Chuck Lefley

My parents, my brother Mark, my uncle Chris, and my friend Brady might remember my boyhood obsession with the St. Louis Blues hockey team. Street hockey was a favorite recess and weekend sport, with each year culminating in the Manley Cup, our New Year's Eve finale played on the old blacktop basketball court at St. Gerard, with the school building serving as one end of the rink and the concession stand the other. Unique features to our rink included a killer hill along one side that had a few places where the fence didn't touch the ground, and if the ball or puck bounced just right, someone (usually one of the younger kids) had to clamber down the hill all the way to the soccer field and then huff back up while the rest of us took a break.

When I wasn't playing, I fancied myself an announcer: Jack Buck in the summers when imagining or re-enacting Cardinals games, and Dan Kelly in the winter during hockey season. Somewhere there's a cassette tape uncle Chris made of me when I was six or seven "announcing" a Blues game that I was creating as I announced it, complete with Stag beer commercial after the end of period one. The highlight of that period, I remember from listening to it again much later, was an apparently dazzling play by none other than Chuck Lefley, who made an incredible end to end rush filled with incredible moves and close calls that culminated in a highlight-worthy goal. I must have said the name "Lefley" (which I pronounced "Le flea") 30 times in those 15 or so seconds, and while I remember thinking at six or seven that I had the sort of deep, rounded tone of my favorite hockey broadcaster, when I listened to the tape all those years later I was shocked at how high-pitched my voice was.

And it was that high-pitched voice I heard when I saw these pictures James's teacher sent us last Wednesday:

 (My favorite—look at that grip! Head down, eyes on the ball! Good solid base in the legs!)

His teachers said he had a great time, and that he was passing the ball back and forth to them. And while he didn't really jump into the larger game that was going on, apparently he did wander into it with his own ball a few times, so they stopped everyone and gave James a turn. He loves to play air hockey at Grandma's house, but he doesn't like to use the mallet, he just likes to push the puck back and forth (and he'll say "puck" if you ask him). But the teachers said that they persisted for about five minutes with the little stick, and he just got it.

When I was showing Megan these pictures after school, James came up and looked and started patting himself in the chest like crazy (sign for "That's me," or "My turn") and grinning. He's also been trying to vocalize something that sounds like "hockey" when we ask him if he likes hockey—sort of a deep throaty 'kgh' sound. Fun stuff!