Student Publishing Program ::

Sasha P.

The Simone Rink

Most of what I can remember of my early childhood was being in the rink. When I was just a baby, my parents took me for strolls in my baby carriage around the rink. I was in a rink so much; it seemed as if I took my first steps in the Simone Rink in Cambridge. We spent every waking moment on Saturday and Sunday, taking my brother to the rink or watching him play in a game. As great as this seems, the Simone Rink was not the place a person would want to be on the weekends. Inside the rink, the temperatures dropped another 20 degrees from the already frigidness of a New England Winter. Every time we stepped foot into the rink, another part of the rink seemed to break. The pipes were always leaking and dripping with water. By the time our family moved from Cambridge, the Simone Rink was in desperate need of repair.

My brother played for the Cambridge Eagles since he was five or six years old. We have ended up spending so much time with his team that they became like a family for us. Each parent seemed like a second parent to my brothers and me. The love for hockey was as evident as the stench coming from the locker rooms.

Ever since I was little, I never enjoyed sports in which there was a winner and a loser. I have played every sport known to man, but I never ended up sticking with them. On the team, I was the one that would say that “I am sorry,” every time that I hurt someone or thought I hurt someone. This is why I could never play hockey because, I would be afraid to check people or hit people to try to get the puck. Despite not skating for about seven years, I decided to join the hockey team at Lexington High School. Mason, my little brother, loves hockey as much as my older brother, Marc does. Marc and Mason eat, breathe, sleep hockey twenty four seven.

Everything in our life was influenced by hockey. Every vacation, we had to make sure that no one had hockey, but someone always did, cutting our vacations short. In our basement of our house, the walls are dented and splattered with black marks from being hit so much with the puck, while playing knee hockey. In our old house, my brothers shot the puck so hard, that our windows had to be filled with plexiglass because they kept on breaking the real glass. My dad was the only one who ever purchased plexiglass for inside the house rather then outside. Our cars always had to have spacious trunks, so my brothers could fit all their equipment which was never an easy task. Similar to most parents, my parents never wanted to get rid of the objects that had the most importance in our life as a child. In our basement, we have a boiler room which is filled sky high with hockey equipment. In our boiler room, we have alone, about 20 pairs of skates and 10 goalie pads. Whenever we lost a piece of a equipment, we would look in the boiler room and it was guaranteed we had what we were looking for.

Recently we went back to the Simone Rink to come to find that the pipes no longer were dripping and the lobby of the rink was 10 degrees hotter then the temperature outside. The entire rink was redone with plasma screens and a new heating system. Despite all the new changes evident to the rink, a couple of things remained the same. As you walked in, a display case is hanging in the right corner. In the display case are pictures from all past teams. There are pictures from when Marc was five to when he was about ten. Every time we walk back into the rink, memories of spending my early childhood in a hockey rink comes rushing back. It was weird to think that by the time I was nine, I had attended about seven hundred hockey games. Despite the cold and those long drives to the rink, it was a good experience for my family and me. We were able to bond more than if we didn’t have hockey. When we walk into a rink, a strange feeling overcomes our family. A child’s attachment is to a teddy bear or a summer house from when they were little children. In our family, we have an attachment to a smelly hockey rink in Cambridge that holds many memories of championships, wins, losses, family and commitment.

[TABLE OF CONTENTS, LHS CLASS OF 2009 EDITION]