students, I was put into a “selected class” at Etobicoke Collegiate Institute, a high school on the outskirts of Toronto. With few exceptions, we stayed together until graduation. Then we went our separate ways. Sixty years later, I decided to search out my former classmates and see what had happened to them.
Hockey filled my winters, and my imagination, but it wouldn’t fill my future. The NHL was beyond me. Another world. After university, I’d stop playing and coach my kids. And so, in early January, 2020, I started to track my classmates down. One led me to five or six others, who led me to a few more, and a few more. I found all but one of them. Six others had passed away. We began to talk. About three months later, COVID-19 hit – which gave us even more time to talk. We talked more often and for longer than I thought we would. One-on-one, over the course of two years. By phone mostly, a few times by Zoom. Our voices were the same; our faces weren’t.