Maple Dogwood - the birth of a nickname

[dogwoodmaple 380]

As a young man growing up in the metro Atlanta area, I never imagined hockey would be my preferred sport.  Like most kids my age, it was baseball, basketball, and football - in fact, I'm not even sure if we had a hockey rink within a half hour of my house.  That all changed one day, but in a way I never would've never anticipated. It didn't start with a dad in love with hockey, a mom from Canada, or distance relatives from more hockey friendly regions. No, it started with a maple tree in my backyard.    

 

We didn't have many trees in our moderately sized yard and most of them were pines.  But there was one rather magnificent maple tree that stood quite literally above the rest. The story was that when my parents bought their first house right when they got married, all they could afford in the way of lawn decorations and landscaping was a single maple tree.  My dad was famously bad at keeping plants alive, but somehow this maple tree thrived. It withstood winters, brutally hot summers, and near-drought conditions from time to time. But what it most famously withstood was the multiple times my parents moved before buying the house I grew up in. Each time they moved, they had the tree uprooted and replanted and despite all of that shock to the maple, it continued to thrive.  And it didn't just thrive in terms of staying healthy, it grew and grew and grew. It had to be the tallest tree I'd ever seen, but I was also very young, so take that into account.  It far outpaced our other trees and only continued to spring upwards year after year.  That is, until the Great Storm rolled through.  The Great Storm was a rare ice storm that hit Atlanta especially hard when I was nine years old. The temperature got below 0 and it snowed for days.  Most of the pine trees in our neighborhood were casualties, but the maple stood strong.  The forecast predicted a break in the storm and eventual warming temperatures on the coming Sunday and we knew if we could just make it to then, our beloved maple would survive.  I awoke at the crack of dawn that Sunday and raced downstairs to see the backyard, where my dad was already standing, silently.  We lost the maple that night and it's enormous trunk lay strewn across the backyard.  I cried for hours, and my dad, ever the one to console me, hatched a plan to cheer me up.  I couldn't stand to have the maple just die there, so my dad started carving it up into keepsakes. Coffee mugs, cutting boards, the usual.  When he asked what I wanted him to carve, my gut was to say a baseball bat because that was my favorite sport.  But I looked all around the yard and saw nothing but ice and snow and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I wanted a hockey stick, made out of pure maple, and handcarved by my beloved father. That isn't just what spawned my love of hockey, though, it also spawned my nickname - Maple.  Ever since then, my dad started calling me that and it stuck throughout school, into college, and as I know head into the pros.  

 

You never quite know what'll guide your path in life.  Hell, mine was a tree.