Skating and my gimp finger

I went skating for the first time in a couple of years. The last time I played ice hockey was in 2010. I hope to be able to play in China. There is an adult lague in Beijng, wich leads me to the conclusion there may well be ranks where I am moving.

Perhaps I could start a league, if there isn't one in the city where I will be.

In June of tis year I broke my finger while walking a dog. He is a big 90 pound Rhodesian Rodgeback. Only 10 months old, he thought my attempts to get him on a leash were a game, and he jumped at the same moment I reached for his collar,  inadvertently catching the tip of my left ring finger in his harnes.

All of the ligaments and tendons in the tip of my left rng finger were torn and the bone fractured. I had surgery on my hand that left me with 2 months of rather painful rehab and the tedium of wearing a finger brace.

I find the choice of my left ring finger to be broken as somewhat mystical. In many ways it felt cathartic to have an injury to the same finger upon which I wore a wedding band for less than a year. The dog n question was and is one of my favorite dogs. So intelligent, willfully disobedient, like a child.

One day I had him with me in the car. He came up to sit in the front seat, which is barely big enough to hold his enormous, muscled frame. At a stop light I looked and him, and he looked at me and closed his eyes. A brief eddy in the flow of time occured for a few moments, and the afternoon sun shone like reddish gold off his face. I felt like his huge lineage of dogs, stretching back generation smiled at me. It is difficult to explain language that has no words, but I felt he was happy and was a friend.

I feel like my fractured finger was a blessing that would have been a more serious injury. This dog had interceded to prevent my negative karma from manifesting n a worse way. Perhaps because we were friends, but perhaps because dogs do things like that for people. Dogs don't ask for much, they just do what needs to be done.

I miss that dog a lot. Funny, but I miss him more than a lot of people I know. Broke my finger, but I would never hold it against him, yet there are people who have done less who I would gladly filet and feed to buzzards.