Object story · Signed, Numbered, Provenanced
The Back of the Ticket.
A Kingston hockey-night artifact, four autographs, and one borrowed evening from the years of school, work, friendship, and grief.
Why this object
The front marks the event. The back kept the evening.
This framed piece began as a ticket to the Kirk Muller & Doug Gilmour Retirement from the NHL Event, held in Kingston, Ontario, on December 10, 2003. The front of the ticket marks the formal occasion. The back carries the part that turned into an object: four autographs gathered during the evening, later remembered and labelled as Doug Gilmour, Yvan Cournoyer, Wendel Clark, and Don Cherry.
I was living in Kingston then, after leaving Royal Military College and becoming a civilian. I had stayed in the city for Queen’s University, working whatever jobs I could manage while trying to afford my own apartment and keep going to school. The Kingston years included Queen’s, the convenience store, Subway, the fry cart, the deli, Wolfe Island restaurant work, and some very strange phone jobs. It was not a glamorous period, but it was formative.
The object matters because it holds that whole practical weather system in miniature: a formal event, a friend’s invitation, a few famous names, and the residue of a young person trying to build a life out of school, jobs, rent, and small chances to step outside ordinary survival mode.
Friendship note
A borrowed evening, offered by a friend.
The night came through friendship. While I was briefly at RMC, I became friends with Nick. We clicked over general nerdiness and more specific interests in D&D and gaming. He stayed while I left, but we remained friends. When he came across the opportunity to attend this event, he invited me.
I accepted partly because my dad loved hockey. I remember the evening as formal, funny, full of stories, and slightly outside my ordinary life. We were mostly observers, but I did manage to gather four signatures on the back of the ticket.
That is one of the reasons the frame still works as a collection object. It is not only memorabilia. It is a record of being invited somewhere, of being included, and of having a small night out from a stretch of years that was otherwise mostly work, school, and trying to keep my footing.
Family memory
A hockey object with my father threaded through it.
Don Cherry is a more complicated cultural figure now, but at the time he was one of my dad’s favourites. I used to save money from working at Safeway to buy him a new Rock’em Sock’em Hockey DVD for Christmas. One year, I saved enough to buy tickets for us to see the Canucks play.
My father died in 2005. So this object is not only about hockey, or autographs, or an event in Kingston. It is also about the way ordinary interests become family language: the things people watch, quote, argue about, ask for, and receive as proof that someone was paying attention.
A ticket, a card, a few signatures, and a handwritten note are not much in themselves. But paper keeps things. Sometimes it keeps a whole evening that would otherwise have disappeared into the general blur of working too much and trying to keep going.
Provenance
The event, the signatures, and the note that keeps the names attached.
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