My New Favorite Children's Book

Hockey used to be my favorite sport. Due to overexpansion and other general stupidity on the ownership/commissioner level, I can't stand the NHL product anymore - although I do enjoy minor league and college hockey.

The mighty Detroit Red Wings were just a shell of a team in the 60's and 70's. Monickered "The Dead Wings," I couldn't stand to watch my hometown team and quickly adopted the powerful Montreal Canadiens as my favorite team (they still are).

What a joy it was to find that there is a wonderful children's book about the Montreal Canadiens jersey. I bought it and I love it. And how couldn't I? As Uniwatchblog writes,

I just got myself a copy of the book’s English translation, and it’s pretty great. It tells the story of Carrier’s youth in the mid-1940s, when he and his French-Canadian friends all wore Montreal Canadiens sweaters with Maurice Richard’s number. When his sweater gets too old and threadbare, his mother orders him a new one from the Eaton’s catalogue. But when the package arrives, it’s a Maple Leafs sweater instead of a Canadiens model, much to Carrier’s horror. His mother convinces him not to make her return it because, as she puts it, Monsieur Eaton “is English and he’s going to be insulted because he likes the Maple Leafs.”

So Carrier wears his Toronto sweater down to the local rink, where everyone makes fun of him. When the ref calls a penalty on him, he blows his stack and complains that he’s being persecuted because of his sweater. The ref ejects him and sends him off to church to pray for forgiveness. So Carrier heads off to church where — and this is my favorite part — “I asked God to send me right away, a hundred million moths that would eat up my Toronto Maple Leafs sweater.”

And that’s it. The end. No happy conclusion, no uplifting moralizing — just a bitter, pissed-off kid refusing to learn his lesson and unrepentantly praying for a heavenly pestilence to destroy something he hates. Now that’s a children’s book.

Amen.