Plato at the Hockey Rink

If you've read The Republic by Plato, you'd get this.  Otherwise, all you need to know follows.  Plato and his philosopher buddies, while discussing the ideal nation, talk about its legal and justice system, but then realize they need to define what justice is.  After talking for a while, Plato concludes that "Justice is minding one's own business."  That's almost a direct quote from the English translation of The Republic.

Anyhow, I went to the hockey rink on Thursday before my class at 2:30 because it was a nice day and I want to get better at hockey and actually make my heart beat sometimes.  When I showed up, there was a family there.  The dad was wearing a white jersey and I think knee pads, and had short black hair.  There was an older son, maybe ten or eleven, with slightly longer black hair and a black shirt.  Then there were two kids, one was wearing a blue collared and buttoned dress shirt with blonde hair, and the other one I forget.

At one point I tried to shoot it on the net, but did something absolutely idiotic and shot it safely over the ten-foot-or-more chickenwire fences that surround the back of the rink.  I screamed an obscenity - sheepishly remembering a little later that there were five-year-olds in the rink with me - and then started looking for a way to get the puck.  It went out what I'll call the lower right corner of the rink, which is as far away from the pavement as you can get, so you'd have to walk through a LOT of mud and dirt to get the puck if you took the normal route.  I tried to open a door on that side of the rink (with the benches on it) to get closer to the puck, but it was nearly impossible from the inside of the rink.

So, instead I did the next best thing, which was to jump up on one of the benches on that side, hop onto the boards, and then use that to jump over the slightly-lower chickenwire fence that surrounds the benches.  This would keep me close to the puck and reduce how dirty my wheels got, but it was uncomfortable and I'm sure it looked weird.  As I was doing it, I suppose the little kids in the rink were watching.  One of them must have been focusing particularly acutely because I heard the older brother say, "Justice, mind your own business!"

I thought it was pretty funny, the exact combination of the kid's name and what his brother decided to say.  It was like the ghost of Plato was showing his philosopher buddies how clever he could be by bugging a kid at a hockey rink.

Peace out!