Detroit Novice Curler

There's a certain romance to childhood memory. Like how the smell of a pumpkin smoldering from its candle can make me five years old again.

I have fond memories of watching curling as a child on CHCH, the Hamilton, Ontario station we got in Western New York, back in the days of turning a dial on the the black-and-white TV to get channels 2 through 13. This would be before MTV, calculators with trig functions, and music on CD's. You whippersnappers don't know what I'm talking about, but that's OK ... go back to your palm pilot games or something.

Anyway, there were these guys with slapper brooms going FWAP FWAP FWAP down the ice with their team caption (the "skip") yelling at them in a thick Canuck accent, and then the rock made it into the bullseye (the "house"). I had no idea what they were doing, and no one in my family had enough of a clue to explain it to me, but I loved watching it anyway.

As of Sunday, I am a member of a club where I go FWAP FWAP FWAP down the ice myself. Only nowadays the brooms are different, and they don't go FWAP FWAP, they go ... well, they don't make much noise at all. Kind of takes that five-year-old's romance out of it.

But I still love curling every bit as much as I thought I would. My muscles were tight and warm from the burn all day today, and last night when I laid down to sleep there were visions of perfect throws and sweeping in my mind.

Romance can take many forms.

Any other Motown-area curlers on here?