My wife Yahaira and I showered for our date. We had just returned from the grocery store, where prices double weekly.

I lathered myself into a tizzy: "Five bucks for Coco Puffs! What part of a Coco Puff is worth five dollars?"

Yahaira wore that face she gets when she's trying to tune me out. It looks like constipation.

"Did you see what we spent on cookies?" I said. "I wasn't aware of the global chocolate famine."

Taking my lecture to go, I resumed on the freeway: "Everywhere you turn, someone is trying to squeeze you. The doctor, the gardener, Mickey Mouse."

I vowed on my belly to never eat chocolate again. Yahaira stuck her head out the window.

...

The observatory dome billowed on the horizon, and Yahaira came back in.

"It's beautiful, papi."

Some people find it odd that she calls me papi, but then they call each other pumpkin.

We approached the star-gazers who were milling about debating astrophysics as so many of us do on Saturday night. Others convened inside the dome, where a 20" lens was fixed on Pleiades. Everyone seemed eager like they expected God to reveal Himself.

Since Yahaira and I were new to the world outside our house, I broke the ice with a dumb question: "What's the difference between a galaxy and a universe?"

A gray-bearded man shook my hand. "I'm Carl. Are you new to the Astral Society?"

"It was my question, wasn't it?"

Carl -- no relation to Sagan -- started from scratch.

"Earth," he said, "belongs to the solar system, which is a tiny drop of milk in the Milky Way." He paused to laugh. By himself. "There are over 150 billion other galaxies in the universe, which itself continues to grow."

Yahaira asked, "Growing onto what?"

The group laughed like so many folks who had been there.

An Asian man with Coke-bottle glasses cut in. "Andromeda is the nearest galaxy outside our own. It is 2.9 million light years away. The universe, on the other hand, is 15 billion light years in diameter. For now."

A light year is the distance light travels in one year. A billion is a one with twelve zeros at the end. Fifteen billion light years is very humbling.

An elderly woman grabbed my elbow and pointed east. "See the belt of Orion?"

I had no idea what she meant.

"Yes," I said.

"To the right is a nebula. Look."

She handed me her binoculars, and I saw a bunch of brilliant blue glow worms. Those, she said, were stars being born.

"Of course," Carl interjected, "that all happened millions of years ago. It's only reaching your eyes now."

I wobbled on the edge of the space-time continuum. Maybe it was the fact that my head was attached to my back and would have to be surgically restored to an upright position.

Carl explained how the Egyptians used the North Pole to align their pyramids.

"But the North Star was all wrong in 2,500 B.C.," added a boy no older than my underwear, "so they used points on both Dippers."

At that kid's age, I thought the world was created by a grumpy old man who wouldn't bring presents if I acted up. So it goes.

His father clarified. "Earth," he said, "revolves around the sun once a year, give or take a day in late February. It also spins on its axis. The sky, then, is always changing. Venus, for instance, shines in the morning for half the year and in the evening for the other half."

I nodded dumbly, unable to grasp a word. Something inside me resisted the lesson, refused to grow up. Heaven was so much more comfortable.

...

Yahaira and I bid our farewells, mainly because our brains were full. We didn't talk in the car. Nothing seemed important enough.

150 billion galaxies...

A Saturn cut me off to gain a car-length. Funny name for a car. I wondered how many car-lengths were in a light year. Finally, I apologized to Yahaira for my previous tantrum and proposed a nightcap at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Denny's).

I knew exactly what to order: "Anything with chocolate and a tiny drop of milk from the Milky Way."

No matter how bad life gets, I know that hockey is there for me. It is an altar on which I sacrifice my aggressions. It keeps me from killing the neighbor's dog.

What I want to know is, WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO MY GAME?

Every year hockey disintegrates into "family viewing." The NHL issues more dictates to make the game OSHA-compliant, G-rated, PTA-approved.

I blame it on the Mighty Ducks.

Hockey is no place for Disney, and why did they come around to begin with? Did they mistake it for the National Hokey League? Hockey is for gladiators. We should be trying to incorporate lions into the sport.

Fights are down 50% over the past three years. That's something, like...half! What am I to do with all this hostility?

Remember the days when Gretzky got checked? The fans would hush, the referee would squirm, and out jumped Marty McSorely to hunt down the culprit. The rest was Batman: Splosh! Bammo! Wham! Talk about drama.

There is nothing more exciting than a hockey fight. Sticks drop, gloves fly, and the showdown begins. On special nights you get a line brawl, mano a mano, goalie a goalie. And the fans exult like so many Romans.

Duck fans can't appreciate the unwritten rules that a player picks up along the way. If you shoot the puck after a whistle, a large man thumps you on the nose. You learn. If you knee a guy with the intent to injure, five men thump you on the nose. And you learn.

It's like The Godfather before the senate hearings ruined the series: sometimes it gets bloody but only out of respect for the family-er, team.

The hockey fight also has a purging effect. Like a hard rain. Or a good vomit. Skill players get a much needed rest, entertainment included, and the contest begins anew.

Yet the NHL meddles. Disney is meeting with the commissioner right now to propose more Mickey Mouse calls. So it goes.

Let us count the ways we have sissified hockey:

• Two referees: no more jostling behind the puck.
• The instigator penalty: no dropping the gloves without consent.
• Jersey straps: no more bestial, bare-chested brawls.
• Automatic game misconduct: no Round Two.
• Whistles any time someone falls: no more hitting.

What's next, tea and crumpets between periods? If we must add rules, how about too many women on the ice?

Remember when referees would pocket their whistle and let the boys decide the score for themselves? Man, was that fun. In overtime you could discharge small weapons, providing they were licensed. There was spearing and elbowing and washing of the face, and it made you so mad that you wanted to shout, "I love this game!"

Now hockey is like Dallas without J.R., Nascar without accidents, Hostess cupcakes without crème filling! Some stations even censor fights by cutting to commercial. Who are they to decide? It's like missionaries breaking in and stealing your girly mags.

"It's such a brutal game," say Duck moms.

Yes, but it's the only thing that makes your overinsured, lawsuit-driven, café-mocha-sipping world tolerable.

Even checking isn't checking anymore. Players are terrified of the whistle: charging, roughing, tripping, using the lord's name in vain. Yesterday a guy tapped his opponent on the shoulder and said, "Excuse me, sir, but I'll be checking you momentarily. Please don't overreact."

Commissioner: stop the madness. The tenets of hockey are older than ice. Your job is not to domesticate the game but to make sure the fans are enjoying themselves. Hear that roar in the distance? A fight is breaking out, and the spectators are going nuts. They may even order $10 beers.

If we maintain our present tack, hockey will go the way of basketball: "Johnson dribbles to the key and is fouled. Smith passes to the perimeter and is fouled. McKinney takes-fouled..."

Talk has turned to mandatory face masks, stage four in the conspiracy. The ostensible reason is to protect players' eyes, but we know the truth: enforcers will have nothing to swing at. The best they can do is tattle on each other.

Still-sigh-there is no substitute for hockey. Even if the NHL reduces the sport to figure skating with sticks, I'll have to keep watching...but I won't be held responsible for what happens to the neighbor's dog.

In the not-so-good old days, I lived in the mirror. Couldn't go ten minutes without a peek. You'd think I was afraid of disappearing. It wasn't vanity so much as the impulse to fix myself. Some people call it retarded.

Sunup to sundown, I probed myself for flaws. Weeks were lost to the idea that one eye was bigger than the other. My shrink, Dr. Dan, called it "body dysmorphic disorder" -- seeing a monster in the mirror. Michael Jackson is what happens when you mix BDD with millions of dollars.

One morning I stared into the looking glass so long that I had a bad trip. My reflection wouldn't let go. I looked into his eyes, he looked back at mine, and so it went toward some strange expression of pi.

That day I decided to never look in the mirror again.

Dr. Dan said that "always and never are risky endeavors." I asked him why he couldn't be happy for me. Then I took back my brain and went home.

Two years lapsed, and would you believe I was true to my word? I contact-papered the mirrors and made my poor wife fend for herself in a compact. To shave and comb, I used The Force. I avoided windows, rearview mirrors, and the shiny side of compact discs. I boxed up all of my photographs, and, as fate would have it, I did disappear.

...

Then came the anxiety attacks triggered by pictures, songs, anything that smelled meaningful. Julia Roberts died in a movie, and boom -- I couldn't breathe. The attacks came mostly when I imagined my wife dying. Why did I do that? Retarded.

Dr. Dan suggested that my issues had relocated: mirror issues had become panic issues. I told him that the real problem is how ambivalent I was toward his mother.

Then came the titan of attacks. I was sifting through our Memories Box, when that void descended like a blanket. What's it all about?...Why do we strive as we do?... I called my wife, but she was at lunch being detained by a rapist, no doubt.

It felt like I was missing a part. I ran outside to grab a neighbor, the mailman, a stray cat -- anything but the void. No one was around, not even the sun. Just when my thoughts turned to the noose, a voice said, "Look at yourself."

So I did.

I rushed inside and unpapered a mirror. There in the glass stood my old friend Jason. He hadn't gone anywhere. He even looked the same -- aside from the bags beneath his eyes. He was the missing part. We had, after all, known each other since spermhood.

Accept. Approve. Surrender.

That's what popped into my head. I'm not sure what the words meant, but they steered me to "the middle way." Lao Tzu would be proud. I don't spend hours in the mirror, nor do I shun it altogether. I look when I look.

I can't say that I regret my experiment. We could all spend less time in front of the mirror and more time looking at ourselves. It's just a hard way to find out that we can't outrun ourselves. My issues are probably relocating as we speak. I just hope they land on Dr. Dan.