Chapter Text
Shane received his first paint set at 11, after he sprained his ankle and bruised his ribs on the ice, which, much to his chagrin, took him out of the remaining season in his youth league games.
His grandparents gifted it to him. While his father was on the hockey team at McGill, his grandparents never understood the obsession with the sport. They encouraged him, as any grandparent should, but even at his age, he could tell when their eyes glazed over as he talked about stats or MHL prospects or facts about his favorite player.
Shane suspects there’s a little disappointment that no one followed in his grandmother’s footsteps in pursuing art history and working in a museum. When she retired, she took painting back up. On the few times Shane stayed the week with his paternal grandparents, he would watch his grandmother paint on her covered porch. Sometimes there would be the stereotypical bowls of fruit and other items; other times she would tape a childhood photo of his father to the top of her easel and recreate it. There were a few of her nature paintings hanging in their hallway, and a small portrait of Shane as a baby in the living room.
Maybe his grandmother noticed how Shane would stop fidgeting when he watched her paint, or maybe she thought Shane needed a more peaceful hobby that, she believed, would simultaneously ground him and get him out mentally when he plays such a physical sport.
Still in his head about missing the rest of his season and letting his team, his coach, and his mother down, he was sitting, a little teary-eyed, on the couch, watching the Centaur-Admirals game on TV. His grandmother gently approached and sat next to him on the couch, holding a small gift bag in her hands.
“Shane,” she said, “I understand how hard it is to stay on the couch and move slowly. You’re so much like your father that way. Did I ever tell you about the time he broke his leg after falling out of a tree?”
Shane just mumbled a response.
“Maybe you can channel your energy into a hobby that may only give you carpal tunnel,” she chuckled at that, “instead of bruised ribs. At least, here’s something you can do while you wait for the physical therapist to clear you.”
She hands him the bag, and he takes out a gouache set, a set of miniature canvases, and a set of brushes. A small smile emerges as he looks up at her.
“This is the same brand of paint and paintbrushes I use. When your father broke his leg, he started painting with me while we waited for him to heal. I know he didn’t stick with it, and I’m not asking you to become the next Bottecili or Rubens,” she lists her favorite artists, “but you can channel your physical energy onto these canvases until you get back on the ice.”
Shane looks back down at the bounty, the gift he’s been handed, and an understanding of what this means to them.
“Thank you,” he says quietly, and gives her an awkward side hug before setting the gifts on the coffee table and returning to the game.
Shane waits for his grandparents to leave and his parents to go to sleep before quietly unwrapping everything...He feels…embarrassed to be painting in secret, and embarrassed to feel embarrassed. He knows his parents don’t care, but after three years of enduring (and not really participating in) locker room talk, he’s worried someone, somewhere will see this vulnerability and think he’s not a ‘jock.’ Still, he sits at his desk, under the glow of yellow lamplight, and begins to paint one of his earliest memories until his thoughts become unfocused and the aches in his body dull into nothingness.
A few weeks later, after he’s been cleared by a physical therapist, he bikes over to his grandparents’ to deliver a miniature canvas of the sun shining on his grandmother as she’s 9 years younger, and painting on her covered porch. It’s no Rubens, but she hangs it up on her side of the bedroom and cherishes it.