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It turns out that, in sixteen years as the head coach of Samwell’s Men’s Hockey, a person accumulated a lot of stuff. Weeks ago, as he’d bemoaned the state of his office to Bitty over dinner, despairing over clearing it out in preparation for his retirement, Bitty had interrupted him to suggest that he figure out how to donate it. Taken aback, Jack had said nothing.
But the next day, he’d done some poking around, talked to his friends in the history department, and found out about the Samwell University Archives and Special Collections, tucked up on the top floor of the library. Olivia Taylor, the archivist, had seemed delighted when he emailed her. He’d set up a meeting with her for later that week, but knew that he had to start packing sooner rather than later.
And so here he was. He had a stack of bankers’ boxes in one corner, already filled, and the box in front of him was half-full of old rosters and promotional materials. He wasn’t giving up his SMH Frozen Four Champions 2045 mug, of course, but he’d somehow acquired five more of the damn things. Did archives take mugs? He ran a hand through his graying hair -- okay, Bitty, more gray than graying, but still thick at least -- and sat down heavily at his battered old desk.
He’d already retired once: as Captain of the Falconers, two-time Stanley Cup Champion, member of an Olympic gold-medal-winning Team Canada. He’d proven his many critics wrong, but he was only human, and his 36-year-old self had no longer healed as quickly as his 26-year-old self once had. He’d watched not one but two of his teammates leave the ice for the last time on stretchers - a busted knee and a badly-broken ankle, respectively - and he hadn’t wanted the same for himself.
So he’d hung up his skates, and at the start of the following season, he had taken a front office job, working with the same group of guys and coaches and PR people he’d spent his entire professional life dealing with. Never mind that the job hadn’t worked out as he’d hoped it would. It still gave him something to do, even temporarily, as he figured out where he was going. He shook his head; of course this retirement felt different. There wasn’t another job waiting for him on the other side. Just… time.
Even Bitty’s comforting reassurances hadn’t done much to lessen Jack’s anxiety. “Jack, honey. We’ll travel, all those places we’ve always talked about going. You’ll finally have time to tackle that stack of history books Dr. Thompson has been recommending for the past fifteen years! There’s still the charities and events. You’ll be busier than you think.”
Bitty was one to talk; he had taken to retirement with aplomb, just as he’d done everything else throughout their years together. Hell, Jack was sure his husband was busier now, a year into retirement, than he had been when he worked.
With their daughters off on their own, the nest was empty. Remy had graduated from college three years ago and lived in Brooklyn now. Jack felt as though he couldn’t keep track of her career path, but she was happy, and that was all that mattered to him. Anouk was finishing her junior year at Rhode Island School of Design. She’d be spending the summer with her sister, interning at a small Manhattan gallery. She was home now, but only for a few days. Bits was retired, but seemed to be off to a restaurant opening every weekend. Jack worried more than he wanted to admit, even to himself, that he’d find himself at loose ends.
Calice, Jack thought. No one told you that life sometimes seemed as uncertain underfoot at sixty as it had at twenty-five.
He turned and went back to packing.
***
“Coach Zimmermann! Come in, come in.” Olivia’s frizzy brown curls were escaping their bun and her eyes were bright behind her tortoiseshell glasses. With a quick smile, she waved Jack ahead of her into a well-lit corner of the university library: “Samwell Archives and Special Collections,” the gold lettering on the door declared.
“Jack, please,” he said, shaking her hand.
“Jack, then. Welcome to the University Archives! Would you like a quick tour before we get down to business?”
Jack glanced around. “Sure. I haven’t spent much time in the library since I was a student, and I never made it up here. I admit I didn’t even know it existed until after my husband encouraged me to look into donating my stuff.”
“Not many undergrads come visit us,” Olivia replied. “I’ve been working with some professors in the history department to try to get some more students through the doors, though. Anyway, this is the reading room.” Half a dozen large, solid oak tables, each topped by gold library lamps and surrounded by four chairs, filled half of the space. “Anyone who wants to work with our holdings sits here, and one of my student workers brings them the material they request.”
Olivia led him towards the compact shelves that took up the other half of the room. “Here’s where our most popular records live. We also have a separate cold-storage room for photographs, negatives, and film, plus another space in the basement that actually holds about one and a half times what you see here. I’d be happy to show you both of those sometime if you’re interested. But how about if I show you something from our collection so that you can see what happens to materials after they’re donated? Pick a subject; I’m sure we have something that will interest you.”
Jack paused. “Samwell athletics in the 1970s.”
“Oh! You’ll love this. Samantha Millar, women’s basketball coach from 1974 until she retired in 1993. She put women’s sports on the map at Samwell after Title IX, and her archive is one of our most frequently-consulted. You’ve probably heard of her?”
Jack nodded. He remembered meeting Sam Millar at an alumni function his mother had taken him to when he was little. She was a tall woman with cropped steel-gray hair and impeccable fashion sense. He didn’t remember if she and Alicia had known each other beforehand, but he remembered how long they’d talked and how he’d only been interested when the topic of conversation changed, briefly, to hockey. Alicia had admired her, and Jack knew that his parents had attended Sam’s funeral. He’d had no idea she’d donated her papers to the archives, and he was suddenly eager to see them.
“We have all her stuff; she donated it to us, just like you’re doing,” Olivia continued, talking as she spun the compact shelves open. “We have eighteen boxes -- here.” She pulled one, a gray board flip-top box with metal binding at each edge, from a shelf. “This is my favorite. I can send you the finding aid for the whole collection, and you’re welcome to come back to look through anything if you want to. But if you take this box back to one of those tables, it’ll give you an idea. It’s from the 1974-1975 women’s basketball season.”
The box contained ten or so manila folders, each labeled in tidy pencil. “Budget, 1974-1975.” “Team Schedule, 1974-1975.” “Roster, 1974-1975.” “Scorebooks, 1974-1975.” “Newspaper Clippings, 1974-1975.” That folder was the fattest of the bunch, and Olivia pulled it out.
“Look at this -- there’s profiles of the team from the school paper, and writeups from the local paper, but here -- this is the gem.” Olivia pulled a fragile clipping from the stack. It was from the Boston Globe: ‘Samwell Women’s Basketball Strives for Title: Young Coach’s First Year,’ read the headline. “They didn’t manage it that year, but they did in 1977. Sam was one of the youngest coaches to lead a women’s NCAA team to a title; she’s still on that list.”
Jack’s hand hovered over the paper. “Reminds me of the stuff they wrote about me, during the ‘15-’16 season. ‘Will the Zimmermann Legend Live Again?’ and all that.”
Olivia chuckled ruefully. “I wasn’t even born yet; my parents got married a year or two later. And we weren’t a hockey family; I grew up watching the Red Sox.”
“The Red Sox?!” Even Jack could hear the indignation in his voice.
Olivia shrugged. “What can I say? Boston girl, born and bred.”
“But -- the Boston Bruins! Bobby Orr has a statue!” Even the still-simmering sense of rivalry he felt towards the Bruins didn’t get in the way of his indignation. “No? Nothing?” he asked, after Olivia stared at him blankly for several seconds.
“Nope. Heard all my dad’s stories about the 2004 World Series win, though. I guess it was something to see.”
Jack shook his head and changed the subject. “Listen, thanks for showing me around. I’m sorry I didn’t spend more time up here. It seems like you’ve got some really great Samwell history.”
“You’re welcome, and you’re more than welcome to come back. I’ve heard through the grapevine that you’re quite the history buff. We have a whole collection of 1960s protest materials. We’re already talking about planning a centennial exhibit for those in a decade, along with a bunch of other university archives in the region. And there’s a big collection of cookbooks and recipes that an alum donated a couple years back. Some of it’s not all that exciting, but there’s some family recipes that seem to have come down from some 1920s socialites, and one or two nineteenth-century recipes. Dr. Atley’s been trying to find a PhD student in Providence or New Haven or Boston who’d be able to work them into their dissertation. She thinks they’re really exciting.”
She paused for breath. “Sorry, I get attached to these collections, and I can just go on and on about them if you let me.”
Jack smiled. He understood enthusiasm. “I’ll have to tell my husband about those, if he hasn’t already heard about them from Camille -- he’s a foodie. Anyway, listen, thank you again. When should I bring my stuff by?”
“Oh! Jack, I have minions -- uh, students -- for that.” She turned away from him and bellowed “LESLIE!” in the direction of the offices adjacent to the reading room.
A young woman with short blonde hair, wearing a well-loved gray Samwell hoodie, poked her head out of one of the doors, tugging her earbuds from her ears. “Olivia? What’s up?”
“I’d like you to meet a famous Samwell face and one of our donors, Jack Zimmermann. He’s coached the men’s hockey team for sixteen years and is going to donate all his papers to us when he retires at the end of the year.”
“Oh!” The woman -- Leslie -- walked out of the office, wiping her hands on her jeans. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi, Leslie,” Jack replied, holding out his hand. “What brings you to the archives? I’m not sure I even knew they were here when I was a student, and Bits -- uh, my husband -- can tell all sorts of stories about how studious I was.”
“Um, well, I’m a chemistry major. But, I’m thinking of going into, like, conservation? So I wanted to learn some stuff about archives and old sources, that kind of thing. I’m working on cleaning up some documents that got stored near a furnace right now.”
“That sounds great. It’s good to have a path in mind, too,” Jack said.
Olivia cleared her throat. “Anyway, Leslie or my other student, Erik -- he’s a sophomore history major -- will come to your office and bring up the boxes. Listen, I’m sure you have a busy schedule, but we’ll be in touch to arrange that. Then there’s some paperwork you need to fill out and sign, officially donating everything, copyright, that kind of thing. And I might need help categorizing and describing everything eventually, sorry.”
“Thanks, Olivia. We’ll be in touch.”
Jack left the archives, and, as he walked out of Samwell’s library, found that he felt a little lighter. He had never particularly dwelled on what his agent liked to call his “legacy”: working with kids, donating money, being a “gay sports icon,” and all that had just been part and parcel of the job for him. Some things -- signing kids’ jerseys as they told him how, because of him, they felt like there was a place for them on the rink -- had been less onerous than others -- shaking what seemed like a thousand hands at a black-tie fundraiser dinner. Even so, it was nice to think that some part of him would be remaining here. This place meant so much to him, after all.
***
Jack’s Faber office felt empty. Leslie and Erik had come by two weeks ago with carts and hauled off Jack’s twelve bankers’ boxes to the archives. His knick-knacks were still on the shelves alongside photos of Bitty and Remy and Anouk at the beach and in front of the Christmas tree. A Falcs mug with a broken handle still held his pens and pencils. But the framed news-clippings from the Frozen Four championships, an interview he’d given about being an openly-gay coach in the NCAA (“Honestly, you’d think this would be old news; I was openly gay in the NHL, too,” he’d said), the accumulated years of rosters and player records and old schedules that had stuffed his filing cabinet were all gone. And with the hockey season over for the year, he felt at loose ends.
The ringing of his phone jolted him from his reverie. “Zimmermann,” he answered.
“Coach -- Jack. It’s Olivia, from the archives. Listen, can we set up a meeting? I finally have the deed of gift all drawn up for you, to make this donation official, and I want you to go through the inventories with me. Turns out Leslie and Erik aren’t hockey fans either, so we’re really not sure if we have all of this stuff right.”
“Of course! Is Thursday good for you?” Jack picked up a pen from his desk for something to do with his hands as he talked.
“Yes, 10:30?”
“Works for me. See you then,” Jack replied, making a note on his desk calendar as they hung up.
***
“Jack, good to see you again! Come in, come in.” Olivia waved him in. His banker’s boxes were spread across two of the tables in the reading room, with a stack of those archival boxes -- Hollinger boxes, he’d learned they were called -- and manila folders at one end, waiting, he assumed, to be filled.
“Sorry it’s all a bit of a mess,” Olivia apologized, “but it’s organized chaos, I promise. We wanted to ask you about some of the tape, and then we’re really not sure what is in this whole box.” She gestured to one, which had a slip of paper with three big question marks Sharpie’d on it sitting on the lid. “After that, we’ll go through the inventory, you’ll sign the deed of gift like we discussed, and then that’s it. Unless you find more stuff.”
Jack laughed ruefully. “Yeah, Bits wants me to go through the attic. He’s been complaining about it since the minute we moved into the house, and reminding him that half of the crap up there is his recipe cards and notes for restaurant reviews and his blog doesn’t shut him up like it used to. Maybe this is the last push I need.” He paused, struck by a thought. “I’m sure I have stuff up there from my NHL days, and maybe even my student days, if you want it?”
Olivia nodded. “Just let us know when you’d like to bring in anything you find.” She held out a hand in the direction of her office, which had a big plate-glass window overlooking the reading room. “Let’s go into my office. I have all the tape in there, and we can watch it with the sound on.”
Jack followed her into the office. It reminded him, sharply and suddenly, of how his office used to look -- sticky-notes littered the desk alongside framed photos of Olivia with various groups of smiling people. There was a big calendar pinned to the wall with dates of meetings and other notes scribbled across it, and stacks of papers littered the credenza. A Simmons College coffee mug sat within easy reach of the keyboard. He wondered if archivists ever archived their own offices the way he’d given his to be archived.
Olivia gestured to the spare chair that she’d pulled around to face the computer screen, and sat down in her own office chair. “I thought we could quickly run through this hard drive and you could show me how you organized it, what’s on it, that kind of thing, if you organized the other drives similarly?” Olivia said, pulling out one of his old external hard drives. A strip of tape across the top labeled it “Tape, ‘44-’45.” She plugged it into the computer and pulled up the list of files.
“Sure. I organized them all chronologically and then by team. With so much tape, there had to be a system. We watched tape of each team leading up to our game against them, and then tape of each of our own games to analyze what we needed to work on for next time. See, here’s our last regular-season game against Princeton.” Jack pointed at a file on the list.
Olivia clicked open the file and they watched the start of the Princeton game. “Is everything on this drive game tape?” she asked, as the two captains readied themselves in the faceoff circle. It had been a good game, and of course it was followed up by their trip to the Frozen Four and their ultimate win. That was a good season, good kids, Jack thought. One of them had made it to the show, and played for the Habs now.
“Yeah, on these drives it is,” he replied. “Sometimes I’d get one of the assistant coaches to tape stuff informally during practice, another way to help players improve. But I’m not sure if we saved any of that, honestly. Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Olivia said. “Nobody saves everything, and the stuff you’ve brought over is more than we’d really expected. It’s always difficult to know what people will bring in these days. You’d think archivists would’ve figured things out by now -- the world’s been digital for decades. But we still collect people’s papers… letters and newspaper clippings and that kind of thing. You know what?” She had a sudden spark in her eye, and forged ahead without waiting for a reply. Jack was getting the sense that she did that when she was excited. “I should put you in touch with Dr. Henri Duval in the history department. He’s had a lot of experience documenting oral histories, and that would be such a wonderful addition to your archive. Only if you’re interested, of course!”
Jack had to work to keep his dismay from showing on his face. Interviews had honestly been one of the things about the NHL that Jack had been most ready to give up. Unlike his parents, he’d never been particularly skillful around the media. Media training had done wonders, but he’d never felt comfortable being interviewed and he knew it showed. He always felt like interviewers were trying to catch him out, trip him up, and he hated it. “I’ll think about it,” he said finally, hoping his doubts weren’t clear on his face. “In the meantime, do you have anything else you needed to know about the tape drives? Or anything else?”
“I think that’s all for the drives,” Olivia said, exiting out of the video player and ejecting the drive from her machine -- they’d watched barely five minutes of play. She really wasn’t a hockey fan, it seemed. Jack would have watched the whole first period for nostalgia’s sake if she’d been willing. “If I have any more questions about them, I’ll let you know. Let’s go back out to the reading room and we can go through that box, if you still have time?”
“Sure,” Jack said, following her back out of her office.
When he pulled the lid off the box, Jack chuckled ruefully. “Yeah, this is the office equivalent of the last box you pack when you’re moving, the box you label ‘stuff’ and then don’t unpack for ten months. Sorry. It’s everything that didn’t fit anywhere else.”
Olivia grinned. “We got that. But what we aren’t sure is what all the stuff is. Since it’s not packed full, do you mind going item by item?” She pulled over a legal pad and prepared to take notes.
Jack pulled a stack of cards and envelopes tied together with a piece of string from the top of the box. “These are all from former players -- I didn’t keep every piece of correspondence, but these players were all something special. Corey Booker went on to play in the NHL, Troy Smith is an astrophysics PhD now -- that sort of thing.” Olivia frantically scribbled on her pad as he talked.
The next thing in the box was a small spiral-bound notebook whose pages were stuffed full of scraps of paper. Its corners were battered and the back cover was creased. “You know, I almost didn’t give this to you guys,” Jack said, flipping through it. “It’s a bunch of stuff from my years as captain of the Falconers -- new plays I wanted to try, notes on things that were said at practice or things I wanted to say to the guys. I wanted to do the best by the guys, you know…” he trailed off. He hadn’t opened the notebook for years, had in fact probably shoved it in the desk drawer on his first day in his Faber office where it hadn’t seen the light of day until he’d begun packing. It was the sort of thing that was so special and so tied to its memories that he hadn’t wanted to flip through it in case he spoiled it. But now, his eye caught on a cream-colored envelope tucked between the pages and addressed to “Jack” in Bitty’s fastidious handwriting. It was unopened, and Jack couldn’t help it: he was completely overcome by laughter, so hard it shook his shoulders and didn’t make a sound.
When he finally glanced up, Olivia had a crinkle between her eyebrows. Still shaking with laughter, he held up the envelope and flapped it in the air. “Do you -- do you mind if I open this?” he finally managed to gasp out.
“No! It’s still technically yours,” Olivia replied.
Jack slipped his thumb under the flap and popped it open; the glue was brittle with age. He slid out the card inside. There was a small red truck on the front, driving across a gold field. It read, “Strong. Dependable. Built to last. Hm…” Already guessing what he would find inside, Jack flipped to the inside and immediately started wheezing with wordless laughter.
“I think I married a truck. Happy anniversary to the guy who still gets my motor runnin’.”
Underneath, Bitty had written: “To my very dearest Jack, Vroom vroom! Happy fourth anniversary, my love, and here’s to many, many more. Now go win the Cup, and I’ll really show you how you get my motor runnin’... just not in view of Lord Stanley. All my love, Bitty.”
When he had calmed down a bit, Jack held out the card to Olivia. She read it, with a smile playing over her face. “We won the Cup that year,” Jack said in explanation. “I told that boy that a May wedding would mean I’d forget anniversaries as long as I was playing in the NHL, since we’d either be deep in the playoffs or I’d be mourning the end of the season. But then I heard about the flowers, and the perfect weather, and the fact that May is rhubarb season -- and talk about a short season -- and so we got married in May. I must’ve stuffed it in the book and forgotten it.” He had to pause to laugh again, a bit ruefully this time. “Do you mind -- can I call Bitty?”
“Be my guest. I hope he takes it okay!” Olivia replied, chuckling. “I’ll just be in my office.”
“Oh, he’ll love it,” Jack said, already pulling up Bitty’s number on his phone.
***
“Jack!” Bitty said, “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you until maybe you were on your way home. What’s up?”
Jack, who had started laughing too hard to breathe the moment his husband answered, couldn’t get out a word.
“Jack? Hon? Is everything okay?” The concern was evident in Bitty’s tone. “...Jack, do you need to call 911? Do you need me to call 911?”
“No!” Jack finally managed to get out.
“Hon? What -- what is it?”
“Bitty.” Jack finally schooled himself into some semblance of normalcy. “Do you remember the 2024 Cup run?”
“Of course! Your second Cup! Why?” Bitty now sounded less concerned and more confused.
“Do you remember the anniversary card you got me that year?” A stray -- well, men of his age did not giggle -- escaped.
“I -- honey, that was twenty-six years ago.”
“I just found it. In that old notebook I kept as Captain of the Falcs.” Bitty’s chuckles were evident over the phone line, even before he delivered the punchline. “Unopened.”
There was a clatter on the other end of the connection, and Bitty was wheezing with laughter now, too. “Bits! Are you okay? Are you there? ...Bitty?”
“Oh, Jack -- Jack! I am literally on the floor, Jack. Rolling. On the floor. With laughter. I am too old for this, you idiot!”
“ Your idiot. If it helps, the message you wrote inside still made me laugh. I don’t think I’m going to let Olivia keep this one. I guess it’s a good thing we hadn’t gotten around to finalizing all the paperwork yet.” Jack smiled softly. “I love you, Bits.”
“Love you too, hon.” Bitty’s voice was full of affection. “See you when you get home.”
***
That evening, Jack walked from the garage into the mudroom, where he left his shoes and jacket, and then into their big, bright kitchen with its farmhouse sink and butcher-block counters and the range that was Bitty’s pride and joy. As he was setting his backpack down, Bitty walked in and leaned up to give Jack a kiss hello.
When Bitty opened his mouth, Jack shushed him and held out the envelope. Bitty opened it and pulled out the card. Immediately upon opening it, he dissolved into laughter. “Oh, lordy! I can’t believe --”
Jack cut him off, chuckling. “Really, Bits? I seem to remember quite vividly…”
“Jack!” Bitty whacked him in the head with the card. “Our daughter could walk in at any moment!”
“In that case --” Jack hugged his husband around the waist and leaned in for a kiss. “We’ll take these motors for a spin later. You know what they say about vintage cars, after all.”
***
@omgcheckplease
11:43 PM, 17 Apr 2050
Ladies and gentlemen, @jzimms1 just brought home a 26 year old anniversary card. Unopened
@omgcheckplease
11:44 PM, 17 Apr 2050
Boy still gets my motor runnin’, though