Glenn Kubish

Happy end of the week, y’all. Here are three things from my life up on latitude 53 that made for some happiness and gratitude this week.  Three Things podcast, episode 80:                       1. Big world   Sitting at an airport, looking at the different planes from their different places, re-lights the longing that would come over me as a kid, watching freight trains go over the Fort Road. Most of the cars were CN, but some had different names. Santa Fe. Burlington Northern. If I was lucky, I’d spot a boxcar from the Illinois Central, like the sublime train in the Steve Goodman song. My first sense that it was a big world came from the livery on those cars. Like sentences being read, the trains and their fonts shuttled by. My horizon was a receding train.   Air travel doesn’t have the romance of the rails for me, but seeing planes from Southwest Airlines or KLM or El Al or Aeroflot on our various travels takes me away, too. Last week, I watched an ITA Airways A330, with Pope Francis

Happy end of the week, y’all! Here are three things from slightly off the path that left behind some happiness or gratitude this week.  Three Things, episode 79:                                             1. Local news 🪰 Of all the news that has broken in the past week, of all the voices that I’ve heard talking about everything from the heat to Hockey Canada, of all the stories watched or read that I can’t quite recall, the story and the sound that have stayed with me were <Jeopardy music here>...cicadas. You’ve all heard them, but did you know they were here? I owe the fact that cicadas are in Edmonton to Taproot Edmonton reporter and recorder Brett McKay . I enjoy their sound. I like the sound of the word itself—cicada, three syllables, unstressed, stressed, unstressed, which makes it an amphibrach, the name for that kind of foot in poetry. Like Versace or Fitzpatrick or Bob Dylan or There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening.  Over dinner last week, I told our f

Happy end of the week, y'all! Here are three things that made for some happiness and gratitude this week in Three Things from Edmonton, episode 78:                             1. Breaking news   And oops and smash! A new ecosmart 60 watt, soft-white LED replacement bulb slipped out of my hand and hit the kitchen floor. I grabbed the broom and the dustbin and swept up the debris field of miniature mirrors.  What I saw in my mind was the pavement on the 142 Street service road just past Valleyview Drive. For at least two weeks, shards from a broken bottle sat there on the road like chunks of ice that won’t melt. I had pedalled through them and around them and I had pointed them out to other bike riders, but did I stop to clean them up? The whisk I carry wouldn’t have been up to the task. The whisky glass stayed there.   And the glass might still be there if three unexpected things didn’t happen. First, the cleanup of the broken bulb at home. This suggested to me, obliquely, that brok

Bonjour tout le monde! Here are three things that made for some happiness and gratitude last week, not because there’s not a pile of other crap out there, but because there is.   Three Things podcast, episode 77:                          1. Pelicans   They are remarkable looking waterbirds, pelicans are. For the last two summers, every time I pedalled across, I made a point of glancing over the railing at the north end of the Quesnell Bridge to see if they were back. I first saw pelicans down there by the mouth of the storm sewer, where the fishin’ is good, in 2019. It was in June of that year that my binoculared friend Nicola pointed out 10 of them as they soared over the downtown farmers market.  That same summer was the first time I saw them at the outfall. I would stop and watch them from above on the bridge deck while eight lanes of traffic streamed by on Whitemud Drive. They were there the next day, and the next day, too, and one of the next days they were there, and I didn’t sto