Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 96: well, well, well; whale, whale, whale; world, world, world



Happy end of the week, y’all! Here are a few things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude this week.

                 

1. Well, well, well 

I don’t need to know if there actually is a term for the accumulations of snow and ice that build up inside the wheel wells of automobiles. If you live in a wide-open winter city where occasional driving is a fact, you know what I’m talking about: those dinosaur-tooth-shaped accretions that are so strangely satisfying to kick loose.
 
[insert that sound here]

Evidently, I am not the only one who enjoys this. Take a look at surface parking lots these days. They’re dotted with these mashes of potatoes. There’s a routine. Car comes to a stop, ignition is turned off, and, then, before the driver heads for the mall, it’s kick-kick-kick with the heel, leaving behind, when the car again moves away, four mounds of snowy slop—four cairns of winter. 


Whatever they’re called, there is something deep afoot in the experience of dislodging them. 

I was flossing my teeth when a kernel of a thought emerged. Kicking loose the wheel-well plaque is like getting the popcorn my dad makes out of my teeth. Without the pain of flossing. Or it’s like editing, as opposed to—and this is important—being edited. Blasting free from the body of somebody else’s writing the barnacles that disfigure it, that’s fun. Being edited, not always so much. Editing leaves red marks behind. My challenge with being edited is it’s hard sometimes to separate the edit from the editor. What I have to remember is that a helpful idea from an unhelpful person is still a helpful idea…from an unhelpful person…in that order.

I saw as I stared into the bathroom mirror the lesson of whatever those things in the wheel wells are called. I mean, if someone takes a well-aimed boot to my nonsense, it must be possible to do a better job of sitting there and accepting it and being, like the car, the lighter for it. 


2. Whale, whale, whale 
 
Pppchcpccfcfccfhhhhhh-sssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh……!

That, roughly, was the sound on a memorable day in 1970 as a dynamite expert with the Oregon Highway Division blew a dead, beached, rotting whale to kingdom come, solving, it appeared at the time, the problem of what to do with a dead, beached, rotting whale that had washed up on the shore of the town of Florence.

The story of the whale came to me in a link from my friend Fitz, who enjoys as much as the next person a great TV news story about an exploding whale. It’s actually not a story about an exploding whale. From the age of well-shot, well-written, well-edited TV news stories, it is a story about inertia, lack of foresight, bureaucracy and nitroglycerine. In other words, it is the old story of power and knowledge and how they aren’t necessarily the same things. (I have put a link to the video at the bottom. The twist denouement doesn’t exactly blow me away, but  I think you’ll decide watching the story, even watching it again, is worth 6 minutes of your time.)


I don’t open enough of the links that friends or spouses send. It’s become too easy to see it all as just more stuff piling up in my email, my text, my Facebook messenger, or my Twitter DM. As if my time was better spent not looking at a piece of shared media that a friend or spouse thought I might really like, as if it wasn’t an invitation to talk about it later. As if keeping up on electronic correspondence at work was the best I could do. This is not to say that we don’t get a lot of junk trying to attach itself to us. Every time I glance over at a message about this first annual fundraiser or that gift of extras at the movies, I realize again how much of it there is. 

But that doesn’t mean that somewhere in that stream there isn’t a real e-whale blast from a friend. 


3. World, world, world 

The rended curtain on the Jubilee Auditorium stage was back together, the Broadway Across Canada show was over and, with the rest of the theatre faithful making their way in a ragged communion line to the exit doors, Shelagh and I were whispering about what we had just witnessed. I have known the music of Jesus Christ Superstar since the mid-1970s. That’s what AM radio used to do—cast its notes broadly. The “Christ-Christ-sacrificed” rhyme landed in decent soil. To hear and see the rock opera live, though, was another thing. It was ANOTHER THING in capital letters for the two MacEwan theatre arts students we talked about the show with. They had discovered the music only a year ago. It was all new. They loved the show. They seemed to be still in a bit of shock. 

As Shelagh and I got into our familiar car in the familiar parkade (after I kicked off those things that accumulate in the wheel wells), and as we took the familiar Fox Drive back across the familiar Quesnell Bridge and towards home, I remembered the nights we were lucky enough to walk out of a Broadway play and onto the sidewalks of New York City, and how the air and the concrete felt charged. I was in the world and the world was an exciting place. As we made the right off 149 Street and then the right down 148th, I thought a new thought. Things might not always strike me as new because there’s not as much new in me for them to strike. And then from Broadway to Parkview to Longview, the line from Ian Tyson appeared: Coffee’s kinda bitter, is it the water or the pot? 

I think in the beginning of anything are the words. I think the world is created from words.

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