Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 100: wherewithal, Professors Plumb, reunion

Once a week I’ve try to notice what I noticed made me happy or grateful. So the noticing equipment doesn’t freeze up. This week's podcast is episode 100:

                         

1. Wherewithal 

Through the kindness of friends and the historical support of taxpayers, I got to Rogers Place to watch an Oilers game in person. The person I watched, with the puck, without the puck, watched even as he skated onto the ice for warm-up, was Connor McDavid. It’s a different Connor McDavid than you see sometimes at the dog park or at the IGA, where he’s just another dog lover and coupon clipper. On the ice, on skates, free from the hold of the thick earth, #97 moves like the wind. Over, between, into, against, around, across, through, by. He skates prepositionally. And that would be quite good enough if what he did for a living was the league’s skating skills competition. He plays hockey, though, and that means he skates in a violent, confined area, in which the goal is a goal. Short of the rushes where he undresses the entire opposing team before depositing the puck in the net, he and his art need others. His list of prepositions needs one more: with. 

The play I most remember from that game started when Leon Draisaitl backhanded a pass from the right wing boards diagonally across the Arizona Coyotes zone to McDavid, who received it almost behind the goal line. Let’s hit pause for a second. For those of us who grew up playing north-south hockey, it is still remarkable to watch the space behind the net used as territory to attack from. By north-south, I mean straight up the ice toward the other team’s goalie for a shot on net and then straight back when it didn’t work. We were table hockey players connected to rods. Under the influence of the Europeans, Gretzky changed that, using the space behind the net like a cavalryman who had outflanked the enemy. A new phrase had to be coined. 99 was in his office.  

McDavid continues this workplace tradition, with remarkable help from his friends. That pass from Draisaitl was along the ice, but, really, it was on a different plane. It opened the door to the office, opened a full half of the net for the puck to be, after a slick eagle turn by McDavid behind the cage, deposited for a wraparound goal. I told our son Alex that I went to the game. He asked if I saw what McDavid did with Draisaitl's backhand complement. 

“A lot of players would just get the puck and try to jam it in, but it would have just gone in the goalie’s pad,” Alex said. “McDavid had the wherewithal to do the wraparound. The goalie was so far to the side of the net where the puck was that it was a higher percentage play to do the wraparound. Because of the pass.”
I liked the word Alex used. McDavid’s wherewithal, as in knowing how to use the resources he skates with.

2. Professors Plumb

 
The clogs have been declogged. The sinks in the house are working again. Water is flowing. The leak mid-winter is a thing of the past. We can host Christmas dinner. It was Mr. Rooter with a wrench in the kitchen who solved the mystery. 

Plumbing has long been a fixture in my imagination. This is strange, considering that actual plumbing is a complete riddle—pipes shaped like question marks at every turn. The good news is my confidence now matches my skill, so, I no longer make bad situations worse through pride. We bring in pros. While they are sawing their way through the Lazy Susan, I can drift back to the 1970s, and Watergate, and how the bad guys I read about in the afternoon Journal were called plumbers. In those days, we played board games, including one where you drew cards with images of different pipes to be put together to get the water from the tap card to the spout card—it was called Waterworks. Early in my reporting career I got the unforgettable advice that I was to think of my job like a plumber would. Move the attention of the readers from the top of the page to the bottom after adding various twists and turns, but never require them to stop or back up. No leaked attention allowed. One of Shelagh’s Christmas traditions is watching Moonstruck. She recites the script. The Cher lines, the Olympia Dukakis lines, the Nicholas Cage lines, the old grandfather with the dogs lines, the lines from Vincent Gardenia’s Cosmo about copper pipe. All together: “It costs money, it costs money because it saves money!”

So, when the real-life plumbers presented the bill for their work, packed up and left with the assurance that things were flowing , I winced a bit, but also agreed they were. Plumbing runs deep.

3. Reunion 

A good year ago now, someone in Edmonton found a wallet lying somewhere in the snow out there, unzipped it, saw that it contained the usual cards: debit, credit, a driver’s licence, library, immunization records, work ID. No money, 20 cents, actually, but enough on the credit card to go on a tiny spree. The wallet itself was handsome—worn leather, good zipper. Someone put that wallet in a mailbox. They trusted the system. Someone at Canada Post classified it as what’s called undeliverable mail, and shipped it to the Undeliverable Mail Office in Scarborough, Ontario, where someone else found an address back across the country for the wallet’s owner.

I took the package out of the mailbox and waved to Danny, our letter carrier, as he drove away. He honked his horn. I ripped the envelope open. My wallet was back. With the two dimes. With all the cards, including the cards with my picture on them. Those were the ones that bothered me, being out there, lost. It’s slightly disturbing to find someone’s image in the wild, whether it’s an old photo in an alley or yesterday’s newspaper stuck to a fence. And it’s unsettling to think your own image is floating out there in the elements. You can cancel your cards, but not that feeling. 

A letter included with my wallet said, as a courtesy, Canada Post Corporation is returning this item to you free of charge. To the many strangers who kept my wallet and its contents intact, and who got a part of me back home safely,  thank you for the helping hands—for the assists.

Thanks for being out there, friends.