Glenn Kubish

  It’s the end of the week as we know it! Here are three things that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness. Three Things, episode 110:                                                             1. Timing   There’s a difference between saying the right thing and saying the right thing at the right time. Both take skill. They are different skills. Shelagh needed grated ginger for a ginger cake, and I was in the produce section at Andy’s IGA where I quickly located everything she didn’t need for the cake—garlic, shallots, chives, bok choy.   It was like looking for a word in the dictionary not knowing how to spell. I walked over to the produce clerk who was unloading oranges and with mock weariness asked him, “How close am I to a knob of ginger?” He nodded, smiled, removed his hat to make sure I didn’t miss the fact of his red hair and replied: “You are very close, sir.” He laughed an apology and said it was the only knob of ginger joke he knew and walked me the six feet to the g

Here are there things that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness this week:                                1. Boss   For those of a certain vintage, and I’m checking my look in the mirror here, word that Springsteen is coming to Edmonton in November calls to mind the saga of Pete The Rocker. Back in the early 1980s, Pete engineered a ceaseless lobbying campaign to get Springsteen to play Edmonton. He wrote letters, he hounded his management company, he put together a 50,000 name petition, which I signed. Pete loved the Boss, that was obvious. He also loved Edmonton, and was open about it, which was different. Edmonton was a place to be from, a place to grow up in, a place to get an oilpatch job, but people my age here didn’t seem to love their hometown like people in, say, New Jersey, or anywhere else did. Pete, who I’ve never met, but whose son also rocks and is a friend, turned the equation around. Springsteen and the E Street Band should come to Edmonton not because they des

Happy end of the week! In a few days, the sun will rise before 8 am for the first time since October 13 last year. Here are three other things from my little life in the retreating dark that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness. Three Things, episode 108:                             1. Waves   There is a quaint practice that clings to life in Edmonton, a vestige of the happy days of motoring. I speak of the courtesy wave from the car driver ahead back to the car driver behind after the latter allows the former into the flow of traffic. Close to where we live, the stage is set for the wave when bumper-to-bumper afternoon traffic pointing south on 142 Street blocks the way out of the Andy’s IGA parking lot for the drivers of other vehicles. Same thing at the zipper merge where 102 Avenue now goes down from two lanes to one around 137 Street due to LRT construction in year one of X. I received the quick courtesy wave there last week, extending the half-life of a courtesy wave I h

  We managed to get out downtown last week, and stayed in, too. Here are three things that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness. Three Things, episode 107:                              1. Print   The big five Asian cuisines are Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese, which means Filipino is not quite in the gang, yet. Our friend Ariel knows that’s not fair. Ariel runs Filistix, the wonderful Filipino restaurant on 100 Avenue downtown, which is where we were last week for a unique sit-down dining event called Rice and Mysticism. Six courses of pre-colonial and early contact Filipino food researched and prepared by Chef Earl Briones, who narrated the evening, telling stories from island history and culture as he introduced each dish of plated art. Shelagh was where she’s meant to be: at a table with food and words. That night was Edmonton’s version of the evening she spent at The Cloisters in New York listening to Ottolenghi exhume the culture and cuisine of Colmar in Fr