Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 113: digging, building faces, music room


Here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude. We keep going, right?

Three Things, episode 113:


                                         

1. Digging 

I am drawn to the CN Tower. Not that CN Tower. I mean, Edmonton’s CN Tower at the north end of 100 Street downtown, the original CN Tower. Its name is borderline obsolete, sure. At 26 storeys, it’s not so towering. And the railway company no longer has a presence in the building, even though its logo, the good old twisted paper clip, still adorns the structure at base and tip. When I was a boy, the basement of the building housed the train station and it was from there that trips to visit the Winnipeg grandparents commenced. Waiting for Christmas morning was a snap compared to the agony of waiting for the train to wake up and, abruptly, with a jolt, head east. 


“Are you looking for something particular here?” a woman asked me as I walked through the lobby last week. I likely presented as a lost soul. “In the basement was the train station when I was a boy,” I said. “Before my time,” she said, walking off. 

There are other voices. The announcer over the station speaker with the names of the trains—the Skeena, the Supercontinental. And the conductor as he walked a tightrope down the aisle of the moving train. Dinner is now served in the dining car, he would say, three cars back. Three cars back. I loved the rhythm of those three words.  


I wandered to the back of the CN Tower and out a door into the open air. I was on a staircase looking down to where the railway tracks used to be. There is a big construction build going on now, a big residential and commercial complex taking shape. A giant crane was lifting  things up from the deep. Personally, it looked like an archeology site. 



2. Building faces 

If you stand on the MacEwan University campus behind the Robbins Health Learning Centre and look east toward 109 Street, you will see in the sky looking back down at you the face of a giant cat. In all weathers, at all times of year, the cat is there, waiting, watching, waiting to be seen watching, perhaps. It’s a cat that takes some perceptual gymnastics to see, but it’s there, its features an amalgam of the parts of the physical structures of the buildings themselves. The pedway is the cat’s head, the porthole windows are its eyes and the iconic concrete towers its pointed ears. Put together in your mind with a sprinkling of figure-and-ground dust, voilà, you get the giant cat of MacEwan University. 


Now, if you take a few paces north, so the towers are no longer in view, the cat transforms into a giant emoji-style face. Either the grimacing-face emoji or the face with a diagonal mouth emoji is what you will see if you see the staircase outside the students union building as a kind of giant mouth below the porthole eyes.


I look for faces in inanimate objects. I find faces in door knobs and baked pies and rocks on the side of the road and in seaweed and in the crimp pad on staplers. I am told this condition is called pareidolia and that neuroscientists are still trying to figure it out. I kinda hope they don’t. I enjoy the thrill of seeing unfamiliar faces out there.

The Canadian Press

3. Music room 

On a night of televised pyrotechnics, bare breasts, #97 centre stage, Simu Liu, the sons of Hanna, Avril Lavigne and three f-bombs that got past anti-blue-air craft censors, there was also Jewel Casselman. Casselman is an elementary school music teacher in Winnipeg, who took back from Edmonton her JUNO for music teacher of the year. How quaint. How lovely. How refreshing that there’s enough money behind that award to make it part of the prime-time broadcast. 


The pandemic has taught me things that are only now starting to be hauled to the surface. That musicians rule the world is one such thing. They don’t all get paid accordion-ly, and music teachers, for all they compose their way out of, most certainly don’t. Who else has a work day that involves herding feral recorder players into a functioning pack? They do work for good, music teachers do. They teach individual commitment to craft, and teamwork and they introduce us to the mystery of translating feelings through instruments into sounds. They make worlds to share and they make hideouts when you’re on the run. 

Mr. Milan at Mac

All together now, on the count of three, 1-2-3, bravo, music teachers.

Thanks for being out there, friends.

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