Glenn Kubish

It’s the end of week as we knew it, amicis.    Here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude.   Listen to the Three Things podcast, episode 119:                                1. The Stoics   “But, you ask, if a wise man receives a blow, what shall he do?” the Stoic philosopher Seneca asked in an essay written almost 2,000 years ago. He answered himself: “What Cato did when he was struck in the face. He did not flare up, he did not avenge the wrong, he did not even forgive it, but he said that no wrong had been done.”* The “struck in the face” part feels very 2023. It’s a big part of the first round of the NHL playoffs, striking in the face is. I’m picturing the padded punches to the kisser in scrums after the whistle that the cameras love, the face washes as they are euphemistically called. This is where Stoicism has something to teach the players—and to teach us all.  “So, and I’m not the authority on this,” said our son Alex, “but to my understanding, it’s

And that's a wrap on the week, friends!   Here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude. Three Things podcast, episode 118*:                         I bought a pizza from a vending machine last week. No, don’t report me to Sonia   Piano. It was for science. I wanted to know if the pizza was as good as, say, Tony’s on 111 Avenue. It was not. The crust, the sauce, the cheese, the haphazard pepperoni placement, the pepperoni, the fact I couldn’t get into the machine to watch the pizza being made—all of this made the encounter with the food machine unnerving. It was the sound, though, the lack of human sound that really got through. The machine pizza itself was disgorged like a tired bus passenger.   At Tony’s there was a hum. The servers wore black, the cooking staff wore white, together, as they moved back and forth at the kitchen counter, never colliding, they struck me as a kind of real-life Player piano. There were other sounds to be heard. From the long

  Here are three things that left behind still discernible tracks of happiness and gratitude in the week that was.  Three Things, episode 117, for the listening and sharing.                               1. Scrabble   My friend Rob is the craftiest Scrabble player I have ever tiled against. A man of letters, he is. A player with supreme control of his vowels. A champion of the game who will soften you up with a flurry of two-letter, three-way jabs before putting you to the canvas with a seven-letter bingo, or two. I had never beaten him. That’s not quite true. Years ago, I did prevail. Alas, that was the game, we were soon after to learn, that was played with a missing tile. So the triumph remained asterisked. Rob is the kind of Scrabbler who would play ISKED onto ASTER,   with the K on a triple letter. You get the picture of what it’s like to face him. We met for lunch and a game at Bucas & Pastas, and, wonder of wonders, I won my first ever game against the master, even though he

It’s the end of the week, the Oilers are playoffs-bound, and, sure, McDavid has been elevated to minor deity status here, but, have y’all been watching Draisaitl?! This week’s three things:                              1. 48   The Oilers star Leon Draisaitl needed three goals to get to 50 goals for the season. The Oilers were playing the Anaheim Ducks, a team good for everyone’s statistics. Shelagh and I were at the Banff Centre, listening to the long-long-short-long of the poetic freight train moving through town while we watched the game on TV.   Through centre ice, three Oilers, Evander Kane, Draisaitl and Brett Kulak, skated astride each other against two Ducks defencemen and one back-checking teammate. Kane carried the puck up the right wing and over the blue line. Kulak skated full throttle for the far post. Draisaitl hung back. The horizontal line of the Oilers attack had transformed into a triangle. Euclid nodded. The fans at Rogers Place rose in anticipation. We edged forward