Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 121: old film, bottom line, anemone


Here is my weekly survey of three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude.

Listen here to Three Things, episode 121:

                           


1. Old film
 
It’s not easy playing hockey in Vegas. I used to be part of a travelling team called the Emperors. Not a travelling team I had to try out for as a promising minor hockey player, more travelling in the sense of wouldn’t it be a blast if I said yes to my buddy Mitch’s invitation to join an oldtimers outfit he had put together and play some games and drink some beers in a tournament in the desert. 



Those trips were something. One year there was a case of mistaken identity when I walked out a back stairwell at the Monte Carlo and into a surveillance operation staffed by security officers trying to apprehend a pornography distribution suspect. Another year, I ate a warm beet parfait at a pre-game lunch and ended up locked in a fenced utility compound outside the arena, in my equipment. A locked washroom is what I most needed. I was reminded of that scene by my friend Jeff. He was one of the top players on the team. We stay in touch on Facebook. On the podcast episode about the Stoics, he left a comment.

Great read Kubi. Question, does Seneca speak of food poisoning and playing through it like a superstar? If that isn’t stoic, I don’t know what is. Once an Emperor always an Emperor!

I smiled when I read that. It resonated, as they say. In a flash I saw clearly how much of me—how much of the stories that I am made up of—are preserved by others. For a flash I saw how sad it is to be diminished by the eventual loss of comrades who have the old film of you. 





2.  Bottom line
 
Shelagh and I found ourselves all dressed up at the Royal Glenora Club on Saturday night in a room of investors celebrating a decade of returns engineered by Iannick at Axcess Capital. We know Iannick from Shelagh’s time at the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts. It’s interesting to be submerged in a different world. Private market investing is a different world. I caught a glimpse of many things, including the possibility of income diversification and capital appreciation through the ownership of music performance royalties. It was a new way to listen to John Legend, gotta say. 

Iannick

The event, in the Braemar Room, with its glass walls like an aquarium, happened in three parts. In the middle were presentations from the reps of the different funds going through their strategies. On either side of those talks were two very different meditations on being awake to reality. Let me tell you about the closing act first. In it, the hypnotist Wayne Lee led a half dozen volunteers through various antics on stage. They were rock stars, and uninhibited dancers. They reacted to imagined bad gas from the person next to them. One woman could not remember the name of her husband of 21 years until <snap> she could. Lee smuggled in messages of positive visualization, telling them the power to achieve goals was in their hearts. 



The event had started with another perspective on those same beating hearts when Iannick himself asked the crowd to name the most important currency in the world. The Canadian dollar? The US dollar? The Kuwaiti dinar? He talked emotionally about a dying friend. Iannick made the point to his rich audience that the only thing they really spend is their time. Time is the most valuable asset in the world. That’s still the bottom line. That’s still the thing of real interest. 




3. Anemone 

As a boy in 1970 working on his Jacques Cousteau Life of the Ocean sticker collection at the kitchen table, I pronounced the exotic creature as a “sea aniMOWN.” Decades later it was Shelagh who set me right. It’s “sea aNEMAnee.” Huh. Animown, anemone, whatever, I saw one the other day. Bright pink, it was lying there like it was washed up on the beach. The beach was actually the street gutter. The “anemone” itself was a discarded rubber dish glove I spotted as I pedalled by.




I’ve said before that I sometimes feel like I’m moving along the ocean floor when I am out on my bike, the sky above being not the sky above as much as the rim of the water beyond which is a realm beyond imagining. The feeling is enhanced by the currents of traffic and the schools of little birds that dart by and the diesel trucks that emit inky exhaust. The tractor trailers are the whales and the occasional Stingray is the, well, the stingray. Sometimes I stop to inspect bumpers and grilles and other wreckage before it’s salvaged. 


Sometimes I find treasure in the vault. Like the five dollar bill I spotted in the gutter near 111 Avenue last week. A fin, as we used to say. My buddy Eden teases me about how slow I ride. I told him about the fiver. He reminded me that I once stopped to pick up an onion that had gotten away from somebody’s grocery bag. 

I had forgotten about that.


Thanks for being out there, friends. 


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