Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 141: Italy, garages, long play

Ciao, ecco tre cose della mia piccola vita che questa settimana hanno lasciato tracce di felicità e gratitudine, or something like that.

Here's Three Things from Edmonton, episode 141: 

   

                           

1. Italy 

  
Shelagh is off to Italy soon for a couple of weeks. It will be a belated milestone birthday vacation celebration with her friend Sheryl. I’m staying home to keep an eye on the tomatoes. If it frosts, someone has to cover the plants. Italy as a holiday destination makes deep sense for Shelagh. She took night-class Italian lessons a decade ago at Ainlay. Her accent is a-pretty good. She studied the literature and the architecture of the country as an undergrad. She spoke real Latin, actually. She made me watch Don’t Look Now with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. She shops at Spinelli’s in Little Italy. She knows Moonstruck by heart. A favourite exchange: 

Cosmo: Well, stick around, don’t go on any long trips.
Johnny: I don’t know what you mean!
Cosmo: I know you don’t. That’s the point. I’ll say no more. 

Shelagh is fond of the cuisine of Italy. She read the Tucci book. She likes boots. She follows the Giro. We saw Merchant of Venice in Stratford on our honeymoon. She convinced me to watch a Room With A View. As a young girl growing up in Lynnwood, Shelagh had an honorary mother from Italy, Mrs. Timeus, who lived next door. She helped take care of little Shelagh and her brother, and made them brown soup for lunch. I would not be far off if I said going back to Mrs. Timeus’s kitchen with her brother Sean for brown soup would be one of Shelagh’s make-any-three-wishes wishes. 

And, of course,  Shelagh’s own mom, Phyllis, studied in Italy for six weeks on her way to an Arts degree—after raising nine children. In her memoir, Phyllis warmly remembered her time in Italy. 

Italy makes deep sense as a holiday destination for Shelagh. It’s the heartland. She will meet a lot of herself there. 

2.  Garage 

The garage is a strange place.

In a way that I don’t when I walk into the house, I walk into the garage never quite sure where I am. I mean, I know I have walked into our garage, I know it’s September 2023, I can see all our stuff. It’s a museum of stuff. Artifacts from the permanent collection that can’t be displayed but can’t be thrown away. A shuffleboard table we bought and then realized was too big to get it into the house. It serves now as a long table holding boxes and bins and bicycles. There’s Michael’s yellow, rubber-shafted hockey stick. His coach Skip liked the way he skated with the puck. In the back corner by the air compressor from my dad is a black Manhasset music stand from Sean. An old Oilers flag in the rafters fires a memory of my friend Graham every time I look up. 

Growing up, garages were where the dads down the alley went to fix things, cut things, hammer things, solder things, wire things.  Things were always being fastened and connected in those garages. Our garage carries a faint echo of that tradition, but, really, ours is more a place to store things, and find things. Like the youth-sized red Team Canada baseball hat that Shelagh came across while looking for a toy railroad set. The hat was Alex’s. He wore it forever. It seemed like forever. On the brim, still visible in thin, black Sharpie, is Gretzky’s autograph. 

The hat and the Oilers came up in a phone call with my mom last week. 

“Those were the years,” she said.  “Those were some years. Kurri and Gretzky and Anderson—very exciting the way he charged the net!”

Our memories are garages, of course. Dusty in parts, dim lit in corners, places where immovable objects sit, sites where items flicker back to life when glanced at—safe, for the time being, from the elements. 

3. Long play 

The Dylansphere has been vibrating since the Bard of Hibbing  showed up last week on stage backed by, among other players, members of Tom Petty’s great band. They were a fine match, said John Mackif in the Vancouver Sun. He wrote: "With guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench leading the way, the Heartbreakers gave Dylan superb support, keeping the songs simple, with a kick." 

Mackif wrote that review in 1986, a day after Dylan, Petty, et al, played BC Place in Vangroovy, a concert I was at with friends. Thirty-seven years later the assessment was still true as Dylan, with Campbell and Tench, showed up unexpectedly to play a three-song set at Farm Aid in Noblesville, Indiana. The songs he brought were from 1965, including  Positively 4th Street.

“Dylan back at Farm Aid,” our son Michael texted me with a link the next morning. I stopped my work immediately and watched. The songs have travelled well. What struck me most was the the profile of it, the shape and stencil of it, the anatomy of it—Dylan again, still, tethered to electric guitar. 

Thanks for being out there, friends.