Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 143: weather map, Shelagh in Italy, class reunion

I try, no matter what is happening in the world, which is a mess, or in my bronchial tubes, which are, too, to notice what I noticed made me happy or grateful. 

Three Things, episode 143:

                            

1. Weather map 

I saw the weather map in a new way last week. 

The visual grammar of the TV weather is familiar to all of us of a certain vintage. A personality with effervescence and expertise stands in front of a map printed with the names of local communities—Edmonton, St. Albert, Leduc, Sherwood Park, Spruce Grove, Stony Plain, and all the smaller places, too, like Veg and Whitecourt, Smoky and Westlock—and this expert, like the great Josh Classen, or the great Bill Matheson before him, narrates a story of how the meteorological forces, the high pressure systems, the low pressure systems, are vying above to make their presence felt in our little lives below. It’s mythical stuff. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Bill, quoting Robert Herrick channeling the Book of Wisdom, would say, intuiting a strategic direction for life lived in an atmosphere of constant change. We don’t know what will happen next. We should let that radical uncertainty charge positively our lives and relationships and words. 

As someone who has grown up and will go out watching television (unless television goes out first), and as someone who has watched countless weather forecasts and worked in television news, all of that visual scaffolding is in me. It was that structure on which was hung a quite different story last week.
The magic board was brought to pop cultural prominence by CNN’s John King who, on election nights, took viewers into maps of Cook County or Fulton County to analyze voting patterns. It’s remarkable television, this way of showing the power of ballots. The technology also works well as it shows the power of bullets. 

The CNN magic wall has done heavy work to chart the course of  the war in Ukraine, and now it is in service for the war in Israel and Gaza. Watching CNN’s coverage on Canadian Thanksgiving, I was left with unspeakable gratitude for my quaint and innocent practice of watching the maps on local TV for the natural storms we face. 

2. Shelagh in Italy 

Shelagh is in Italy with her friend Sheryl celebrating 120 years of combined life on the planet. The photos she sends back are captivating. The Colosseum. The Tiber. The Palatine Hill. The Arno. The Florence Cathedral, or, as Shelagh would say, il Duomo di Firenze. The sounds sent back are thrilling, too. The bells of the churches as they toll over each other. A coffee shop in Florence.  Daily life. Beautiful, mundane daily life. With some Dante and trains at 245 km/h thrown in, but, still, quotidian stuff.

On the way out to the airport at the start of the voyage, Shelagh shared a new story. Or one that I had forgotten, same thing. In high school, there was a school trip planned to Italy. It was the beginning of the era that we, as parents, would come to know when our children were themselves in high school. There’s a field trip, we’d be informed by Alex or Michael. Elk Island Park? I wondered. Lake Miquelon? The Provincial Museum? No, Cuba. There’s an info night you can go to. Just like there was an info night for the school trip to Italy back in Shelagh and Sheryl’s time. Which they attended. From which they brought home information for their parents to consider. Which information was rejected for household budgetary reasons. Which is what I think I see in their faces in the pics from Italy—the satisfaction of a quiet promise of a trip to Italy kept for years, and now brought to life.

3. Class reunion 

It’s so nice to meet an old friend and pass the time of day, the great Lightfoot said. I don’t know how many years it had been since I last saw Manuel. We were part of a group that hung around in high school. We weren’t the jocks, the brainiacs, the students' union types or the Chevy Nova drivers, but we found each other, and, with each other, got, for the most part, through. We published an underground newsletter that didn’t put us in good standing with the administration. Think rate-your-teacher-dot-com before the internet. 

Those days were nowhere in my memory as I ordered an English Fog at Second Cup in St. Albert. A woman approached, asked if my name was Glenn Kubish, said, while I hesitated, that she was pretty sure it was and who then said she was married to Manuel, sitting at the table over there, Manuel who, I thought, and said, as we shook hands, must be on some kind of anti-aging serum. We caught up on the important stuff— family, parents, kids, retirement, winter weather here (a getaway plan for them, a surviving-the-siege plan for us). He’s an accomplished sensei, and runs a successful karate school in St. Albert. He looks like a movie star. It was good to run the film back for a half hour.

Thanks for being out there, friends.