Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 145: goalies, first snow, cross-examination

Here’s a fact beyond debate:  it’s the end of week. Next up: the weekend. Here are three things that I noticed I noticed made for some happiness and gratitude last week.

Three Things from Edmonton, episode 145:

                            

1. Goalies 

Connor Hellebuyck, the goaltender for the Winnipeg Jets, allowed two early goals against the Oilers last week and then closed the door, as they say. The Oilers lost 3-2, underlining what has been a lacklustre start to the season for the home squad. But enough about them. In an extended interview after the game, Hellebuyck was asked about his unique style. I reached for the remote. I didn’t need to hear again some version of “the team plays well in front of me”  or “I was just seeing the puck well tonight” or some other in the long list of platitudes for the multitudes. Before I could hit the mute button, he said this of his style.

“I think it’s extremely efficient. And I’m using my brain. I’m using my mind, and I’m really reading the game. I’m not overdoing anything.”

Huh! That was different. Then he went all literacy and baseball!

“When you’re reading plays that could happen, you almost have to, it’s almost like analytics, like there’s a 50 percent chance that that goes there, I’m going to cover the 100 percent chance. And that’s why things get so simple. It’s very heavy on the neurological side, but it works.”

Huh! Huh! Here was another lovely eccentric behind the mask, the latest in the line of netminders for whom the mind is the key piece of equipment. Ken Dryden was one of those. 

Dryden, #29, the Montreal Canadiens goalie, would strike a pose when the action was at the other end of the rink. He would stand in his crease, head resting above arms crossed atop the knob of his goalie stick, the tip of the blade anchored into the ice. As a sculpture, he contemplated the drama. He was a question mark. He was my hockey hero. Years later, when I saw a Rodin Thinker in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, I saw Ken Dryden. This is how Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts informed me. 

Last week’s show featured the entertaining and insightful interview of Hellebuyck by Scott Oake and Louie DeBrusk, made memorable by the generosity of Hellebuyck’s answers. It was a reminder that even in the locked down, corporate-controlled, sound-bite driven landscape of sports journalism, there is room for 10 minutes of good questions and the best of all answers—the ones you didn’t see coming. 

Speaking of didn’t see it coming…

2. First snow 

I saw the first fall of snow/
I saw the flowers come and go

That little couplet from Dylan means something up here on latitude 53 where last week started with Shelagh pulling back the veil and reporting the scene on the other side of the window

“It snowed,” she said

Those two words place the annual choice in the hearts of Edmontonians: Will it be terror or terroir? The terror is simple.  Please, God, tell me this isn’t the first of six months of snow. Six months of layering up, a half year of no shorts, no bare feet, no easy backyard barbecues. A half year of slipping and sliding on the roads, of slipping and falling on the sidewalks, of dark and wind and cold. Cold fingers, feet, ears, faces, and the burning question: why do we live here? 

The terroir approach is a little more of a finesse job, as my friend Steve would say.  It accepts  the weather as a given. As a given, weather is nothing to complain about. To moan about the weather is to reveal an inflated sense of self and bottomless pride. To gripe about the weather is really to say we are equal to it, which we, the puny we, so aren’t. Our part is to follow Dylan and notice the changing seasons and adapt. The best we can do is to apprehend the cycle of life and death—tweaking it here and there. The route open to us is to allow the environment that we live and move in to impart a characteristic  flavour to our lives. After all, this is what it’s supposed to look like here on the eastern slope of the Rockies at this time of year. What do we do to let that inform us? 

I hauled out the fatbike and went for a ride as I considered this year’s existential terror-terroir calculation.

3. Cross examination 

What makes it borderline unlikely that Walter Lippmann ever listened to Bob Dylan’s Infidels is that the album came out in 1983. Lippmann, the American journalist and political theorist, died in 1974. So, okay, there’s that. But, on the other hand, there’s also the article Lippmann wrote in August 1939 for The Atlantic Monthly titled “The Indispensable Opposition.” In it he wipes away the oft-heard maxim of Voltaire (I wholly disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it) by applying a bit of Machiavellian varnish to it. Let’s deal in facts, not in imaginary ideas, Lippmann says, noting that as a matter of fact most people will not defend to the death your right to say what you want. If the times run hot, if society disapproves sufficiently of what others say, some way will be found to suppress those people. It’s a remarkable essay. Fauci is in it. Trump is in it.

Lippmann argues that we shouldn’t just tolerate what others say. That’s an incidental good. The good of freedom of speech is the chance that others’ opinions, confronted in true debate, will get us closer to the truth. Here’s a Dylanesque part of the Lippmann essay: 

“For while the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes the right important. What matters is not the utterance of opinions. What matters is the confrontation of opinions in debate. That is why civilized men must cherish liberty—as a means of promoting the discovery of truth.

And a Lippmannesque part of Jokerman:

Freedom,  just around the corner for you/
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?

Confronting good questions in the hall of debate. Somehow, that might be the only way back. The un-cross-examined life, perhaps, is not worth living. 

Thanks for being out there, friends.