Glenn Kubish

On deadline, Jimmy Breslin put it like this: "That summer in Breezy Point, when he was 18, and out of Madison High in Brooklyn, there was the Beatles on the radio at the beach and on the jukebox in the Sugar Bowl and Kennedys." Breslin doesn't tell us yet who "he" is. It's more important to tell us the high school "he" went to, and the places "he" hung out at, the music "he" listened to and the technology that delivered the Beatles music to him and his friends. It's more important to tell us "he" was young, wore long hair and was in the important part of life. Because we've all been there. Because we all went to high school and hung out with friends. We all forged friendships over music and we all mark the passage of time by, among other things, the technology that delivered those songs. We all had important parts of life. On December 8, 1980, we found out on Monday Night Football that John Lennon...

The oldtimers section at the McDonald's on 50 St isn't marked with a sign that says oldtimers section. It's the oldtimers section because it's the place where two oldtimers nod to me as I sit down with my tray. It's where one of them starts the conversation as if we know each other, which we don't, or are picking up where we left off, which we aren't. "It was on the radio once," he says with a nod. "What was?" I say. "They were talking to the oldest people in the world or something. One was in China. The other one was somewhere else. One was 120 years old or something. What was the secret of their.... "Longevity?" "Right, longevity. They said two things. One was to not get involved in other people's business. The other thing was, I can't remember what the other thing was." "Makes sense," I say. "Not getting involved." A couple of beats of silence go by. "I he...

I am fortunate. I have a fatbike. I have a neighbourhood grocery store. I have a smartphone that dinged an incoming text request from Shelagh (who I am most fortunate to know) as she bused home from downtown while plotting the next steps in today’s Japanese chicken curry dinner. 1 1/2 pounds (680g) boneless, skinless chicken thighs, 2 onions, piece of ginger, 2 carrots, 1 celery stalk, 1 pound (455g) Yukon Gold, russet or other potatoes, 2 tetra paks (they are about 1L each) of chicken broth The dinner had started to take shape yesterday when Shelagh asked the spices to assemble. Answering the call in the aspect of an artist’s palette: pepper corns, turmeric, a bay leaf, cloves, cumin, fennel, cinnamon, brown mustard seeds, cayenne pepper, paprika, cardamom, coriander and salt. My job was to make efficient use of Shelagh’s time by going, while she travelled home, to get the rest of the ingredients. But how to go? I asked Siri for the temperature, and then consi...

I learned just about everything I needed to know in junior high. Mr. Litwin (in those days adults did not have first names) was the science teacher. We were using microscopes to identify plant and animal cells. Get your slide, position it on the microscope plate, peer into the invisible world, match what you see to textbook diagrams, decide whether it was a plant or an animal cell, defend your position. Class after class, the right answer was plant cell. The plant cell camp gained momentum. The good-looking students and the members of the junior volleyball team were united in their plant cell verdicts. One science class after a week or so of this pattern, I dutifully placed my slide under the microscope, looked through the eyepiece and, while the chorus proclaimed plant cell, I froze. It was not a plant cell. It looked different. It resembled the textbook diagram of an animal cell. I must have betrayed some inner terror as I walked to the front of the classroom carrying the piec...

If you spend time in Edmonton's Oliver neighbourhood, you know the place. It's the snow-fenced backyard garden just off the Oliverbahn bicycle lane, in from the alley, across from the old Indian restaurant, kitty corner from the tattoo parlour and a block or so from the fence printed with an image of Richard Avedon's photo of Nastassja Kinski and the snake. My friend Myles helps grow the vegetables in the snow-fenced garden. And that would be a wrong way to put it. "We spent all of this year making this really good soil so that things could grow, so we have to give back," Myles said. "Because the seeds don't grow the plants. The soil grows the plants. Everything you see that comes up from the soil is taking from the soil. You have to give back. You have to put nutrients back in." The soil grows the plants. (I zoned out for a second as an Eliot fragment pushed toward the surface. For most of us, this is the aim, something something someth...

I don't mind the wind where I live. The wind reminds me I am outdoors. Air conditioning aside, the interior life in buildings, malls and automobiles is windless. The advantages of this arrangement are numberless—better looking hair among them. Outside on my bicycle working the pedals on my Rocky Mountain into a gusting from the northwest at 50 kilometres an hour, I am in another kind of place. It is a landscape of action and reaction, give and take. I feel very much a small element in a larger equation where the wind is strong enough to make demands. I make concessions. The wind hits me in the face, and I add seven teeth, switching to an easier gear to keep my legs turning at a comfortable speed. This is what gears do, of course. They help bicycle riders like me speak back to the conditions, and keep going. Keeping going is the job. Keeping going in the little picture means shifting to an easier gear to get to the right turn onto 91 Ave without grinding to a stop. Ke...

It merits another airing: the great good of riding a bicycle in the city is the unroofedness of it all, the way, from a saddle, you can share a few words, a laugh or a smile with people, strangers or not, who, too, are moving at the speed of life, but not faster. Today's ride home was more proof. As if we needed more proof. Here's Max on the 102 Ave sidewalk pointing me to Shelagh, waiting a couple of blocks west at the crossroads in Railtown. Here's Shelagh, off her bike, talking to Professor Legris about Auden. Ring, ring. The bell from behind means a fellow Oliverbahn commuter is coming by. As she does, she smiles a thanks. A few blocks up the Oliverbahn, Shelagh points to a tree illuminated by the autumn sun. Hello, Troy! Hello, woman whose name we don't know, but is very friendly. On Ravine Drive, a woman whose red hair appears to be on fire says hello to us at the same time we say hello to her. At...

I am back in the grip of the New York Times crossword. I can't see if this will end happily. Seeing is my challenge, actually. Take 31 down in today's puzzle, which I started last night,  Kitchen drawers?  Six letters. I immediately pictured the drawers in our kitchen and saw spoons, ladles, cheese graters and the rest of the silver mix of implements Shelagh uses to concoct the most delicious dishes, lately from cookbooks by Ottolenghi and Molly Yeh. I was off track. And stumped. What is another name for a drawer? Compartment, container, something that slides in and out, furniture, chest. Nothing fit. Then I looked closer at the clue. "Kitchen drawers?" The question mark suggested some wordplay was afoot. Words can act like planks on a theatre stage, seemingly strong and solid enough to stand on, but also trap doors through which certainty disappears with a whoosh. Where you come down on this magic of words, the way they move and molt and mock, separates tho...

That was as close to a sublime rainbow as I have ever witnessed. I almost missed it. I was pedalling east down the MacKinnon Ravine. I had just said hello to the stand of spruce trees I greet going by.  It's curious to hear your own voice talking to trees. I have done this for years. After the trees, the trail curves to the right and then swoops to the left and, ahead, a woman stood off to the side of the trail. She was pointing to the sky behind me. I stopped. A rain drop hit the top of my hand. "Look," she said. "Look" does not give a person much of a clue about what is about to be seen. I turned around. I saw a ribbon of lights arced across the western sky. And before I had the instant needed to apply to it the concept of rainbow, I saw it as a colossal faucet turned on full bore, emptying a torrent of coloured water into the sink of the North Saskatchewan River. In another instant, it stopped being a spout of light, and became, again, properl...

You never forget how to ride a bike. In those simple sounding, nostalgically lacquered eight words divided neatly between two thoughts, a) you never forget and b) how to ride a bike, and in the even distribution of syllables across those two thoughts, you ne-ver for-get (1-2-3-4-5) how to ride a bike (1-2-3-4-5), and in the memorable way those two thoughts of five syllables displays the storyteller's proportioning out of tension and release—first, the tension of You never forget (never forget what? What is this thing that cannot be forgotten? In a world where our grip on so much, namely, names, ages, dates, facts, memories, computer passwords, the TV remote, loosens, what is this thing that we cannot but hold tight to?) and then the release of how to ride a bike  (yes, the satisfaction of a proposition posed and not left suspended), in this artful use of tension and release that makes a story memorable, that saying,  you never forget how to ride...

I want to tell you about Andy, but, first, I want first to try to explain why I didn't stop to clean up the shards of broken beer bottle glass on the shared-use path this morning. I can't. I don't know why I didn't stop. I did see the shards. But I swerved, content not to hear from my tires the poof of rubber's deflating surrender to glass. I might have weakly dangled a left-arm warning to the bicycle rider behind me. That was it. That was the extent of my flaccid public spirit muscle flex. Having neatly navigated through the peril, I quickly forgot about the glass or how it might undo others. It was on to Coffee Outside in Faraone Park, a Friday morning meetup ritual with fellow bicycle riders. Like the rest of the Coffee Outside gang, Andy was there with his bike. Unlike the rest of us he was there with his aluminum trash grabber arm. On the tip of the device is a retractable blue claw that, when triggered at the handle, squeezes closed, securing wh...

The first time I ever lost my grip on things I was maybe six or seven years old,  and the garden behind our house in the northeast end had been shredded by summer hail. I stood in the back porch down the three stairs from the kitchen and looked through the glass and metal and mesh of the storm door at the frame of devastation. The hail had knocked everything flat. Carrot fantails were bent over and smeared into the soil. The potato plants were pulverized. The food that took shape above the ground—the peas, the cukes, the green beans, the precious tomatoes tied for support by sections of my mother's old nylons to slender wooden sticks—were destroyed. I stood still in the porch and watched my parents in the garden here and there reaching down to collect handfuls of shredded lettuce, letting them drop dead. The sight of the fractured corn hurt the most. My parents had put so much work into that garden, and I could tell they were sad. Now, as I stood still in the back porch,...

There are bicycle rides where I just know I'm going to keep seeing interesting things. This morning's was one of those rides. Starting with the Husky pup on the sidewalk along 101 Ave. What a face. I watched a hare change its mind, and then again, and then again, about which side of the avenue it would aim for. I saw a cyclist prepared to fix a puncture. A Glenora skateboarder projected a giant shadow mask. Shelagh pedalled by wearing her helmet that looks like a scoop of gelato. Eden entertained us with tales of basketball and beer in the place we, as children of the age of cable TV,  both grew up: 500 West Boone Avenue, Spokane, Washington, the Inland Empire, where you could shop at Rosauers. Look closely at the guy on the porch of the house with Richard Avedon's Nastassja Kinski on the fence. He's sanding a wooden donkey sculpture. At 109 St a vaper exhaled a thought balloon as he considered things. I love riding my bik...