Glenn Kubish

"I could use a little more green," John said as we pedalled across the 142 St bridge over the MacKinnon Ravine yesterday afternoon. The comment was different parts description and defiance. Mostly description: it's still pretty brown and leafless out there. The trees and lawns haven't yet gone all in in the spring photosynthesis sweepstakes. Some defiance: The weather forecast was for snow by morning. The trees and the meteorologists got it white. The brown ground and bare trees have a set of fresh linens today. The reactions are varied. Some people deliver the neutral facts and emojis. Others share the surprise that change brings: Some bemoan and go all first-person singular about it. Others detect a mythology in which Edmontonians are eternally punished for their puny, chorophyll longings . Some offer a tentative, questioning resistance to the negativity. And others are Eric. Eric is out there. Eric is out there on his bik...

I stop for words on the street. Like the day a couple of summers ago on the 103 St bike lane when page 70 from Shaw's Pygmalion lay face up on the asphalt. Liza Doolittle Day I picked up the loose page and, standing over my bike, read the scene where Henry Higgins tells his mother he has picked up a girl. Mrs. Higgins: Does that mean that some girl has picked you up? Higgins: Not at all. I don't mean a love affair. Mrs. Higgins: What a pity! I remembered how Shelagh shared her love of musicals when we met. Camelot. My Fair Lady. She taught me that West Side Story was Romeo and Juliet. And the day last summer in the north end when I pedalled across scattered pages from the Book of Psalms. Old Testimony I stopped and retrieved Psalm 33: The Lord frustrates the purposes of the nations; he keeps them from carrying out their plans. I smiled. Still in the news that week was criticism of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions's retreat to St. Paul (not t...

If memory is a guide, I've now been sick for exactly two weeks with a virus that planted its flag in my throat and then advanced to my lungs, sowing a confusion of drip and phlegm on its march. My artillery has coughed out weak replies. To those feeble rattles, the mocking invader has blanketed the countryside with "remember to breathe" tissues. I do wonder if it has actually been two weeks of coughing and hacking and sinus congestion like the Groat Road Bridge at automobile rush hour. Am I remembering right? The days blur into each other under a pattern that goes like this: sleep, take pills, use inhaler, swallow cough medicine, consciously inflate my zeppelin lungs. Then: watch whatever Top 100 sports highlights package is on TV, make it to No. 98, fall asleep under the sway of the monitor's hypnotic colours. I have omitted the less elegant aspects of the assault and retreat.  This is how desperate things have been. I haven't been on my bike for two w...