Glenn Kubish

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...