Three Things from Edmonton podcast: air, water, trees and other stuff

 


Here are three things from my little life that I noticed made my happy or grateful this week. 

(I say them out loud in this week's Three Things podcast, too.) 

1. To air is human...💨

Before the solution presented itself, it had to wait while I tried again and again to force into place a solution that didn’t work. I was trying to remove the back wheel from my bicycle.  The wheel had a broken spoke and was on its way to the bike shop for a fix. As soon as I could get it free from the frame. Which I could not do, no how. The quick release was released, the chain was off, but I could not move the axle out of the dropout where it rested. Trying to slide it or coax it or hammer it out delivered only the same result: the wheel jammed into the fender and would not come loose. After five minutes of stubborn effort and exasperation, I remembered the Arrow Book Club. In Grade 3 I had a book with different real-life puzzles. One was how a tractor trailer driver whose vehicle was stuck inside a covered bridge figured out how to get loose. He let the air out of the tires to gain clearance. Which is what I did. And it worked. I got the back wheel free, and gained some insight into how my brain doesn’t work. I don’t define the challenge specifically enough. Yes, the challenge was to get the wheel free. But the real problem was to get an inflated tire free. There was no room for that problem to present itself, to define itself while I was sure the problem was something else. Which means the real task is how, when I am quite sure of things, to let the air out of myself. P-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-t-t-t-t.



2. Public water for life  🚰

For Fahrenheit’s sake, it’s hot in Edmonton. It is so hot that people of my vintage are going back to the pre-Celsius scale to make sense of the historical hotness of it. On Wednesday, it was 100 degrees. In these temperatures, air conditioning is the private good. I find I am spending more time at Andy’s IGA on 142 Street for the cool air around the frozen peas and corn. The public good is a spray park. A spray park is a cool-down, a joy, a refuge and a post modernly coloured pipe organ that pumps out notes, no, emits shrieks of delight. Last week, we dropped by the giant fountain at City Hall. I convinced a young sniper to blast me with a Nerf gun bigger than she was. At Parkallen, at the Kinsmen, at Rio Terrace and Callingwood, the happy voices all sang the same song—in the key of glee. 




3. Of particular interest 🔎

Pedalling a bicycle in the city is a way to see the city that reveals itself at the slower speed of pedalling a bicycle in the city. When I pedal,  I see bark, not just a tree. Blades of grass, not just lawn. Pink petals, not flowers. Cracks lined with chickweed, not just pavement. Ice in a pitcher, not just a lemonade stand. A shattered cylinder of a pen, not just garbage in the gutter. A single line of spider silk, not just space between two trees.  Smile lines in a face after a passing hello, not just the shape of a human being. As I pedal, I can hear the slap of hands on a volleyball, and not just kids playing at recess, smell the hot perfume in the air, and not just see the wolf willow. 


Have a good weekend, friends, have a good week next week with all the sense and sensibility out there to be taken in!

🎧 This week’s podcast has more deflating tires and bonus sound from Auntie Shelagh and Siri














Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more