Three Things from Edmonton - Episode 46: minding the gap, talking the talk, reading the room


Here, once a week about this time, and because the week's ending is also a kind of beginning, I try to notice what I noticed from my little life that made me happy or grateful and, from the noticing, make the Three Things podcast.

1. Minding the gap 📡 👼

For the most part, I’m good with working remotely. It’s curious, though, how we use the two words “connected” and “remote” to describe distance communication in the pandemic. “Connected” and “remote,” are more opposites than alikes. Connected means “with” and remote means “apart,” kinda, right?  That pair of states of being does capture nicely a piece of the human condition. We are at the same time apart and with. I am indicted every time Auntie Shelagh says something like, okay, did you hear anything that I just said? which is not frequent but frequent enough.

The truth about us is probably that we connect because we are remote. We are forced to communicate not just to get our ideas across but because, not being angels, we can’t just get our ideas across. Not being telepathic, we face an “across” across which our ideas must go. Sometimes that “across” is across the table and sometimes it’s across the world, but it’s still an invisible pit into which intentions and meanings fall and pile up.  What we all are afflicted by is a failure to communicate, and it’s this that leads us to build with words and pictures and music and podcasts. When they splinter and crack and break down, when they don’t do the work we wanted them to do, it should come as no surprise. The matter is with them because they come from us and what comes from us—who are matter—is what decays. The matter is us. Words perish because we perish. Like our bones, words crack. Our receiving equipment will not stay in place.

Connecting remotely has become commonplace during the pandemic. It has made me more efficient and certainly kept me healthier. It has brought home the strange and humbling truth of the distance between us, however close we are, and the marvel of the bridges that present the only two choices: burn or build.



2. Talking the talk ☕ 💬

Work, I can do online, but coffee is still hard to share in a Google hangout.

Nobody calls it a coffee house just because coffee is consumed there. A coffee house is a public place. It brings people together. It’s got newspapers. Maybe there is debate in the air. Or the hum of conversation from which only a word or two emerges intelligibly, and then returns to the sonic blend. A coffee house is where people don’t as much go for coffee as stop for coffee. At least, that’s how I imagine coffee houses—something more than drive-thru filling stations.


My favourite local coffee gathering is called Coffee Outside. It’s not a building, but it is standing, and it has been built. By the Edmonton bicycle riders and active transportation types who have, as of last week, gathered in a park every Friday morning, in all seasons and weathers, for seven years now. To share stories of the road, to share the morning, to stop and, over coffee, talk. What started as a virtual community of strangers on social media got real, and has, so far, stayed that way. Meeting in person makes sense for people who ride bicycles, when you think about it.


A bicycle puts your body out there in traffic. In the more mystical moments, it’s just me out there, my bicycle having become an extension of my body—my arms and hands extended into handlebars and tires, my legs and feet having grown cranks and pedals, my mouth now with a steel ring of teeth. For folks with that sensibility, pedal strokes point beyond keystrokes, and so we have come together in person. And added coffee. And the warm buzz you get in good coffee houses.

3. Reading the room 👻 🔖

I’m finishing up Out on a Limb, the selected writing of Andrew Sullivan. It’s a 519-pager. Just under 2.2 pounds. Sullivan is next week’s author up for discussion in an online book club that I’m in. Academics, podcasters, community organizers, citizens across the political spectrum in the networks of my Oklahoma friend David and his friend Josh, all of whom are in the United States sans moi, all interested in making the political discussion out there more civil. Not sure what a Canadian up north knows about de-polarizing things at this time of year, but, it’s a good group of people to be connected to.


It’s good to read, too. My TV time is taking a hit.Last Sunday, the tube didn’t even get switched on. No ghostly images flickering on the set downstairs. Instead, a kind of seance upstairs. That’s what reading at the dining room table can be—a kind of summoning to life of authors from the republic of dead letters now embalmed in print.  Sullivan cites Montaigne on faith on p. 249 and I hear Arendt citing Lessing on truth from last month’s reading. It’s uncanny. The four of them are briefly with me at the table. I can’t make them stay. It’s back to just me quickly enough. But for a sublime second or two, I heard the inaudible voices of the printed word, remotely.



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