Three Things from Edmonton - Episode 50: sardines, ribs, end credits

This week's Three Things podcast is episode 50. This week's three things that made me happy or grateful are: 

1. Sardines

This year for Christmas, our eldest son, Alex, is getting sardines. I found them with the other candy at the checkout till at the Italian Centre Shop on 170th Street. They are milk chocolate sardines.

Before he died, my grandfather, for whom Alex is named, put down an account of his life in 10 pages of handwritten, blue ink. The story starts in October 1914 in a village in the partitioned territory of eastern Europe. My grandfather recalls how, as a six-and-a-half year old boy, he overheard the men talking as their ordinary lives were being pulverized by the machinery of war. He writes: “We were ordered by government to prepare to leave our homes, bake bread and other food, be ready when order comes to go. Men talking between themselves. What to do?  Leave and go, but where? Born here, grown up, that is our home.”  This is a terrifying scene. I admire my grandfather’s decision to capture the First World War as it presented itself to the eyes and ears of a young boy. I can see the barn floor and the men’s boots and their knees. I can hear their voices above—angry, bewildered, frightened, defiant.

There is another scene where my grandfather, now 20 years old, talks on a telephone for the first time as he tries to book passage on the Hellig Olav from Danzig to Halifax. Four men from home had each loaned him $50 for the ticket, which freed him from the specter of military conscription. Those men apparently saw more poet than private in 20 year old Aleksy Gajczuk who arrived at Pier 21 in 1928 and immediately spent $7 on, and these are his words, “cookies, sardines and other food.” Cookies, he doesn’t say what kind. Other food is left at other food. But the sardines are sardines, not just fish. I love that detail. I didn’t know enough to ever ask him why he had packaged the sardines whole in his written words. 40 years and more on now, those sardines are still preserved in ink and also, as I learned while shopping in west Edmonton last week, preserved, somehow, in, of all things, chocolate.

2. Ribs

Describing a fall off a bicycle as a wipeout has never really worked. Obliteration is closer to the mark. That’s a word that better conveys the feeling of dread when it’s suddenly too late, and there is no going back, when the knowledge of assured, imminent destruction has erased the joy and freedom of riding a bicycle. There’s one description even better than obliteration.  It’s a term I first heard in the kitchen of our friends Wendy and John many years ago. John’s parents were there helping prepare a bird for dinner, a chicken, maybe a turkey, and one of them in a musical Irish accent that belied the violence of what was described, asked for some help tearing it asunder. Tear asunder. To forcefully separate into two or more parts. Which nailed what it felt like a few weeks ago when my bicycle and I hit a ridge of ice near the Groat Bridge and split apart. The bike lay with its handlebars twisted backwards. I was on the icy concrete, fighting for full lungs of air, knowing instinctively that I was an injured and vulnerable animal. I crawled out of the path of any cars. I got home, had a scotch and concluded that even though the pain felt like a knife in my side, my ribs had held. They did not break. If they were broken, you would know, said Auntie Shelagh, putting the bottle back.

By last week, the ribs were good enough to get back on the bike, frame to frame again, and let me go for a slow ride through the new snow. Is there a word that brings all of this home? The way the body heals…how the bicycle rider and the bicycle come back together…the way the mind stages scenes from the past…and the way that turkey in the kitchen in Highlands is in words re-membered? That is the word that collects it all, yes. Remembered.

3. End credits

This holiday run-up has been full of movies for us. On the TV downstairs, Home Alone and Home Alone 2, Dash & Lily, A Very Murray Christmas, Over Christmas and Love Actually. (The scene where the Alan Rickman character is trying to quickly and furtively purchase a necklace from the clerk played by Rowan Atkinson, how much fun would it be to be those talents playing off each other, or to be on the set watching and recording it?)

On the big screen, we watched the latest versions of Romeo and Juliet in West Side Story and Lady Gaga as a kind of Lady Macbeth in House of Gucci.  Auntie Shelagh and I typically stay for the credits. It was a  quiet thrill to see suspended on the screen the letters that spelled  S-T-E-P-H-E-N S-O-N-D-H-E-I-M. It’s still remarkable to see the names of everyone it takes to make a movie. And all the  job titles: focus puller, clapper loader, storyboard artist, the chargehand wood machinist, the stunt doubles, the caterers, the accountants, the Foley mixer, the company that supplied the cherry pickers, the soundtrack songs, each of which itself is a nest of credits—composer, performers, rights holders. In the five minutes of credits for Love Actually are actually the names of 17 plasterers and, of course, two plasterers’ labourers. If you’ve ever forced yourself to look at a photograph for five minutes straight, you know that you start to see other things about it, details you miss in a glance, maybe you start to see through the photo into parts of yourself. Same thing watching credits scroll by as the resolution to do a better job keeping track of those who deserve my thanks for helping me notice what I think I notice comes into focus.

🎄Happy holidays, Merry Christmas. Peace to all.