Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 49: take a bough, take a read, take a shot

 

Happy end of the week, friends! Once a week here I try to notice three things that made me feel happy or grateful, things I noticed I noticed, so, the shabby noticing equipment doesn’t completely rust over. This week's Three Things podcast is episode 49.

1. Take a bough 🌲

In Edmonton, the snow is with us again, or least, it’s pushed over to the side and next to us again. The snow falls and the work to remove it happens next. Remove it from sidewalks, streets, driveways, windshields, highways, bike lanes, staircases, remove it from rooftop, from bridge decks and skating rinks, alleys and driveways and bus stops and boots. Remove it from playing fields, too, so, in the case of the snow on the pitch at Commonwealth Stadium, the men’s soccer team could jump into it after scoring that winning goal against Mexico. Okay, it was last month, but ‘tis the season for reminiscing…

Where are we again? Right, here. We use brooms, shovels, scrapers, brushes, snowblowers, salt, plows, blades,  leaf blowers and our hands to put the snow in its place. We try to  push it out of our minds. It’s an enormous effort. 

There are a few exceptions, places where snow properly stays put. Toboggan hills. Cemetery headstones. Trees. The spruce trees are okay with letting the snow pile up. They seem made for the weight. We were driving back  from the airport last week after getting Janet to her plane home to California. Lack of moisture is a thing there. Here the new snow covered up the highway lane markings. It was like a giant liquid-paper brush had painted over all the hyphens, leaving the page blank again. Auntie Shelagh looked out the passenger seat window and said the spruce trees looked so nice. Frosted with snow, she said. Pretty scenery for us is the work of life for the trees, holding onto the snow, keeping it near, waiting for a drip release of water down to the roots when spring says the word.

They have something to teach us, these quiet, dignified beings with their white epaulets, how they stand at attention, shouldering every drop-of-water-in-four-months that they can during winter’s long reign.

2. Take a read 📰

Monday morning started with a thud as I opened the front door, hauled in and landed one and a half pounds of New York Times. We get the paper once a week. It’s a blizzard of news and opinion and ads across which the tiny typography machines leave their tracks. Like snow plows. The author Neil Postman has observed something along these lines—that reading requires the ability to look through the printed letters to the ideas and images they summon. You can’t afford to get tied up marveling at the font if you want to get through the chapter. I think that is why misspelling hurts. Typos are infractions against spelling, sure, but they’re crimes against reading. Typos break the spell of the printed word. Spelling mistakes draw attention to words as words and letters as letters, shutting the door on the world of ideas they are portals to.

When an injured word says, hey, over here, look at me, I’m misspelled, it forces a kind reader to stop the flow that reading requires and transfer attention to the mangled word. But it’s too late. Words, as pieces of infrastructure, are not equipped to do their best work when they are seen only for what they are—shapes in ink. When I worked in newspaper newsrooms, I admired  the gang of editors there in the flesh, people who knew how mischievous printed words could be, and whose job it was to proofread every one of them so that readers of the next day’s paper experienced windows, not windrows. I don’t know if the New York Times still gets edited that way, or if the computers now are just as good as editors on the rim were back then, but after cruising along the storylines in the paper, I sense those little word machines are not fully automated yet.

3. Take a shot 🟤   💨 ⚪👌

Christmastime has not come full circle until the crokinole board is set up downstairs. Crokinole is a tabletop shuffleboard-slash-curling game where players flick wooden playing pieces across a circular playing surface, trying to knock out the opponent’s pieces, or sink a disc in the centre hole, or hide behind a medieval spike wall that bristles around the inner of three rings. Everyone played crokinole when they were a kid. And that’s one way to play the game: nostalgically. You can play crokinole transactionally, too. Position your discs and remove your opponents’ markers like clockwork. Or you can play metaphorically, because crokinole presents the questions we all face: when to gamble, when to play it safe, when to put yourself out there, when to stay close to home. It can be  played socially, with spectators, like the high-drama games we played in the newsroom. You can play it sonically, letting resonate the flick, then the scrape of the disc sliding on its line, then the sweet silence through the pegs and then the  satisfying click-click of a double take out. Or scientifically, each shot, successful or not, demonstrating the laws of motion. But crokinole is best simply played, as a reminder of play, as a way back to play, as a way to aim for a simpler hour or two when the only serious business is play.

Editor's note: the pice at the top of the post is courtesy Shelagh Kubish.