Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 51: air drop, big save, grade memories


Happy end of the week, happy end of the year, friends! Once a week I try to unwrap three things that made me happy or grateful, and then say them out loud. Three Things podcast, episode 51.

1. Air drop 🪁 🇲🇽

When I was a boy, I had an Astronauts lunch kit. It was still the Cold War. Simpler times. Carrying that lunch kit to school as I balanced along windrows of snow left by the graders on 66th Street made me feel like I was on a top secret mission. The kit was metal, not plastic, and on each panel was a scene from the Apollo 11 story. The rocket blastoff…the lunar lander detaching from the service module…the touchdown on the moon…the splashdown with the red and white parachutes. The lunch kit came from Aladdin Industries Incorporated, Nashville, Tennessee. Inside the lid was a poem from the National Safety Council. One of the couplets:

There's really no need to play in the streets
Since playgrounds are better places to meet!

I know the lunch box so well because I’m looking at it right now. I still have it, or, at least, I have a replica that decades later cost me 100 clams. Getting it was one small backstep for boy-kind, but worth it to have a piece of the past at hand.


I fished the Astronauts lunch kit out of a closet down the hall last week after my friend Fitz texted a video from México. Fitz is fond of the pelicans. (Not the Zion Williamson Pelicans, even though Fitz does cheer for Duke. Whatever, Fitz.) Los pelícanos, the giant birds that feed on the fish off the beach get his attention. The pelicans are good visuals, “good viz” as we would say in the ITV newsroom where I worked with Fitz years ago. The way the pelicans hang like kites and then the way they plummet into the waves with enough force to send up splashes of surf. Like Steph Curry hitting three pointers now. Like the command module hitting the grainy water in the middle of the black-and-white Electrohome TV screen back then. Fitz’s pelícanos know there is a lot to feed on just below the surface.


2. Big save 🛑

Roll over Talus Dome, step aside giant shoes at Southgate Mall, I have a new favourite piece of public art. Somehow, I saw it for the first time only last week. If you’re a hockey fan of a certain vintage who, say, grew up in front of a TV in Canada in the 1970s, you will understand why I stood on 118th Avenue, in -28 degree Celsius weather last week, and stared up at the art installation on the light pole. It was Tretiak up there.


Vladislav Tretiak was the goaltender for the Russian Red Army hockey team who confounded Team Canadas for years. Like all great innovators in the game, he got to where the puck was going before it got there. We played road hockey on 67th Street back in those days. It was routine to announce which player you were. “I’m Dryden” or “I’m Tony O” or “I’m Tretiak,” the goalies would say. Oh, what a save, Tretiak! was a common part of the open air play-by-play. (There were Danny Gallivans among us, too.) We played hockey indoors, too, thanks to the Coleco company at 4000 St. Ambroise Street, Montreal, Quebec, and their wonderful table hockey games. Plastic hockey players sat on metal rods that you moved along grooves cut in the particle board ice. When you got good, your hands flew as you shuttled the players up and down and whipped the puck around for a shot on net. When a puck went in, it made a delicious gurgling sound in the plastic receptacle under the net.




Brucey, my buddy across the lane, once spray-painted crimson a team of his players. He was Red Army. Oh, what a save, Tretiak! That’s what the Tretiak art piece in Alberta Avenue looks like—a giant Coleco table hockey figure. I’m not sure it’s supposed to be Tretiak as much as a generic tribute to all goaltenders on the Avenue of Champions, but it’s unmistakably him, right down to his number 20, his cage mask, his KOHO stick and his crouched stance. It’s heartening to see Vladislav Tretiak watching over life on the street there across from the Paraiso Tropical supermarket and the Green Onion Cake Man store. I feel all over again that he’s not going to let anything slip past him.
All of this ice fishing to explain why I unfolded the ladder last week, climbed up to the rafters and hauled down my old Coleco table hockey game.


3. The grader good ⬇️

As I carried the table hockey box back into the house to set the game up, I saw in a wooden crate on the garage floor my childhood Tonka toys—a yellow grader, a yellow front end loader, a red dump truck. The toys were on their way back up to rafter storage after a bit of a lark a few days before. I had taken them down and put them into action, using them to clear snow on the front sidewalk like they were the real machines on 149th Street. Chantal from across the street came over to see why I was playing with my old toys.
“I have to come over, there are toys out,” she said. “Oh! My! God!”

My old Tonkas, the table hockey game, the lunch kit, these things have been with me for a long time. They have meaning beyond their functions. With an old crokinole board and a childhood stamp collection they are the only childhood things that haven’t been ground up by the retreating glacier of time, and some bad decisions about what I should toss out. What was a 57-year-old man doing on his knees on the front sidewalk, pushing his Tonkas back and forth, clearing away layer after layer of snow and ice right down to the sidewalk?
Toying with archeology, I suppose.

🥂 Happy New Year, Feliz año neuvo, everyone.


 

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