Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 55: pop music, book return, sunrise-sunset

 


This week we travel by pod to various places, including Bing’s corner store in 1971, Beale Street in Memphis last week, the 1980s, the Jasper Place Library and the intersection of 170 St. and 95 Ave. in Edmonton. Here’s Three Things, episode 55, baby!


1. Pop music


They Don’t Know is irresistible. The melody, the lyrics, the bridge and the hook and Kirsty MacColl’s voice and Tracy Ullmann who made it a hit back in a special place called the 1980s. The song shone then and it still shines. A bit of shine helps the heart in the fifth wave of the pandemic in the freeze-thaw that is this January in the grey-brown that is this Edmonton. Even if you don’t know the song, you know the song. Against all advice from the chorus of them who don’t know, the girl defends her boyfriend, who is a very down-to-earth version of her ideal love.



A star in the night sky is the star as it was light years ago. Same thing with a song. When They Don’t Know came into the musical universe, it wasn’t with a big bang as much as a “pop” and that “pop” travelled through time and it hit me and Auntie Shelagh—that’s why it’s a hit, right?—as we sat in the car at a red light at 170th Street and 95th Avenue. The people in the van next to us looked over but wouldn’t have known why the driver and the passenger they were looking at—each maybe in their mid to late 50s, the woman probably a few years younger than the man, both trying to dance while seat-belted—they wouldn’t have known why this couple waited for and then belted out what, if the people in the van could read lips, was the lyric "ba-a-by" just before the traffic light turned green and the pair resumed their more responsible roles of driver and passenger. The two temporary teenagers in the car might have been just as bewildered by time having telescoped for exactly two minutes and 59 seconds.



2. Book return

It’s still a thrill to go online, search the Edmonton Public Library’s collection, keystroke in L-e-s-s-i-n-g, locate the novel I’m looking for, walk to the Jasper Place branch, find it in its niche, pause like I’m quietly paying respects there in the stacks, remove it and then walk home with it, read it, actually finish it in a week, and, then, to complete the borrowed book’s life cycle, take it back again.

Thunk.

That was the sound at the outdoor book drop as Briefing For A Descent Into Hell was consigned to the library vault. I did next what I always do. I peered into the slot. What does it look like in there? Is the spine okay? Where did the book go? Is there a pile of books? I couldn’t see inside, of course, which is as it should be. The inside of a library is somewhere else.

The vital part of a library is in its users who treat the book exactly like it isn’t theirs, because it isn’t, because it’s a trust, which means you somehow withstand the temptation to underline the beautiful sentences and write in the margins, you avoid leaving graffiti for the next reader—all of which makes you not just a reader but a kind of citizen-reader content to leave the presence of an absence instead of proof you were there.



3. Sunrise, sunset

I ushered myself to my seat at the dining room table with a morning coffee, carefully, like a man in a dark theatre. On cue, Auntie Shelagh delivered her lines as she opened the living room drapes.

“Sunrise!” she said. “Glenn, it’s beautiful.”

True enough, there it was, slowly making its way back north—the Edmonton sunrise. The colours looked like they did 15 minutes into a good jawbreaker from Bing’s corner store in 1971. The red, pink, purple and blue looked like a bruise, too. Note to self: I start the day new, and a bit bruised. We all do, maybe. Roughed up, scuffed up by the hardness of things. A sunrise like Tuesday morning’s was a good reminder of the sky we all spend time under. All of which is half the item.

The other half is how on Tuesday evening Auntie Shelagh’s niece Janet sent us a glorious pic of her view of the Mississippi in Memphis at sunset from the observation deck of something called the Bass Pro Shop pyramid. In the pic, the giant, illuminated lower-case m is the de Soto arch bridge. The blend of black, violet, blue, green, orange and red is the watercolour sunset.

Janet also sent a short video of the blues club she was in, the lights on the stage just as dramatic as the scene outside. Maybe even better with the gleam of a saxophone and a trumpet.

“I’m on Beale Street in Memphis listening to live blues. Thought of you two!

Xoxo
,” she messaged.

I don’t know much about the blues, I want to know more about the blues, I think in life there is happiness and there is sadness and there is a kind of rebuilt happiness on the other side of sadness and I’m guessing that’s where the blues will find me, if they see the right light in me. I do know it’s heartening to be thought of and then contacted out of the black and blue.

Listen here:

          





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