Three Things from Edmonton podcast - episode 62: jars, curling, Canadas

 


It's the end of the week as we know it, friends. Here is this week's Three Things podcast.

1. Jars

Apparently, I am also from Chortkiv in western Ukraine, and not just Delwood in northeast Edmonton. Thanks to my mother’s record-keeping, I can trace my family back four generations on her side to the small city of 30,000 people, which is where my great-great grandparents Maria and Dmytro lived and where their son Yosyp was born. It’s close, 100 kilometres or so, from a recent Russian missile strike. I don’t know if I still have relatives there. I have never visited or done an ancestry search. For me, the old country is St. Basil’s Ukrainian Cultural Centre on 109th Street.



The siege on Ukraine has brought back flashes from my youth. Ukrainian dancing ribbons for my sisters’ hair. Perogies and cabbage rolls pronounced “pedaheh” and “holopchi.” Borscht made deluxe with spare ribs. The sweet smell of hot wax for Easter pysanky. A blue-covered book on conversational Ukrainian by Yar Slavutych next to a Reader’s Digest trilogy of classics in the living room. And chicken in jars brought up from the cellar at the farm—those jars of farm-butchered chicken that emptied with slurp and a suck sound as the limbs bounced in jelly on the plate.

I hadn’t replayed that last earthy scene for 50 years, but it came back in a news article about the city of Chortkiv. I had asked my mom for the family tree information she kept in her Bible, copied Chortkiv into my computer search bar and found the story of a woman from Santa Clara, California, who has gone back to Chortkiv, war or not, to be with her daughter and grandson. The women there help the soldiers by sending jars of pickled pork to the front lines, the story said. I know those jars. They remain preserved in me.




2. Curling

It was years ago. Auntie Shelagh had had enough of me leaning over in movie theatres, asking her to clarify a piece of plot or repeat a bit of misheard dialogue or confirm a character as good or evil. It was typically during a James Bond film that I would need this real-time viewer’s assistance. Memorably, she told me to just watch the screen, look at the shapes and colours and just enjoy. I took her advice and have not asked for her interpretation nor understood a Bond movie since. But it works.

The shapes-and-colours strategy also works for me when watching the event at the other end of the audio-visual spectrum from 007. I speak, of course, of curling. I am Canadian. I do not understand curling. There, I said it. I catch as much of the sport on TV as I can, never miss the Scotties and never miss watching the Brier. Curling is like highly skilled darts crossed with billiards crossed with demolition derby crossed with walking home on an icy sidewalk, yelling. Curling is slow TV. It’s like watching the dye rise on an at-home Covid test that comes back negative. I am Canadian, I love watching curling. For the ice and the rings and the growl of the red and yellow rocks as they curve and spin like a narrative arc down the sheet.

Preferred parking, Crestwood Curling Club

Watch a curling broadcast sometime. If you know nothing when you start, you won’t know any more when it’s done. The announcers and players are not there to explain the game to the likes of me as much as revel in the ability to freely speak their mother and father tongue, picked up in curling clubs across the country, across the winters, across the generations.



3. Canadas

There’s nothing like returning Canadas over Edmonton in March. Not because of any virtuosity in their song, mind you. The honks are throaty and raspy with a hint of exasperation. Whinging more than singing. And they’re not geese that are easy to get to know and like, the way they walk around wearing their balaclavas. Their audio and video aside, they are warmly welcomed back at this time of year. They’re like the first notes of an overture that send a ripple through the bodies in the darkened theatre seats. The curtain is about to open on a new season. They’re a reminder of the adventure of international travel. And they bring a shared reality. My friend Brian messaged me last week just to say the geese, heading north, had just cleared Hazeldean without incident. I haven’t yet seen or heard them, but I don’t have to to admire their navigational prowess, and their loyalty.


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