Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 63: eyes and ears, arms and legs, hands and feet

It's the end of another week of staggering carnage in the greater world and of small happinesses and gratitudes in my little one. Here's the Three Things podcast, episode 63.

1. Eyes and ears

March madness is on bloody and terrifying display in Ukraine. In that arena are two colleagues, doing work for good. I admire them both. Tim, who is a videographer, is on professional assignment for the national news. Jerry, who was a reporter, is on a personal mission. Both are doing what journalists do, which is to use the least private of the human senses—sight and sound—to convey something that is out there, an objective world. “This is such an important story to tell,” Tim said in a message. “So important to hear the voices from the people here. It’s heartbreaking.” For his part, Jerry booked three weeks off work and headed 8,000 km for the Ukraine border. “I’m really here just to grow and learn as a person in no official capacity,” he said, adding that that has meant “carrying luggage, helping to shuttle folks in my rental or move supplies. I’m not saving lives although I did manage to help wrangle a wayward puppy who bolted.” I asked Jerry what he was seeing. “I see disbelief in the eyes of everyone,” he said.

Jerry and Tim are not in a war zone to analyze the invasion at an abstract geopolitical level. They are not there playing out scenarios for how weaponry might be used or to establish a timeline for sanctions to make themselves felt. Nor have they followed other voices and retreated into darkness.

In the words of the poet, they’ve gone back to the world, with their video and audio equipment intact, to tell us about the people they see and hear there, so that they are as real as the people hauling relief supplies to the Polish Hall 8,000 kilometres back the other way.

2. Arms and legs

The last time I was on my bike I technically wasn’t. It was lying twisted next to me, two circles and two triangles in a geometry of confusion. I was in worse shape. Trying to breathe. Wondering if ribs were broken. Staring up into the dark December sky above the path down to Groat Road. We had come apart, my bike and I, after hitting a ridge of ice. I remember thinking I am getting too old for this view of the stars from the asphalt. I never got the nerve to get back out on my bike this winter. The ice seemed to be everywhere like it hadn’t ever before.

But the long, single note of winter has broken. The streets are bare and the gutters now sparkle with the sound of melted snow in motion. Little rapids of forgiveness. There is bliss in registering spring’s sensory scramble from my saddle. I got back on my bike last week, warily. Now that the four year olds on their balance bikes are on the streets, it’s safe for me, I figure. They’re learning what I can’t forget, which is how to ride a bike. Not just how to balance and steer, not just how to labor below the bar and feel free above, not just how to hit a puddle and leave a track behind—all of this, yes, but also the reason why we never forget how to ride. It would be just as easy to forget your own arms and legs. Those little arms that grow handlebars and those little legs that grow cranks and pedals in the act of tooling around on a bicycle in the forever spring.

3. Hands and feet

The number 29, for someone growing up in northeast Edmonton in the 1970s, meant two things, both perfect. The first was Canadiens goaltender Ken Dryden. The other was the hand with three fives and a jack whose suit matches the five that’s cut for nobs. I climbed into cribbage early. I watched my dad and grandfather play at the kitchen table in the house on 85th Street. They taught me how to count. Crib became more of a habit over games with the Franciscan friars at the old church. They taught me that in soundly giving it to your opponent, you receive. Years ago, Auntie Shelagh and I won a big Knights of Columbus crib tournament in St. Albert. We learned that night that there is a crib circuit in these parts, quasi-pro players who travel to play, as far south as Reno. These cribbage devotees carried their enamel pegs in jewelled cases. They counted your hand as you played your second card. Shelagh’s slow play and honest questions—"if I have two of kind and cards next to them in a run and some of them add up to 15, that’s good, right?"—twisted them out of shape. They would look at me. I would look back and shrug a well-you’re-down-by-30-after-four-hands-so-don’t-look-at-me-she’s-a-natural shrug.

All of this came back as Auntie Shelagh and I walked across the James Gibbons School field last week, almost home with our groceries. The snow was crusty and deep. She wore a matchstick-red toque. She broke through with every step—like an expert pegger.