Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 64: help from above, here and there, help from below

The idea with the Three Things podcast is to isolate three things from my little life that delivered some happiness or gratitude each week. Here is episode 64:

                                            


1. Help from above

It was a memorable week for going off script, to say the least. In a speech to NATO allies, The U.S. President said, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” of the Russian dictator Putin. White House staff tried to walk back that shot across the bow. During the Academy Awards broadcast, the actor Will Smith assaulted the comedian Chris Rock with a shot across the brow. The Oscars decided not to walk Smith out the back. Then there was the bit of ad lib provided by the University of Arkansas cheerleading team and the backboard during the men’s game between the Razorbacks and the Duke Blue Devils.


Let me draw this up.
March Madness is the year-end American college basketball tournament, of course. It can label itself March madness because it pits teams of supremely talented but still mistake-prone undergraduate student athletes against each other in arenas crammed with screaming fans and coursing with live, broadcast media and the advertising and wagered money that crackles on its waves. Unexpected plays are so predictable in this atmosphere that their predictability can be branded. At some level this must register. How else to explain the thrill when something truly unexpected comes to pass?


Arkansas is down 45-35. A Razorback puts up a shot. It hits the rim, the ball bounces up...and doesn’t come down. For a split second, my senses deliver a world where gravity is not a thing. Suddenly, I am worldless. What has happened is the ball has come to rest on the narrow ridge on the top of the backboard. And there it sits. Like the mischief emoji. Until, unexpectedly, an Arkansas cheerleader and teammate rise to the occasion. He lifts her slowly up, up, up until she can flick the ball free. Six, six-and-a-half and seven foot tall basketball demigods stare up in wonder at this new 10-foot-tall creature that, apparently, just wants the contest below to continue, according to the remarkable as the players down there are given to know it.


2. Here and there

Like birth and death, airports are all about arrivals and departures and the approximate times for each. Families and friends crane their necks for the first look at families and friends coming back to earth. Passengers who have said farewell walk ahead alone, trust to others their baggage, present their records to screeners in the limbo of security and make their way alone down passageways to a plane full of strangers, for liftoff. I feel a kinship to these fellow travellers, these pilgrims whose paths intersect with mine as we leave. Furtively, I study them. What are they wearing? What do they sound like? Where are they going? What is their story?


None of this is the item. We haven’t ventured back onto a plane. I want only to try to explain why I am drawn to airports and why I linger in them and why I try, while in an airport, aware of all the surveillance watching me, to notice right back. Like the day last week Auntie Shelagh and I dropped off Mr. and Mrs. Jr2 at Edmonton International. In the terminal, we kept passing people wearing yellow t-shirts printed with Cyrillic letters. We said our goodbyes and meandered curiously down to arrivals where a throng of people and an arc of news cameras were waiting for passengers from a Warsaw flight carrying Ukrainians from the war. Small groups trickled out from an improvised medical testing area. When they did, hauling their suitcases, cheers went up. Like some kinds of deaths and some kinds of births, airports are all about endings and beginnings.



3. Help from below

“Oh, hello, little tree,” I said as I trudged up the slope of the MacKinnon Ravine to where the seedling we had transplanted last year was, yes, like a periscope, peering out of what’s left of the tired snow. It had survived, taken root, looked strong, was still green. I realized at that moment how much I had riding on the little evergreen.

Evergreen content refers to those stories that have a long shelf life. Like the jarred chicken at my great-grandparents’ farm. Evergreen content is immune to the decay of attention over time. Sports, news headlines, celebrity gossip, today’s weather—all that stuff that’s here today and gone later today is not evergreen. Stories of what went wrong and why, stirring quotations, how-to guides, these are the types of categories of content that remain fresh. The longer I looked at that little seedling, the less it looked like an exclamation mark and more a question mark of spring. It interrogated me, and the subject was evergreen-ness—mine, not its.

Here’s the challenge: as I observe the spring, its honkings, lightenings, drippings, flowings, buddings, bloomings and birthings, as linear, mortal me witnesses the circle of nature’s immortality from a patch of sunny slope in the MacKinnon Ravine in Edmonton, what is my reply? How do I do the work of renewal? How frequently? What are my tools? What am I pushing up against? How do I get to the evergreen I can?

As I awaited answers to those questions, I thanked the little tree for the pointers, and headed back up the hill. Thanks, friends for being there.

Three Things from Edmonton, episode 64.





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