Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 66: bubbles, puddles, cubby holes

 

Here are three little things that found their way back in, leaving behind either some happiness or gratitude. Three Things from Edmonton, episode 66:

1. Bubbles

Bubbles…it’s a fun word to say, bubbles…bubbles stop me as they go by. Trains, too, I will stop to watch a freight train pass in any season. Geese overhead this time of year, they will carry my attention away. And polite children firing bubbles at me on a cold spring day, they stop me, and take me back—and aback.

Jasper out of Place

The pair, a sister and her older brother, I guessed, stood, parka hoods over their heads, next to each on their family’s front lawn last week. At his side the boy held a plastic toy bubble gun, a delightful version of a Gatling gun. As I walked by he cranked the handle a couple of turns, looked at the barrel when nothing emerged, shook the weapon to agitate the dish soap in the chamber, earnestly fired again, and, this time, watched bubbles spit out of the barrel and float away fragile in the wind. I was close enough and at the right angle to see some of the bubbles pop with a splashes of iridescence. One bubble drifted right at me.

When I was a boy, spring was the season for schoolyard games of marbles. We carried them in purple Crown Royal whisky bags hemmed with gold. Peewees, creamies, cat’s eyes, steelies, boulders, crystals and jumbos—a solar system of glass marbles that came in different sizes, colours and values. Two boulders to a crystal, two crystals or four boulders to a jumbo. The steelies were worth what you were willing to put down against them. (We were early relativists.) Unless you had stamped the pot “funsies,” the game, and the pot, went to the player who flicked in the final marble. That was playing for “keepsies.”

Ancestral marble grounds, St. Francis of Assisi 

The brother and sister could have no access to the swirl of memories in the crystal bubble that came my way. They couldn’t dream that while I was walking past them right then I was also, way back then, applying the tip of my right thumbnail into the first joint on the inside of my index finger to form a launcher, crouching down perpendicular to my line, looking at the pot, looking back at my fingers, then back at the pot, then back at the crystal marble, then putting it in motion into the world. All of this on a sidewalk on 89 Avenue that day, and on the packed-dry face of a north-end schoolyard 50 orbits of the Earth around the sun ago.

2. Puddles

Pedalling across the 142 Street bridge above the MacKinnon Ravine on a sunny day, with the past somehow just ahead, is an exercise in prepositions. Prepositions are words well known to bicycle riders. They’re the little words that do the big work of indicating direction, location, place and time—the kinds of things that consume us. If you’re pedalling single track over the logs and among the spruce trees by the Terwillegar footbridge, you are in the debt of prepositions. Same goes for cycling down the Oliverbahn bike lane toward downtown Edmonton to buy pencils at Stylus. It was on the ravine bridge last week that prepositions, those workaday words typically content to do their job quietly, leaving the acclaim for the shiny adjectives and strong verbs, made their presence felt. One particular preposition, in fact—the mysterious "into." I was approaching the end of the bridge where the water incident had happened.

Flashback: a couple of years ago at that exact spot a passing automobilist hit a stormwater-filled pothole and soaked me. I wore most of the water. I swallowed the rest of it.

This time the memory of being drenched by the passing automobile was more vivid. I didn’t recall it as much as pedal right back into it. For an instant, the wall between past and present was very liquid. I was here and I was there and then I was back here. It’s hard to say where we would be without prepositions. It’s hard enough to say where we ever are with them.

3. Cubby holes

Are cubby holes just an Edmonton thing? Cubby holes are the square spaces cut into chain link fences around some Edmonton schoolyards. We had one at St. Francis of Assisi school in the north end back in the old days. I notice the cubby hole in the Oliver School yard fence when I pedal by on 103 Avenue these days. On reddit there’s a what-is-this-thing? thread devoted to the mystery of the Edmonton cubby hole. Some redditers are pretty sure the hole is meant to serve as an escape route for wildlife caught in the schoolyard. Or for firefighters to haul hoses and other equipment through. My theory is that cubby holes are designed to allow elementary school students out, but, slowly, consciously, mechanically out, so they don’t run into automobile traffic.

The truth about cubby holes in fences lies somewhere else, though. A cubby hole is a gate, it’s a passageway, it’s a portal through which there becomes here. It’s an edge, a fringe, a hem, a margin. It introduced elementary school students who climbed through it, some carrying their Macmillan Spellers, some weighed down with whisky bags of marbles, to the thrill of moving across, moving through a border.

I went to fly a kite one evening last week in the field behind James Gibbons School near our house. Walking back home, I saw a cubby hole in the fence on 152 Street. I bent my six-foot-three-inch frame through the aperture and realized cubby holes were my first real-world lesson in prepositions.

Three Things, episode 66.