Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 75: readings, tattoos, introducing...

 

Happy end of the week, friends. To keep the noticing equipment from disintegrating, here are three things I noticed I noticed that made me feel happy or grateful. (Just a little longer today. It takes Arendt awhile to get to the point.)

Episode 75:

                             

1. Taking readings 

Monday morning’s first stop, even before the bathroom, even before coffee, was the mailbox.

The New York Times Sunday edition is delivered overnight. One pound of news. I scanned the headlines. In Ukraine, an ‘Endless Caravan of Death’...How Gun Makers Harness Fear to Supercharge Sales... A Key Hurdle for Prosecutors: Proving What Trump Believed. I am slightly consoled by the mere organization of the newspaper—all this havoc made to fit in boxes, all the power and greed’s copy neatly standing in perfect towers of print, left and right justified. If the message were the medium, a newspaper would be chaos, and not the layout marvel that it is. 

Still, I didn’t have the heart to dig in. Instead, I walked out to the container gardens in the backyard. We have two big containers. The day the idea was planted. I was talking to Valerie in the frozen goods aisle at Andy’s IGA, and she was rhapsodizing about her backyard container bumper crops. Your own veggies, she said. Sold, I said. We devote one box to transplants—tomatoes, cukes, beans. And the other is seed-planted: onions, beets, carrots, lettuce, radishes. The growing season in Edmonton is short. 140 days. And, so, the sight now of the rows of green poking through the soil is big news. 

Not that kind of news. Not the news that chronicles the one-off events, the outliers, the accidents. An emerging garden is just about as old and predictable and expected as it gets.  A purple beet grows from a beet seed. This is not the news. This is the story of a seed finding good soil. This is Demeter finding Persephone. Our container garden is not the news. It’s the olds—all these rows fit to plant. And to weed. A growing garden needs editing. Don’t get seduced by the foreign flora. Uproot the thistles that pop up like cliches. Pull out the annoying chickweed that spreads like adjectives. 

2. Game in the skin 

They’re my only tattoos, or, maybe, they are less tattoos than kinds of birthmarks. If I’m fortunate, they surface once a year, at this time of year, when I have begun to put in enough time outside on my bicycle for the sun to tan the portion of skin on the backs of my hands not covered by bike gloves. The egg-shaped tan marks appear slowly. To see them come to light takes me away. 

Back to the great bicycle tours in the Rockies and my gloves with the leather palms, the blue, white and red crocheted tops, and the oval patches of skin left exposed for the sun to bronze. And back farther to the experiments we would conduct as kids growing up in the Cold War reading books about spies and how to write in code. We would dip a toothpick into a bowl of freshly squeezed lemon juice and use it as a stylus to write on a blank piece of white paper a message that materialized when placed under the glowing broiler element in the oven in the kitchen. The process was, for a nine-year-old, the height of danger and intrigue. It was my introduction to the power of the slow reveal of the word. 

A trace of that excitement returns when I consider my hands and the darkening glows of skin visible through the bicycle glove windows. For me, these marks are signs that I am still related to or a later edition of the bicycle rider stamped by the sun in the passes. I’m still turning the cranks. The tan marks are a sign I can still read some kinship, however illegible, to the boy with the Codes and Code Writing Handbook from the Arrow Book Club. 
They’re my only two tattoos, or less tattoos than kinds of birthmarks. 

Or rebirthmarks. 

3.  Introducing… 

A little fellow I will get to know better has already had a uniquely Edmonton start to life. He was born last week, tipping the Toledos at eight pounds, three ounces. His grandmother, without missing a beat, said, “8-3, 83, Hemsky,” summoning the memory of Aleš Hemsky, the skilled winger who wore that number for the Oilers back in the early 2000s, when her own boys were, what, 10 and 8? 

My friend Hogey recalls that Hemsky was underrated for his toughness. This little fellow I speak of is tough, too. He had a bit of a battle being born, and needed a  cooldown to get his system settled before being warmed up again slowly. Kinda like the way winter in Edmonton gives way to summer in June. Switching metaphors from local meteorology to zoology, this little fellow is already a bit of a canny one, avoiding a few traps, leaving a few unmistakable messages behind—a scrapper, a little coyote who goes by the name Cohen Joseph Kubish. The little title-giver has made a mom and dad out of Kendra and Alex, an aunt and uncle out of Aleasha and Mikey, a Gran Fondo out of me and a grandma—spell it with an Irish twist, g-r-a-m-m-a-g-h—out of S-h-e-l-a-g-h. (Thank you Aimée for being a woman of letters and seeing that).  

I’m thankful for the care the little fella got at Grey Nuns Hospital. And grateful that we got to see him open his eyes via BabyFaceTime on what for him is a new world. Imagine that. It’s enough to get me reaching for the strong stuff, the 100 proof distillation of things.

“The life span of man running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.” 

That’s Hannah Arendt on the power of the real news in the human condition. Here’s to all beginners, young and old. Thanks for being out there, friends. Take care. 

Three Things podcast, episode 75: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../three.../id1550538856... [6:31] features the sound of Auntie Shelagh reading Arendt, and that play where Hemsky scored after whoever from the Dallas Stars didn’t score on the empty net. Original music is by Brendan McGrath. End bells are courtesy the Hephaistos of Edmonton, Slavo Cech.