Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 86: this time of year, tracks, sky

Happy end of the week, y'all! From Edmonton, where August’s average high of 26.5 degrees C, call it 80 degrees Fahrenheit, was the second warmest since 1880 (thanks, Chris), here are three things that made for some happiness or gratitude this week.

                         

1. This time of year 

There’s a lot going on. Young people are going back to school. Canadas are in test flight mode. Tomatoes and cucumbers are coming off the vines as gardens descend into ruin. The sun sets before midnight. It is a letting-go time. It’s a tuning-in time. Every pitch and every swing matter in baseball. U.S. Open tennis is on its two-week off-Broadway run under the lights.

(I would cancel my sports cable channels if it wasn’t for live sports. That’s not quite true. When Ken and Ivanka on Sportsnet are on their game, they are worth extra bucks a month. But the big voices from the big desks, the swirling music and the hit-me-in-the-face graphics, the betting lines presented as content, and then highlight after unbelievable highlight that prove nothing is more predictable than a homerun—all of that is losing its shine for me. Live sports is different. No one knows what is going to happen next. The play is in the hands of the players, not the editors.)

My favourite bit of live television from the U.S. Open is the shot of the giant Rolex watch display board behind the players. It has clock hands that show the time of day there at the stadium in Queens, New York. If the time is exactly two hours later than it is as Shelagh and I watch from the basement of our little house in Edmonton, the time is a silent confirmation that we are watching another part of the world—right now. That’s a bracing feeling. For me, seeing the time there and then subtracting two to match the time here adds up to a fleeting and delightful sense that I am actually alive and, in that second, part of the bigger world of people. Not people who once were alive or people who could have been or will one day be alive, but people who are alive now at, say,  11:34 pm Eastern Daylight Time, 9:34 Mountain. It’s like looking over in the dark at other people in a theatre.

2. Tracks 

There is a deep kinship between music and trains. The bars on a staff of music are ties on a railway line, right? The linked notes that move rhythmically over them carry freight, some of it explosive. Music has conductors, so do passenger trains. I have been back under the spell of trains and train songs since reading the feature on Willie Nelson by Jody Rosen in the New York Times Magazine. The piece doesn’t mention trains per se but it does point out something called tempo rubato, which is Willie’s song singing signature. Rubato, I have learned, is the method of playing or singing behind or ahead of the beat, and then returning home to a feeling of balance. Rubato is not common in music that sounds like elaborate clockwork, like Bach. It’s more Luckenbach.

In 1971, Steve Goodman gifted this part of the world a romantic train song called City of New Orleans, which tells the nostalgic story of the trip from Chicago to New Orleans on the Illinois Central. Arlo Guthrie made the song famous. It’s been widely covered. How do you make something old and familiar remarkable again? Willie Nelson brought his rubato to the challenge, and the monumental result is what you can hear in the song recorded live by The Highwayman. The way Willie compacts the  “of New Orleans” phrase, the way he stretches out “three conductors” and extends the rusted automobile “graveyards” accomplish what rubato is about—the injection of suspense into a forward-driving beat. It’s an artistic tensioning and releasing that has nothing to do with the story of the actual words, but with how the words are sung as the singer plays with time while the listeners hold on to every passing note.

 

3. Sky 

For a city bicycle rider, paved streets are asphalt skies. My posture on my bike means I stare into this black, anti-sky as a matter of course. I enjoy the view. There’s lots to see. I once found a five dollar bill near a sewer grate one neighbourhood over—a Laurier in Laurier. This time of year the fallen leaves are starting to pile up against the curbs like losing tickets in a 50-50 draw. As I ride and gaze ahead, the pavement also absorbs my thoughts. Sometimes it’s an ooze of thoughts as I replay conversations—questions I didn’t ask, answers I didn’t give, dumb things I said—from yesterday or 45 years ago. Round and round I can go sometimes. But, sometimes, when I’m lucky, like I was at 7:18 am last Wednesday morning on Laurier Drive, my neck gets pulled up like I’m a puppet and I see the blue sky printed with a giant scalloped fan of cloud and I stop and exhale audibly because it’s so easy to stop and say wow out loud when the instrument you play is a bicycle. 

Thanks for being out there, friends.

City of New Orleans by Willie and the Highwaymen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnGJ3KJri1g