Three Things from Edmonton podcast - episode 90: that delicious moon, the Mavericks, lotería

On the hunch that remembering once a week to make note of the things that make me happy and grateful will make it easier to notice more of what is waiting to be noticed...

Three Things, episode 90:

                              

1. That delicious moon 

It’s hard to make a nutritional case for the perogy as the one food I would take to a desert island, but chekay, chekay, as my grandparents would say, wait, wait just a second, there’s more in a perogy than potato and cheese. For one thing, a chunk of my childhood is in those dumplings. Both my grandmothers made perogies. My Winnipeg grandma made exotic blueberry perogies. My parents have kept the tradition alive, although my dad devotes as much time and care to the butter, onions and pepper in which the perogies swim as to the doughy packets themselves. I have, so far, not kept up what’s expected of me in the family perogy-making chain.  We order them in fundraisers. We head to Taste of Ukraine in St. Albert to help the cause.  

When John Stetch played jazz piano tunes inspired by his grandmother’s Ukrainian cookbook a few years ago, Shelagh and I were at the late Dish & The Runaway Spoon on Stony Plain Road with Darcia and Boris to eat it all up. I’m heading out soon with my buddy Jim for perogy happy hour at Continental Treat where a sawbuck each will get us a choice of three perogies with sour cream and fried onions. But I have not gotten around to actually doing the work of making actual perogies with my actual hands. I know I will enjoy it when I do. I imagine it will be the carbohydrate version of an envelope-stuffing bee, with the little parcels sealed and sent back a couple of generations to the kitchens in the houses on Lansdowne Avenue in Winnipeg and 85 Street in Edmonton.

Last Sunday, in real life, Shelagh and I were driving up 144 Avenue in the north end after wrapping up a babysitting assignment without serious incident. We managed to feed, walk, burp and bathe our grandson. We watched Uncle Buck with him. And we watched with some relief as Little Buddy closed his eyes and fell asleep by himself. As we drove home the air was warm and calm, unusual for October. The tranquility seemed to lap into each of our hearts. 

Over the LRT station, the first quarter moon hung like a giant, well, like a giant, fantastic perogy that had floated up and out of some grandmother’s kitchen in Belvedere. 

2. Mavericks 

A day after the Raptors played the Jazz at Rogers Place, the Mavericks played their music at the Jube. The group was last here five years ago at the Winspear. That night we jived in the main aisle while a few feet away Raul Malo and the band ripped through Chuck Berry’s C’est La Vie. We danced as hard as we could. It felt like part of the deal. This time around we were on our feet, but we stayed in our row.  I took a Robaxacet before the concert. I wasn’t the only one there in the demographic on medication. Where "there" was was the question. We were at the Jubilee Auditorium, of course. That’s where in the everyday world we were, and it was 8:30 pm in everyday time when the band hit the stage after a light-splashed, booming classical fanfare that rattled my skeleton. It felt good to feel my rib cage vibrating again. That doesn’t happen with earbuds.

“It’s good to be back in Edmonton again,” Malo said to cheers from the crowd, adding, in a bit of covid-era insight, that it was good to be back anywhere, actually. 

It’s funny, I never feel less like I am in Edmonton than when I’m lost in a good live concert in Edmonton. Or, for that matter, in any city. The city slips away, like it does as I am drifting to sleep while the sirens wail up and down 149 Street. The massive, illuminated, visual and sonic reality of a live show in a windowless auditorium is too much like a dreamscape to say it is happening in what I know as Edmonton. Edmonton and everyday life, which is waiting on the other side of the experience, is precisely where, temporarily, I am quite not. The lockdown and its pause on live music blocked that glorious way home from home. 

I still like to close my eyes at a live concert for the simple thrill of opening them again and still not being back in the everyday world. For the return of that dreamy bit of good, thank you, Mavericks—and deep thanks to your sound and light wizards for helping you take us… somewhere.

3. Lotería! 

If your cab driver turns across the lane of oncoming traffic on the Méxican highway from Guanajuato to San Miguel de Allende, so that he, and, by extension, you, can pay an impromptu visit to the Arte San Gabriel roadside artisan’s shop, and if you walk inside and wander past the walls of pottery for sale, and head right to the back, you might, like I did recently, find your heart. On a square, ceramic lotería card. Lotería, I now know, is a card game of chance, similar to bingo, but more meaty and embodied than bingo. Instead of matching called numbers to the numbers on a card, players match playing cards that depict animals and objects and heavenly bodies and characters from traditional Méxican life and lore.  

There is La Araña, the spider. And El Tambor, the drum. There is La Luna (the moon), La Dama (the lady), El Musico (the musician) and the Drunk—El Borracho. It’s a fun way around the family game table to learn some Spanish words. The illustration of the heart on the card for the heart—El Corazon—shows a real, pumping, vesseled, chambered organ pierced by an arrow. Not for faint hearts, lotería. The lotería heart is not a chalk heart sketched on the sidewalk or used to dot the letter "i" in flowery fourth grade cursive. This is the heart with an arrowhead buried in it, which, if not anatomically correct, is, at least, true. 

We bought a ceramic heart to share. 

Viva México.

Thanks for being out there, friends.