Three Things from Edmonton podcast - episode 91: skateboard, sound, cabin door

This week’s collection of three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude goes like this:

                        

1. Skateboard 

There’s a vintage Budweiser skateboard on eBay the description of which—”heavily used with lots of signs of wear, but no signs of damage”—applies, on good days, to me, too. I came back with that same model of skateboard after a family trip to southern California in 1976. The board was the closest I would get to the Beach Boys surf scene. The old skateboard resurfaced in my consciousness last week on a patch of pavement at Avonmore School. That’s where skater-daughter-in-law-teacher Aleasha gave me remedial lesson on how to ride. I felt very shaky. I made my first mistake immediately. 

You might actually find it better to get going a bit and not just stand still on the board, she said, better for your balance, she said. 

Aleasha did something else quite remarkable: she broke down that seemingly simple act of pushing off and rolling on a skateboard into half a dozen discrete steps. Hold one foot in the air. Touch the back foot on the board deck for an instant. Keep the back foot down for longer and longer. Rotate out the front heel 45 degrees while gliding. Lift up the front toes while gliding. Do all of these things before shifting to the sideways stance. And then I did it! I felt those good asphalt vibrations again. 

The most important thing Aleasha taught me was to be ready to bail. She watched while I practised shooting the board forward and behind and hitting the pavement upright. Jumping off wasn’t what I expected I would get good at. But doing so helped me to consider that, on balance, it’s more valuable to be taught to envision things going imperfectly than just right. The goal, after four decades, isn’t just to again ride a skateboard but, now, to ride it again and then again, and, maybe, get going on my own again.

2. Sounds 

I don’t know who it was in my time in TV newsrooms who made me hear the truth. Maybe it was Rob Brown. Or Graham Richardson. Maybe it was Liane Hunt. Or Stix or King Leier. But one of the local legends I worked with hit me with this one day: video is important, but audio is vital. It is captured sound that truly puts us in a place. It is sound that transports us. Not just the sound of the human voice, but the sounds of everyday life that arrive and vanish and are precious because they will not stay put. I find it more difficult to recall sounds than images in my memory. So I try to be more aware of sounds. This is a good time of year in Edmonton to practise. 

Thank you geese at the University Farm on Saturday. Thank you dishwasher down the hall that digested the film from the plates of this year’s Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday. Thank you leaves in the gutter on the 102 Avenue bike lane on Monday. Shelagh said they sounded like Corn Flakes. 

These sounds reverberated in me last week, as, like the days, they came and went.

3. Cabin door 

I am working on the amateur theory that the girl from Dylan’s Red River Shore is the muse, a goddess, now sadly departed from our hero. The song, from 1997, is one of those jewels inexplicably never released on a studio album, and, so, isn’t well known to those who aren’t camped in the cold outside Dylan’s cabin door to see what music he emerges with next. It’s a beautiful song. It has the feel of having always been around. Its opening verse is, maybe, a meditation on live stage performance, its final verse a passage in which Jesus, maybe, appears and the listener is invited to consider what it means to be dead, or unseen on the inside (same thing) while still alive. The verses in between tell the story of regret and of the loss of the love of a pretty maiden, who I fancy to be one of the Greek muses, Calliope, maybe, the Calliope with whom the singer still says he’s falling in love in one of his latest songs, Mother of Muses. It’s thrilling to sit in the basement and listen to Red River Shore speak to Dylan’s On A Night Like This and both of them communicate with Mother of Muses. 

From On A Night Like This, there is this:

There's more frost on the window glass
With each new tender kiss
But it sure feels right
On a night like this

From Red River Shore, this: 

Though nothing looks familiar to me
I know I've stayed here before
Once, a thousand nights ago
With the girl from the Red River shore

From Mother of Muses, this: 

Mother of Muses, wherever you are
I've already outlived my life by far

And from Red River Shore:

Well, the dream dried up a long time ago
Don't know where it is anymore
True to life, true to me
Was the girl from the Red River shore

Of course, I might not be hearing clearly in the dark. Or I am misled by Dylan when he said in the 60 Minutes interview there was a penetrating magic to his early songs that he couldn’t summon anymore.

“I can do other things now,” he said. “I can’t do that."

What I am more sure of is the value of stealing from the cares and noise of the world some time each day to sit still in the dark, switch on the turntable and listen for traces of the older voices. 

Thanks for being out there, friends.