Glenn Kubish

Once a week here, I register three things from my little life that left behind signs of happiness and gratitude. Here you go, the U.S. Thanksgiving edition, with some CanCon to bring it home:                         1. Taxes, El Paso   The great French essayist Michel de Montaigne established the voice of conscience as humankind’s absolute sovereign. He wrote to the powers that be: “You may impose as heavy and ruinous taxes upon us as you please, but to command us to do shameful and dishonest things, you will lose your time, for it is to no purpose.” Of the causes of sedition, the great English essayist Francis Bacon included, along with advancement of unworthy persons, taxes. Of taxes, the American DJ Bob Dylan, speaking of the Jamaican singer-songwriter Prince Buster, said:   “Like all great artists he was able to turn things that bothered him into three minutes of musical pleasure.” I was wide awake after midnight listening to Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour, the series that explores

Happy end of the week, y’all! Here are a few things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude this week.                   1. Well, well, well   I don’t need to know if there actually is a term for the accumulations of snow and ice that build up inside the wheel wells of automobiles. If you live in a wide-open winter city where occasional driving is a fact, you know what I’m talking about: those dinosaur-tooth-shaped accretions that are so strangely satisfying to kick loose.   [insert that sound here] Evidently, I am not the only one who enjoys this. Take a look at surface parking lots these days. They’re dotted with these mashes of potatoes. There’s a routine. Car comes to a stop, ignition is turned off, and, then, before the driver heads for the mall, it’s kick-kick-kick with the heel, leaving behind, when the car again moves away, four mounds of snowy slop—four cairns of winter.   Whatever they’re called, there is something deep afoot in the experience of dislodging them.  

To keep the feeble noticing equipment from completely seizing up, I try each week to think about three things that left behind tracks of happiness or gratitude. The snow is good for tracks. Episode 95:                      1. Fables   I was lyin’ on the living room couch in, if not quite, pain, then, at least, unease, as Shelagh, bent over over under the lamp, sterilized needle in hand, face set in determination, pricked the sole of my right foot. For days, I had limped around with a sliver in the ball of my foot. I had to modify my walk down the stairs to footfall on the heel. Pedalling was a pain. Shelagh is a sliversmith, though. And, after a minute of “come on, alreadys,” she got it.   This sliver that had come close to incapacitating me, was, as I looked at it, thinner than the 1/8th inch notch on a tape measure. Undone by so tiny an intruder, I felt slightly mortified. But Shelagh made the reasonable point that log, splinter or sliver, the truth was that it didn’t belong in my bo

Happy end of the week, y’all, from snowy Edmonton. In addition to the 22 trick or treaters who came up our front steps on Halloween, here are three other things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude.                                         1. Franciscans   The dark season is upon us in Edmonton, and the red eyes out there are watching the days get shorter. The red eyes I mean are the stop lights at intersections in the evening, the taillights of the cars lined up on Fox Drive, the aviation lights on top of university buildings on Saskatchewan Drive.  These red lights remind me of Jawas, the miniature, humanoid scrap dealers from the sands of Tatooine.   All we know of the faces of the Jawas are the glowing eyes set in the recesses of the cowls of their rough habits. They look like little Franciscans. I pedal by a house on 102 Avenue with five, metre-high cypress bushes in the front yard. This is the starry time of the year the owner covers the cypresses in burlap against t