Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 99: cold comfort, theory, Indy scene

It’s been cold here. Cold is a preserving agent. Here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude during a bike ride home through that cold.

                            

1. Cold comfort 

I was breakfasted up, helmeted up, goggled up and ready to head into the dark December morning. First, though, a quick reality check with Siri from Cupertino. This is the actual convo:

Me: Siri, what’s the temperature outside?
Siri: It’s negative 26 degrees outside.
Me: Well, that’s a rather negative comment.
Siri: I’m sorry.
Me: No, that’s what we say up here!
Siri: Is there something else I can help with?
Me: Well, if you can help with the temperature?
Siri: It’s negative 27 degrees outside.

Before another degree went south, I resolved up, opened the back door and walked outside into an atmospheric cloud of dryer exhaust, got on my fatbike and pedalled for downtown. Thirty seconds of arctic-weather bicycle riding is the time needed for a verdict on my clothing choices. The wind that morning was the interrogator.  My Merinos and my Arc’teryx jacket were the answer. Exhilarating is one of the words that describes the feeling of moving under my own power while successfully resisting the weather. Surrender is a better one, surrender in the sense of a crafty, wooly retreat in the face of a superior force. By the time I was on the 142 Street bridge over the MacKinnon Ravine I was warm enough to pull the balaclava away from my face and see my breath. That’s victory.

I’m not sure we are ever the same people we started out as. But, in that instant on the bridge, with the cold air in my lungs and nose, the way I could taste the water vapor, I was again the young boy me, bundled up, walking to school atop the windrows on 66 Street, in winter, past the Texaco, past the Pacific 66, in 15 below weather, breathing cold air in, warm air out. 

“Imagine," my mom said, "walking to kindergarten when you’re five years old, six blocks or whatever it was.”

I called her last week to ask why once upon a time she would ever let her son walk out into the dark of the northeast end. 

“I can remember really hesitating about buying that house, although we loved it,” she said. “It was so far from school. That was a worry to me, but…”

“Well, you seemed to get over the worry,” I said.
“We did, we did,” she laughed.

Looking back, I really called her to say thanks for letting me learn by myself to propel myself, even in the cold. That’s still my base layer. 

(It was eight blocks, not six.)

2. Theory 

The first time I saw the word theory was at the United Conservatory of Music on 95 Street. We did our exercises in a  blue and white workbook, Theory for Beginners, by Barbara Wharram, I think, with a giant treble clef on the front cover. Inside was page after page of frustration. I wanted to play guitar from the Mel Bay book, but half my time was spent in theory, working not a pick but a pencil, trying to make sense of the patterns behind the notes, drawing chords, writing out scales, placing accidentals where they belonged. I never felt further away from actually playing music than I did theorizing about music. 

Which would kinda turn out to be the point, considering that that word theory, I would learn years later, is from a Greek word that means spectator. Action is doing things, theorizing is watching things, in the sense of thinking about them. Simply, getting shit done, that’s action. Reflecting on the need to get shit done, and its benefits, that’s theory. 

Last week. I’m pedalling in the snow and ice up the service road along 142 Street when a yahoo behind me in his car lays on his horn, forces me to start moving right, and then passes me—on the freaking right!  For a second, I was scared. Then really mad. I waved my arm, sent out a few expletives that bounced off his driver’s side window. He sped away. It took me until Glenora School to cool down. Maslow helped. It helped to know I was somewhere up the hierarchy of needs—wanting a higher level of safety (call it justice) or wanting the recognition the driver would be forced to offer me were I to accidentally break off his side-view mirror at the next red light. I was up the pyramid only because my basic needs were still satisfied. I was safe. I was warm. I was breathing. All good.

I do increasingly appreciate the emergency exit into the fresh air and out of myself that theory allows.

3. The Indy scene 

The trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie has dropped. Our son Michael texted it to me when it was only a couple of hours old. I’ve watched it a dozen times, looking to dig out clues about the plot. Indy is in New York City. On a horse. In the 59th Street subway station. He brings a whip to a gunfight. Captured in disguise, he wears a German iron cross medal. He punches Nazis.

Digital, de-aging technology is used on Harrison Ford, which is fair ball for me. That’s what this new Indy movie will, I hope, be. Technology that returns us to the stories the boys grew up watching, that we’re still watching together, but, even better, because the girls are along now for the ride, too, which means, June 30, 2023, yeah, we’ll pay, because, like Sallah in the trailer, "I miss waking up every morning wondering what wonderful adventure the new day will bring to us…”

Thanks for being out there, friends.