Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- episode 102: sliding home, strings, intersection

Here, in Three Things, episode 102, are some things that I am happy and grateful came into focus this week:

                           

1. Sliding home 

I carried up our front walk a cardboard box containing the remains of my parents’ Ektachrome slide collection from the 1950s and 60s. We were hosting Christmas Eve dinner, the first with four generations around the table. After food upstairs, and with the basement lights down, my dad brought the projector back to life. The fan whirred. The lamp shone, illuminating flecks of interstellar dust. The slide tray turned with that unforgettable sound that powerfully recalls for me a key turning in a lock and opening a door, even though I have no such memory of any such key or door in real life.

We saw their old cars—the red VW Beetle in the California Redwoods, the ‘55 Oldsmobile, the ‘65 Ford Custom, the ‘67 baby blue Chrysler Windsor. Go back, go back, Emma and Giulia, the granddaughters, would routinely entreat my dad, who was on the clicker. Back he went. It was stunning. 

Back to the street in front of the old house and the Sunland Industries truck my grandfather drove. Sunland: Manufacturers of Quality Biscuits. 

Back to the neon sign outside the Capistrano Motel, which offered air conditioning, radios, telephones, kitchens and TV. A sign under the Triple A logo reminded guests to Ask For Beautyrest.

My dad channeled Johnny Cash. My mom was a Woodward’s fashion plate. 

Interspersed in these scenes of domestic life were slides of disaster in the bigger world. A derailed freight train leaking potash near Looma. It was an outing for our family to visit train crash sites, apparently—a time to be together. 

And a grainy image of RFK standing next to a veiled Jacqueline Kennedy at JFK’s funeral. My parents must have felt on November 25, 1963, that it wasn’t good enough to just watch that scene flicker by on their black-and-white Electrohome TV. It had to be made to stop. Swimming in media, they did the only thing they could do. They took a photo of the TV. Something clicked when I saw that slide. I wasn’t looking just at what an anonymous cameraman in Washington, DC, saw and transmitted. I was looking at what he saw that my parents, in the living room of their little house on 96 Street, then saw, and from the angle they saw it. Wait a sec, I said, and, with my phone, took a pic of the slide on our wall before the image vaporized into pure light.

2.  Strings 

For a dinner composed of roast turkey, mushroom gravy, ham, stuffing, perogies, cabbage rolls, potato gratin, mashed white and sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, green string beans Italian style, green salad with roasted beets, pecan pie and flapper pie, Shelagh received a sitting ovation. Table conversation rose like a giant instrument tuning up. Here and there, if you listened in, you could make out an experienced player giving a tip to an apprentice. I remember hearing my dad’s advice to our son Michael about how to properly boil a perogy.

A week before the gathering, the piano tuner had come by to tighten the strings on the old Wurlitzer that was my mom’s as a girl, my mom’s as a mom in the house in Delwood, the piano that now sits in our living room. A piano is a stringed instrument, of course. I say of course because, of course, I neglect this fact. Unlike a guitar or a violin, a piano keeps its strings to itself. It’s more modest. According to tradition, Alex took requests and played carols. After dinner Aleasha sat down and tied things up.

3.  Intersection 

The print I am looking at, a gift from Yucatan Sheryl, shows a corner store in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia in the late 1960s. I have never been to the store at the intersection of Maynard and Portland, but I know it. It evokes the ghosts of corner stores still visible in older Edmonton neighbourhoods, Norwood, Parkdale, Virginia Park, those kinds of places. It has a sign on it, Elliott’s Grocery, with an image of the old 7-Up label with the bubbles. One of those green bottles was on the kitchen table in one of the slides we watched on Christmas Eve. As kids, we would re-shape our lips to emit a stream of air down into an empty bottle to make it whistle. I wondered if that was the sound of a genie escaping. 

There is a windrow of tired snow in front of a red fire hydrant in the foreground of the print. A youngster walks along the sidewalk, hands in pocket, bag on shoulder, eyes on boots, thoughts, who knows where, maybe on last night’s Habs game against the Blues, maybe on the copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel he’s secretly reading in math class. I have never been to the store at the intersection of Maynard and Portland streets in the Teri Paquette print, but I know it, or, I know how it fades—same thing.