Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 108: waves, radio, resonance

Happy end of the week! In a few days, the sun will rise before 8 am for the first time since October 13 last year. Here are three other things from my little life in the retreating dark that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness.

Three Things, episode 108:

                          

1. Waves 

There is a quaint practice that clings to life in Edmonton, a vestige of the happy days of motoring. I speak of the courtesy wave from the car driver ahead back to the car driver behind after the latter allows the former into the flow of traffic. Close to where we live, the stage is set for the wave when bumper-to-bumper afternoon traffic pointing south on 142 Street blocks the way out of the Andy’s IGA parking lot for the drivers of other vehicles. Same thing at the zipper merge where 102 Avenue now goes down from two lanes to one around 137 Street due to LRT construction in year one of X. I received the quick courtesy wave there last week, extending the half-life of a courtesy wave I had sent back to some other driver (who knows, maybe to someone who thinks and votes not like me at all?) at the same spot a few days before.

I admit I make a point of noticing if I get the wave. That’s not charitable. Keeping score, I mean, noticing if my kindness is noticed, making a kindness out of conceding an entire car length of space in the slow race to get home. I suppose when we’re all gliding around in self-driving cars with sensors smart enough to make optimal traffic flow decisions for us, we won’t have to wonder if the driver behind will let us in, and we won’t have to watch for the wave from the driver ahead. There will be no drivers, in that sense, the whole thing will all just work without individual acts of grace. It will be a victory for the rational system. 

We’re already halfway there. It’s not science, just an anecdotal feeling, and from a focus group of one, but drivers aren’t waving their thanks as much anymore these days. Or maybe I am just getting older and hardened, the kind of older and hardened type who says things like ‘these days.” Still, there seem to be fewer flickers of fellow feeling from the motorized capsules ahead these days. So, thank you to the human being in the sedan in Glenora who waved back a thanks last week, keeping a flagging Edmonton tradition alive. 

2. Radio 

Instead of getting a dog last week, we got a radio—an inexpensive Panasonic model that looks slightly behind its time. It’s got a thin orange bar turned by a knob up and down the columns of AM and FM band numbers. I don’t know why Shelagh and I both knew we were again ready to have a radio in the house. Maybe it’s videovideovideo everywhere these days and, tick tock tick tock tick tock, the time is again right for audio. A bit of resistance via technology. 

Or a serving of nostalgia. The radio was on in the morning in the house I grew up in, usually Bob Bradburn on CHQT. I’d hear Glen Campbell before walking down the back lane to school. Later at nights, I’d listen to CHED. I remember Len Thuesen playing a new song from a new band called Dire Straits. That’s how Sultans of Swing happened to me. Augusta LaPaix on CBC, too. She played new, important music by a singer songwriter from England called Billy Bragg. It was wonderful to see Billy Bragg in person in the Bowery a couple of years ago, but, in some strange way, not as thrilling as hearing him on the radio back then. Bob Dylan, too, he’s part of the reason for our new, old radio. His surreal song Murder Most Foul and, how, in it, to my hearing, a dead U.S. President John F. Kennedy, the radio on in the hearse, somehow calls in his requests for songs past and present and future to Wolfman Jack, the eternal DJ. 

"There are 12 million souls listening in," Dylan sings.

That line about listening souls captures like nothing else the eerie, disembodied, thrilling reality of radio—still. And, so, I’m sending out my thanks in the dark to those forerunners of the modern algorithms, the flesh-and-blood radio disk jockeys who played us into an audience. 

3.  Resonance 

In three months or so, at the north end of the alley that runs from 102 Avenue to 104 Avenue west of 124 Street, a tree, skeletal now, will, I trust, again blossom in a contained explosion of pinky purple. Maybe it’s some kind of cherry tree?  I don’t know urban trees well enough. We call it a May tree for the month it reappears. For a few weeks, it will add a bouquet of colour to the heaving asphalt and the dumpsters and the cat’s cradle of power lines in the alley. I will take a detour on my route back from downtown to pedal toward the tree and get a cheap version of moving along a grand boulevard toward a landmark jewel set at its terminus. Like Corbett Hall at the end of Whyte Avenue without all the other stuff in the way. 

Shelagh and I were at Glenora Gallery picking up a framed print last week when she heard another print hanging on the wall. It was an alley scene. Rows of garbage and recycling carts considering each other across the pavement. At the end of the alley is a simple Victorian-style house with front stairs up to a porch lit by the May sun. I took it for May sun because across from the house, just up the alley, in a neighbour’s backyard, is a May tree in bloom. 

When you hear people say “that really resonates with me” as the new version of “I see what you mean,” it’s the voice of that tree, its power to evoke memories and scenes and feelings, that they are hearing a version of. It goes without saying. We heard the call to action. We purchased the print.