Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 110: timing, specifically, sounds of home

 

It’s the end of the week as we know it! Here are three things that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness.

Three Things, episode 110: 

1. Timing 

There’s a difference between saying the right thing and saying the right thing at the right time. Both take skill. They are different skills. Shelagh needed grated ginger for a ginger cake, and I was in the produce section at Andy’s IGA where I quickly located everything she didn’t need for the cake—garlic, shallots, chives, bok choy.  It was like looking for a word in the dictionary not knowing how to spell. I walked over to the produce clerk who was unloading oranges and with mock weariness asked him, “How close am I to a knob of ginger?” He nodded, smiled, removed his hat to make sure I didn’t miss the fact of his red hair and replied: “You are very close, sir.” He laughed an apology and said it was the only knob of ginger joke he knew and walked me the six feet to the ginger. 

It took me a full second. I thought about saying I didn’t get his joke right away because I’m more of a Mary Ann kind of guy, but that Gilligan’s Island reference was already too late. His timing was perfect and we both knew it and I simply said thank you, that is the best knob of ginger joke I have ever heard and you must get to use that often here in the produce section. Not really, he said. But you’re ready when it walks up to you, I said, and we laughed. 

His comedic performance in the miniature agora made my day. He could have simply pointed to the ginger and silently escorted me there, but he took the opportunity to breathe some life into another transactional question. He chose to reveal a bit of himself in word. He took a kind of public action. I picked out the biggest knob of ginger in the pile. 

2. Specifically 

I’ve long rebelled against generalities and abstractions and well-worn phrases like, well, well-worn phrases—platitudes, as my friend Spell would say, for the multitudes. It’s why I still silently cheer as I read, as I read last week, passages like Saul Alinsky’s where he advises against communicating only at the issue level. Issues cannot be generalities like sin or immorality or the good life or morals, he says. They must be this immorality of this slum landlord with this slum tenement where these people suffer. The need for the specific is why I gravitate to fiction writers like George Saunders for whom it is never good enough to ask is thing X good or bad? Good or bad for whom? On what day, under what conditions?  The drive for precise whos, whats, wheres and whens was what I took from my journalism decades. One morning a year or so ago on Edmonton AM, Mark Connolly asked listeners to share their favourite places in the city. And don’t say river valley, he said. If river valley, where, specifically, in the river valley? Connolly’s injunction to be specific plays in my head every time I pedal through the portal of tight spruce trees and then out into the vault of sky above the Quesnell Bridge.

I often wonder why specific places are mentioned in songs, too. It’s not just a boulevard or just a drive, it’s Ventura Boulevard and Mulholland Drive. It’s not just a neighbourhood, it’s Reseda, which sounds like recede, which means to depart from a usual state, which, if you’re Lucifer, might be the heaven you had been created for.

I made him just and right,

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

Such I created all the ethereal Powers,

Milton’s God says in Paradise Lost. 

What a particularly original song from the specifically great Tom Petty.

3. Sounds of home 

I took in some pretty remarkable sounds, small and big, this past week. Squeaks out of bread dough Shelagh was punching down. Roy Bittan’s piano in Austin from my buddy Graham via Facebook messenger. On TV, the heroic McDavid spinning backwards and untouched through two defenders (Scylla and Charybdis I think their name bars read) on the Philadelphia Flyers. Little birds darting from branch to bird feeders in the Oleskiw Meadow, leaving a trail of notes behind. Sonically, it was a rich week.

It was also a cold week. Mid-week it got down to -25 Celsius. That’s 13 below zero for those of you outside shooting winter baskets in Oklahoma City and posting pictures on social media. But I don’t feel envy. I feel quite grateful that technology lets us live in this beautiful part of the world at this crisp, shall we say, time of year.

((Insert furnace sound here))

Here, the sound of the furnace is a kind of anthem. We are infrastructure people up here off the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. 

Thanks for being out there friends.