Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 111: socks, serious dream, maracas

Here are three things that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness in the maelstrom.

Three Things, episode 111: 

                           

1. Socks 

I was reading Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech from, wow, what is already, could it really be, six years ago now? Near the end, he takes us to the underworld, calling up the specter of the wandering Odysseus, who has made a never-ending tour stop in Hades to meet the Greek hero Achilles. 

Dylan reminds us that Achilles said if he could, he would choose to go back 

“...and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is,  king in the land of the dead, hat whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place.”

I heard the echo of Maya Angelou’s grandmother. She warns her granddaughter about complaining like the customers, Sister Murphy and Brother Thompson and the rest, who visit the family store, do. Angelou remembers how her grandmother would .
“...turn and her eyes would get like stones, and she’d say, Sister, there are people all over this planet who went to sleep last night when Sister Murphy went to sleep who will never wake again. Their beds have become their cooling boards, their blankets have become their winding sheets, and they would give anything for five minutes of what that person was complaining about.”

I am out of my depth in all of this—Dylan, Homer, Hades, Stamps, Arkansas, Angelou, death, recording media. But I do know about complaining. Complaining about scraping the car windows, complaining about the crush of work. Every now and then, I tend to lament. That’s a good word, lament. It gets us closer to the word death than the word complaining does. Complaining seems to be premised on the endless supply of time for complaining, and on the always fresh supply of people to complain to. But those reservoirs are not endless, and the expiry dates on their contents are notoriously difficult to see coming. Don’t get me wrong. There’s lots that’s legitimate to complain about. Sometimes I see clearly that the question of whether McDavid and Draisaitl’s time in Edmonton is being squandered isn’t high up that list.

I share all of this to explain why, today, I am again wearing my epic Bob Dylan socks. They provide an extra layer of support between me and the ground as I try to walk the land of the living.

2. Serious dream 

I knew that our car was not, in reality, stolen or towed by the City, but I checked just to make sure by looking out the bedroom window as soon as I woke up. Still there in the blue light of morning, good. 

Some time over the previous eight hours it wasn’t where I had parked it in St. Albert while I went to a restaurant run by my friend Katie, who talked to the staff in what I somehow knew was Hungarian. The place was packed. I had a couple of beers and the chicken entree, which arrived without the chicken, just the potatoes, with a side of mashed potatoes, all good. The door with the hand-carved sign Whale of a Deck was locked for the winter. I kept dropping my bank card when it came time to pay, but we settled the tab, I went back outside, watched a bit of the fireworks show and then hiked back up the hill to the car, which was gone. I had missed the red paint on the curb that marked it as a no parking zone. A dude in a pickup told me the impound lot was by the river but didn’t offer to drive me, which was weird, but, St. Albert, whatever. He did point out I wasn’t wearing a jacket or shirt and wasn’t I cold? I realized I was. Out of nowhere, Shelagh joined me and we got picked up by a kid in an ice cream truck. Our friend Jim was in the backseat. If we take the alley behind Katz Avenue, Jim said, we’ll get to the impound. Well, not quite. 

We stopped for a coffee at the Railway Cafe and then we hit a kid’s play zone where, one at a time, we had to inch our way down a concrete slide to get to the exit. We switched to a taxi at this point but three drunk hooligans tagged the cab hood with graffiti and the driver kept circling the block trying to hunt them down. Finally he gave up, turned the car back toward the impound lot and then unexpectedly stopped, got out at a toll booth, and used a pair of forceps he carried to transfer smoking puffballs, like we used to find in the schoolyards as kids, from a bowl on the sidewalk into a bowl watched over by an old woman. Needless to say, the car was not at the impound lot. From a payphone I didn’t notice was on the dashboard of the cab, I got the lot manager on the phone. If I could tell him how many kilometres I had put on the car in the last year, he would tell me where it was. In the back seat, Shelagh was putting pencil to paper to figure that out. Somewhere along the line we had lost Jim. 

Have a bit of scotch to warm your chest, Shelagh had said before I went to bed that night. Good idea, I said. Spiritland, here I come!

3.  Maracas 

Like clockwork, the McKenzie Seeds display has sprouted at Andy’s IGA. It stands like a greeter at the front of the store, conveying the message to the tocque-d and parka-d pilgrims that winter is almost over. It is time to start thinking about the backyard garden. On a shopping trip last week, I spent more time standing in front of the seed stand than the magazine stand. The Zoomer article on recession planning or The New Republic’s take on America’s Most Homegrown Fascism didn’t compete with the Candy Hybrid Onion packet for my attention. I shook the package for the sound. I imagined the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra on stage. The crowd is silent. The players are about to perform a tribute to spring. The conductor gestures to the percussion section. The maracas player picks up two onion seed packets, shakeshakeshake, shakeshakeshake, to establish the faint beat of spring.