Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 115: downtown vibrancy, 118 Avenue, water in this house

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

                           

1. Downtown vibrancy

 
The walls of McDougall United Church don’t keep out the sounds from outside, so, a few times during the concert, Ryan Adams would stop and wait for the sirens downtown to subside, joking that the jazz police were on their way to apprehend him. 
It was not the experience of going to a classical concert at the Jube or the Winspear where layers of building insulation and good breeding enforce the silence thought best to attract the sublime. If I remember right, the new LRT line outside the Winspear even has a section of special sound dampening equipment built under the tracks to keep the reverberations of a passing train from disturbing the stillness of the concert hall. This wasn’t that. Before he played a note, the artist played off the sacred setting, telling the audience they might witness an old-fashioned smoting from above. He asked not to be extinguished if he burst into flames. 

And, thus, we were in a kind of hell, the lamps on the stage campfires you might see on the banks of a river in the underworld as you floated on the dark waves. The pews creaked as people shifted their weight. Someone sneezed. Bless you, the artist said. Listen to your parents, do your math homework, he told youngsters in the crowd, or you’ll end up being a bridge troll, singing about your  feelings for eternity. There were many songs of misery, and we listened—for over two and a half hours we listened because the songs of the fallen had some kind of authority. Or because of the way the singer sang the final word of the final line of the last verse of O My Sweet Carolina, how ”all the sweetest winds they blow across the south,” but not simply the "south" on the I chord but the "sou-outh" from the IV to the V, as it hit me. 

Like the word itself floated through pines.

Or maybe it was how the harmonica blew in at the end of that song after the words had done their work, maybe that’s what got in. 

2. 118 Avenue 

A lot of my life has happened on 118 Avenue. The street resonates in me like a string. I was baptized at St. Alphonsus Church across the street from what is now Battista’s Calzones. I got my boyhood haircuts sitting on a booster bench laid across the arms of the giant barber’s chair at Stan’s. My grandparents lived nearby. Crossing 18th, as the adults said, meant we were getting close. My bicycles came from George’s Cycle on 118 Ave, including a three-wheeler that still hangs from the garage rafters, just like the bikes at George’s did. 

Years later, as I was getting ready for a bicycle ride with buddies to Jasper, it was at George’s that one of the workers revealed to me the secret of bicycle gears. Being in the right gear, he said, means you’re not wasting energy by pedalling too fast or hurting your knees by pedalling too slow. Read the road, read the elements, read your own energy  and adjust your gears for where you are. Long before I came across Socrates, this was my first lesson in moderation. Long before I discovered Seamus Heaney, this was my first lesson in keeping going. Speaking of bicycles, a handful of my overcrowded teeth were pulled out at a dentist’s office just off 118 Ave. With a mouth full of bloody gauze, I took the bus home from 118 Ave by myself. The dentist’s office was across the street from the United Conservatory of Music where I took guitar lessons and got my first job teaching guitar. 

Speaking of guitars, Shelagh and I were on 118 Avenue at Myhre’s Music last week. Byron was inspecting my Martin guitar, a university graduation gift from my dad, purchased at the store when it was still called House of Banjo. Now, the internet has its place, but one thing I still cannot do online is walk off 118 Avenue into Myhre’s Music carrying my guitar and everything else I carry around, be greeted, say hello back, tell stories, laugh a bit—and feel kinda like a string plucked to life.

3. Water in the house 

Aleasha and Michael and Shelagh stayed up late in the living room talking. The murmur of their conversation was like the dishwasher at night. Water moving through pipes in the house is a lullaby. As a boy, the sound of the water draining from the upstairs bathtub carried me off with it. I had said my good nights to the three of them, thanked the youngsters for coming over and told them the old guy had to call it a night. Because the old guy is still in some ways the boy he used to be, he kept the bedroom door open a crack for the current of confab. 

Thanks for being out there, friends.