Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 122: tulips, infidelity, chalk

Blink! It’s the end of the week as we knew it—gone! But, first, three things from all over the map that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude. 

Listen to the Three Things podcast, episode 122:

                       

1. Tulips 

Before I could fire up my simile machine by asking what those tulips reminded me of, those tulips reminded me of Audrey Hepburn. The tulips were planted by a homeowner on a piece of public boulevard that I pedal by most mornings in Crestwood. They’re lovely. The elegant shape and layering of the petals are matched only by the sophisticated chiffon turbans Givenchy crowned Hepburn with. 

I was still pedalling and thinking about the tulips and Hepburn and how Shelagh likes tulips and looks like Hepburn when I got to the 142 Street service road, where there is a house not long for this world. A new owner has bought it. Its long-ago Arbor Day trees in the front yard have been razored into stumps. A sign foretells of the house’s demolition. A woman once lived there. On some mornings, a caregiver would visit her. That’s all I know about her. Except that each spring she placed a handful of miniature plastic dinosaurs in a patch of sand at the front of the property. Like a little movie set. I called it Valleyview of the Dinosaurs. (Jurassic Parkview would have been earlier in the series.) 

I still look down for the little giants as I cruise by, but they have vanished. Quack grass has moved in. Soon the sandbox itself will be dug up and sewn with lawn or scattered with rocks. 

The display made for a bit of secret joy not available to the motorists. I had intended to but never did thank the woman who lived there. When I see the tulip people, I’ll say thanks before they disappear. 

2. Infidelity 

In the TV news game, it’s called fidelity, the practice of ensuring that the words you write and the audience hears match the pictures you use and the audience sees. Write to the pictures was mantra. Write to the pictures, the great CFRN news director Steve Hogle would say. If you have video of a deer bounding through the bush near Mayfair Park, don’t write that the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra calls the Winspear Centre home. If you are reporting that the military is now helping the fire relief effort in Drayton Valley, show people in uniform arriving in Drayton Valley. Establish a faithfulness between what is heard and what is seen. Like good grammar in writing, it’s easier to keep the viewer with you when things flow. 

Hogey

The discipline also builds trust. To some degree, it’s a kind of verification, a practice to persuade the age-old skeptics, bless their noncredulous hearts, for whom being told is not good enough. Show me, they say. Now, what is shown can be subject to all kinds of manipulation, as Dylan warns us.

When I was in Missouri
They would not let me be
I had to leave there in a hurry
I only saw what they let me see

Still, it’s a valuable internal resource, a kind of portable polygraph of perception practice to ask yourself, when you are being asked to accept a claim, do the pictures match the words? When they don’t, it might be because you’re  not getting the whole story. Like in the drug ads on U.S. cable TV. If the pictures show a smiling person walking in slow motion on a pier set on a placid lake at sunrise, but the words from the announcer tell you the drug might cause side effects from thrush to bleeding ulcers, then, stop. There might be more to the story. The health claims of the drug might be alloyed with other facts for the consumer to weigh. 

When CNN inveighs against a former president as a clear and present threat to the democracy of the country, and then gifts this former president a live, primetime townhall meeting, it might feel like what you hear doesn’t jibe with what you see. This infidelity registered with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat who teased CNN thusly: “Democracy is in danger and tune in tonight for an hour with the demagogue!” Again, there might be more to the story. One old explanation is that the news media is a business, and cannot continuously anger those for whom it pays best to reach through their commercials. That’s what Walter Lippmann thought a century ago. And, suddenly, I’m sinking in the deep end. I track these thoughts only as a reminder to trust the tiny voices of doubt and follow them below the surface when things feel out of joint.

3. Chalk 

One of the most dramatic transformations in nature is the metamorphosis of a grass field into a soccer pitch. This was the work underway as I pedalled by the Victoria Soccer Club on 142 Street one afternoon last week. A groundskeeper wheeled a chalking machine across the grass, framing the top of the penalty area with a thick white line. He worked slowly and alone. I imagined the view of the scene from a plane overhead—a contrail line on the earth. 

Last year in Toronto, in a World Cup qualifier against Panama, Alphonso Davies sprinted 40 yards to catch up to a loose ball that looked like it would roll over the right wing touch line. In an exquisite display of grace, balance and timing, he saved the ball from going out of play, separated it from the Panama defender and raced away with it. On the play he scored what turned out to be the winning goal. But that’s not the item, or it’s not the whole item. What he did was marvelous, but it was marvelous, in part, because he did it in a tight space. He acquired a kind of immortality dribbling through the eye of a needle. 
Creativity might need some confinement. It might need not enough money, not enough time and it might actually need not enough space. Playing outside the lines is fun and it’s vital, especially if those lines are arbitrary. Playing inside the lines can be just as memorable. Indeed, we need the lines. We also need those artists who, every spring here, are the first to chalk the lines.

Thanks for being out there, friends.