Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 124: soft rain, Hard Rain, chainsaw

 

Into the books goes another week. But in case I want to read that part of the book again, here are three things from that week that left behind lines of happiness and gratitude.

Three Things podcast, episode 124:    

                           

1. Soft rain 

The news lately has been as old as it gets. Even older than crime, the want ads, the obits and the sports scores. The news here these days is elementally old. The themes in the media are the old media themselves: earth, wind, water and fire. 
Forest fire season arrived early. People have fled their homes. Properties are cindered. The questions are the questions of the firefighter: Which way is the wind blowing? When will it rain? Will it ever rain? 

People are jittery. I know I am on edge. A black fly outside lands on the dining room window while I am peering out and up at the brown sky and, for an instant, I feel it knows it could take over. I see a red-winged blackbird perched on top of a bull rush. A giant matchstick, I think. I imagine the vestal fire contained in the motors of the vehicles gliding by on 142 Street: small, hooded, axled bonfires. The setting sun looks like the red ball we’d kick around in the schoolyard. 

It was onto this troubled landscape that a gentle rain started to fall one evening last week, hitting the dry eavestrough at the front of the house and sounding like a telegraph operator tapping out a Morse Code message from far away. I stood on the porch and listened to the percussion. I stood still for two minutes while it clicked.  Lately, California has gotten rain, too.

California just after the rain (photo courtesy of J.S. Bumbarger)

Shelagh’s niece Janet, who is the Three Things podcast correspondent in Thousand Oaks, CA, messaged me to say “the place looked for awhile like she imagines Ireland looks.” Stop. “And the prickly pear cacti are blooming like I’ve never seen.” Stop. “Typically, each lobe or ear or whatever they are called get one or two buds. Now they have 20.” Stop. 

And voila! (photo courtesy of J.S. Bumbarger)

The Edmonton rain didn’t last long enough, it never does, but the message got through and it sunk in that night on the front porch.

2. Hard Rain 

The song that gave us so many unforgettable images, including the highway of diamonds with nobody on it, itself celebrated its diamond anniversary last week. Sixty years ago Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall first a-ppeared in a-public. 

Once upon a time, I saw and heard Dylan live, it was August 1986, it was Vancouver, one of two times I have been in the same arena as him, the only time I heard him sing Hard Rain live. It was the song that Patti Smith sang in 2016 when Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Memorably, Smith froze during the second verse. In front of the decorated assembled, with the immortals conjured from their crumbled tombs hanging in the air, into the gaze of the cameras that sent her performance to the wide world and to audiences not yet born,  Smith stopped singing. The wheels came off. She looked mortified. What would she do now?  She confessed she was so nervous and asked permission to start again. 

With the support of the audience, she resurrected herself. I’ll be able to watch the video on YouTube again in a year, it's that potent.  It is not the stuff of the clickbait posts that promise to identify the most common mistakes we all make and how to prevent them. This wasn’t a mistake that could be CONTROL-ALT-DELETED or smoothed over and buffed up by a little bit of technology. This was not an error and recovery that some AI entity would make. Patti Smith tripped and fell and unexpectedly opened a doorway to a reservoir of humanity and honesty that was, and still is, breathtaking. This was someone who knew his song well, and so she kept singing. 

3. Chainsaw 

As a boy, I was more interested in how poems worked than how machines did. I didn’t yet understand poems were machines. Anyways, with me, the unbroken line of Kubish males at ease with machines ground to a halt. I passed this legacy onto our sons. My mechanical indifference didn’t stop me from inheriting a lawnmower, a table saw and an air compressor. I use power tools to drill, saw, sand and fasten. Simply, lamentably, my incurisoity simply prevented me from treating the machines with respect. 

When Michael inevitably asked to borrow the chainsaw last week, I said, yes, of course, and then started hunting for it in the garage. It wasn’t under the shuffleboard table that we have never used, it wasn’t under the spare tires or with the extra bicycles. I moved a couple of crates aside, pushed away my childhood Tonka toys and from a tangle of old extension cords extracted the chainsaw. I carefully filled the fuel reservoir to the top and poured in the pink chain oil. I bought a new blade and fitted it onto the arm. Michael said it looked like I was saying the rosary. I primed the line, pulled out the choke, activated the guard and pulled the cord, three, four, five, six, seven times until it sputtered a response. Choke back in, I pulled again, and 

<imagine chainsaw sound here>  

which was the sound of:

Forgiveness. 

Thanks for being out there friends.