Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 131: language, movies, trains

Happy end of the week, friends. This is where once a week I try to notice, remember and record three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude as, hey, hey, hey, the rolling river rolls on.

Three Things podcast, episode 131:

                            

1. Language 

I suspect that artificial intelligence has already done laps around me on this observation, but here’s the observation: the capacity for and the enjoyment of figurative language sets human beings apart from the machines. To be able to say that something is something that it obviously isn’t, or to be able to say that something is like something that it obviously isn’t, and what’s more, to get one’s meaning across, and, what’s even more, to impart a sense of newness and wonder in the world, this is what we can do with language as human beings. Metaphor and analogy are our superpowers. Thank you,  Man In Black. From the turntable in the house I grew up in, Johnny Cash walked the line and fell into a burning ring of fire, without doing either of those literally.  Then there were her eyes, they shone like the diamonds in a tune by the Irish Rovers. I am a rock, I am an island, Simon and Garfunkel confessed. Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone, Dylan analogized. Metaphorical Mick will never be your beast of burden. Duran Duran made us hungry like the wolf. Craig Finn mined this modern gem:

 
There was bloodsucker blues in the lobby at dusk/
She blew smoke in my face and it felt like a bus

A nice analogy there with something else kinda cool happening with the “blew smoke/blue smoke” homophone, too. One of my favourite all-time metaphors came from a political science professor back in my undergraduate days. A buddy had submitted a philosophy paper that had some challenges in its argument, to say the least.  I think he got a 4 on it. The comment was a 9, though. The essay, the prof wrote, was "a magpie’s nest of logic." Metaphor the win!

Every second weekend we pick up a dozen eggs at the University Farm. It’s part of the Heritage Hen program, which breeds alternatives to the monoculture eggs in the grocery store coolers. Last Saturday the chicks themselves were on display in a little lamp-lit plastic bin.  I watched while a dad bent down to the level of his young daughter, who was transfixed by the chattering chicks. 

"Which ones do you like best?" he asked. "The yellow ones? How about the ones that have the stripes like sparrows? I kinda like those guys."

How about the ones that have the stripes like sparrows?  This is how the little ones learn to see in words what isn’t, but is, really there.

2. Movies

 
My bicycle route to St. Albert is either the exact same route in the morning or a very different route on the mornings I see things along the same route for the first time. There’s a landscaping supplies lot on the corner of 137 Avenue and 142 Street, for instance.  Piles of topsoil, rocks, gravel and mulch, same old, same old. Unless the site is also a giant mise-en-place of cumin, coriander, turmeric and quarter-inch potato cubes set out on the kitchen counter on the days Shelagh has a ground beef and potato curry on the go. 

Further north on the pedal, it’s not dining that comes to mind. It’s dinosaurs. Behemoth graders and dump trucks, a long-necked excavator that resembles a brontosaurus, a scraper that trundles by like an armoured stegosaurus—these are the mechanical creatures and their primitive grunts and roars that transform an otherwise routine construction site on 142 Street into the land before time. 

Maybe I played with too many Tonka toys in the sandbox by the side of the garage as a boy.  Maybe the dinosaur skeleton in the old provincial museum on 102 Avenue stayed in my imagination for good. Or maybe there’s something about being out on a bicycle in the fresh air, legs turning and looking around that opens the little theatres of enchantment I find on my rides. Most times, it’s just a routine bicycle ride. Other times, when I’m lucky, I’m a film projectionist, spinning a supply wheel and a takeup wheel, watching from behind the window of my glasses as fantastic scenes come to life in the auditorium of my skull. 

3. Trains 

For a cup of coffee one summer, I worked as a car checker in the old CN Calder Yard along 127 Avenue in north Edmonton. My job was to make sure the cars of the freight trains were coupled together in the right order. I had a pencil and printout of the makeup of each train that I would check against the actual train as its hopper cars, flat cars, box cars, gondolas and refrigerator cars rolled through. Each car has a unique identification code of letters and numbers. You’ve seen them. CNWX 396466, for instance, would be a Canadian Wheat Board grain car. My printout would show that the next car should be a freight car with identification number, say, CN 137088. If it was, then check, check and then check check check check for each of the other 80 cars of the train. 

Photo courtesy of Leonard Yee

The experience previewed what editing a paragraph on deadline would feel like a few years later when I got a newspaper job. I never left  the trains behind. Trains are sentences. Writers build trains according to a grammar that keeps their meaning on the rails and keeps them from running away. Words themselves might look the same as ever as they pass by the reader’s gaze, but, like train cars, they carry all kinds of packed-away meanings. Some words are from other lands. Some words are explosive. 

On the news last week was the account of an 86-year-old man randomly attacked while taking photographs downtown. Photography is his hobby. The news showed some of his photos on TV. One pic was a CN freight train. That rang a bell.  I reached out to the man’s son on email and shared my train story. He sent me his dad’s photo as a gift. He included a defiant sentence about how tough the old guy is, and how the attack will not derail his photography. 

Thanks for being out there, friends. See you next time. 

Photo via Jay Woolner