Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 129: double play, Poe, real scoop

Happy end of the week, friends! Here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude.

Three Things podcast, episode 129:

1. Double play

I pedalled across the LRT tracks north of the ruins of the Coliseum and found a baseball diamond where I didn’t know one existed. I was on one of those lazy rides where I hope to see something new. The diamond was that. A real game of uniformed players was happening on it. I stopped and watched from a picnic table beyond the left field fence. A line drive was caught, but bobbled, and then dropped by the third baseman. I scored it an error—E-5. The base runner then moved to second on a single.

My infield position in my corporate slo-pitch years was first base.That’s where I was safe. I preferred playing third, but our manager didn’t. Prefer me playing third base. I was okay fielding the ball on the hot corner, even the balls hit hard right at me, but throwing the ball on target to first base in real time, with adrenalin pumping, that was a different ball game. It takes skill to block out the sight of the runner running to first base without really blocking out the sight of the runner running to first base because getting a quick, accurate read of the speed of that runner is what determines the speed you need to put on the throw to get the ball to first first. I was wild more than I wasn’t. And, so, it was easy for Kobes, who managed the team, to anchor me at first base. Not that I was any kind of a natural at first, either. When Kenny played third or shortstop, the ball was in my glove before I opened it. Those outs were unnerving. But for my glove as a kind of shield, the outs at first would have been my teeth.

The crack of the bat brought me back from the ago years and back to the game in front of me. Ground ball to third again. The runner on second ran for third. The third baseman fielded the ball neatly, remembered that a force was in play, stepped back to the base for the out and then loaded up and delivered the ball cross-diamond to get the runner, by a half step, at first base. Double play. Error reversed. What a throw. Between the players, the umpires and the few fans buffeted by the flag-snapping wind who sat in the bleachers, there were 25 of us, tops, who witnessed the play as exquisite as a diamond.

2. Poe

The morbid story of the Titanic submersible has stayed with me. Like tales of Edgar Allan Poe stay with me. The picture of five people, willingly sealed into a crypt-like craft and then lowered into the frigid ocean vault to inspect the corpse of a ship that went down with 1,500 souls, and then perishing themselves—this was updated Gothic literature. The fate of the submersible came up in conversation at Coffee Outside last week. Jeorg had an opinion, Hos did, too, and so did Darcy. They helped me understand the more macabre scientific aspects of the submersible short story. I said it all reminded me of The Cask of Amontillado, the way the victims were unwittingly guided to their tombs. To your vaults, Fortunato insists. I’m a mason, Montresor assures him, chillingly.

Darcy’s daughter was at Coffee Outside that morning. She told us she read Poe in school. The Tell-Tale Heart. It was invigorating to talk a little Poe first thing in the morning. Made me feel alive. In our little bouquet of conversation, this young woman was the authority. She knew the plot cold. She explained why the sound of the beating heart in the floorboards couldn’t be heard by the police investigators, even though the narrator was sure it could. Yes, the unreliable narrator in Edgar Allan Poe.

A wise man in our time has asked, what is it about lapsing into narrative that makes you think the storyteller is suddenly revealing the truth? Isn’t any narrator, like any witness, prone to lying or telling a partial truth or barnacling onto the truth that which isn’t? These feel like important questions for our story-soaked time. I’ll put them to my young interlocutor at Coffee Outside next time she’s there and listen to what she thinks Poe might have to say for himself.

3. A real scoop

I lived in and breathed in newsrooms for most of my working life. My heroes were reporters. I traced Uluschak editorial cartoons and taped them to my bedroom wall. A vivid memory from childhood is the whole family, three generations of us, watching a Bruce Hogle editorial in black and white on CFRN TV. I have all the badges, cub reporter to publisher, from the Edmonton Journal’s Junior Journal club. I delivered the Journal to homes along Delwood Road. I’ve worked the beat as a reporter, I’ve worked as a news director. In the pile of current newspapers on the coffee table downstairs is a copy of the Washington Post from January 14, 1982. In it, I just finished an article on page A23 datelined Paris about French President Francois Mitterand’s plan to invest billions of dollars to foster French inventiveness. I’m now half way through Yochai Benkler’s study of the asymmetrical media environments in the United States in 2016. I’ve been to and lived through ITV Christmas parties at the Chateau Lacombe.

Despite all of this investment in the news as a way of life, for me a real scoop is still what you put on an ice cream cone. In the house I grew up in, an ice cream cone was a transubstantiated entity. There was a ritual in its making. With solemnity, the Palm ice cream carton was removed from the freezer tabernacle. From the kitchen sink faucet issued a stream of holy water into the bowl of the scoop so the ball of ice cream would release onto the cone. There was a mystery in all of this. Making the cone was a parent, usually our father. From the counter above, the ice cream cone was dispensed to our outstretched hands below.

These days, I recommend the vegan banana honeycomb with chunks of sponge toffee from the Twice Cream ice cream shop off the bike lanes in Westmount. Single scoop. Amen.

Thanks for being out there, friends.