Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 138: microscopes, jackknife, drama

Back to school is in the air. Hope you all have your duo-tangs, hole reinforcements for binders and your inky-pink erasers, or have helped others get the same. Here are three other things from the past (week) that left behind traces of happiness and gratitude. 

Three Things, episode 138:

                              

1. Microscopes

I remember the moment so vividly still because it was pickled in the brine of junior high school fear and doubt. Grade 7 science class. Mr. Litwin was our teacher. He wore colourful silk scarves around his neck to hide, he said, the marks of the stitches left behind when his head was completely severed and sewn back on after a plane crash in the war. He would tell that story and gauge our reactions and smile. We were studying cellular structure one week. There were illustrations in our biology textbook showing the differences between plant cells and animal cells. It was our job as budding scientists to determine if the cells we saw through a microscope were plant or animal cells, and then submit our findings and reasonings on paper. On Monday, it was a plant. On Tuesday, it was a plant. On Wednesday, same. On Friday, the easy talk in the lab was that the specimen on the plate was again a plant. I thought it was an animal. One of the organelles, I can’t remember which one, maybe the Golgi apparatus or the endoplasmic reticulum, was animal in nature to my little eye.

I said as much, and immediately felt the power of the influencers. The athletes thought it was a plant. So did the social set. So did the kids in the students’ union. I was alone in my inkling. And I began to swing to the majority. As I handed in my paper, I asked Mr. Litwin if it, indeed, was an animal cell. He said if I thought it was an animal cell, I should put that down as my answer, that’s why it was a test. So I did, even though by then I knew I was wrong. When the papers came back marked, I was right. It was a microscopic animal cell we had been given for that final experiment of the week. Years went by, decades even, before I dimly saw that what were made to look at through those microscopes in the science room at St. Francis of Assisi School on 66 St. was ourselves. I am thankful that Mr. Litwin didn’t lose his head in that plane crash in the war. I mean, I’m pretty sure he didn’t.

2. Jackknife

“Shit, what was that?!

That was my unscientific assessment of whatever it was that had just gotten lodged in my bicycle’s rear wheel as I headed north at a good clip onto the 142 Street bridge over the MacKinnon Ravine. This is not the item, but did you know that next year will mark the 50th anniversary of City Council’s decision, by one single, solitary vote, to kill the plan to run a freeway through the ravine? The decision stunned the progress lobby. Crews had already started clearcutting the trees and installing sewer lines. They put their tools down after the 6-5 vote. People ask what does municipal democracy look like? The MacKinnon Ravine is what municipal democracy looks like. I try to call it all to mind whenever I pedal the bridge and look out over the eastern railing to the trees and down to the shared-used path shaped like a giant asphalt divining rod pointed to the North Saskatchewan River. Sometimes, little people learn to ride bicycles down there.

I was just about to replay that bit of local history when I hit the brakes to investigate the horrible sound from the back wheel. I turned my bike upside down for a closer look. Somehow, the cord that anchored the right rear pannier to the back rack had sheared off and wound itself tightly around the rear axle—behind the sprocket. To make things weirder, the little S hook at the end of the cord was now hooked to a spoke. Removing my back wheel would be a time-consuming process. It would mean releasing the air in the tire to get it clear of the fender and then pumping my little pump approximately 750 times to re-inflate the tube. My fingers couldn’t loosen the frayed cord. A tire iron was too blunt a tool. I carry a jackknife that must be almost 50 years old. It’s a Kamp-King. Besides its single blade, a bottle opener and what I think might be a leather tool, it has a can opener. I always thought its sharp hook made it look like a question mark.
That hook was the answer. It let me slowly pick loose the twisted cord and get the wheel back in rolling form.

It is satisfying when time, tools and technique come together to persuade a trivial but stubborn knot of problem, like the one that questioned me near the MacKinnon Ravine Bridge last week, to relent.

3. Drama

You know the tune, sing it with me now: “Hello muddah, hello faddah…"

After years of acting up in class, I took drama as an option in junior high to try to get marks for it. In our little troupes, we dreamed up, staged and choreographed our own productions, picked the music, designed the lighting schemes, wrote the scripts. We built and performed our little created worlds before cycling home to watch Gilligan’s Island. In one assignment we were to act out a piece of music. I played Allan Sherman writing and lip-syncing his lettah, while its scenes came to life in the pantomime of my fellow actors behind me. Like a good TV news story, pictures and words matched.

I don’t know if I am the same person I used to be. I sometimes think of my life as a series of distinct books lined up on a library shelf, adjacent, touching but not always connected. But there are moments, hello muddah, hello faddah moments, when nothing seems to have changed, when the book is still open and the narrative throughline is legible. One of those moments happened last week as I stood in front of a classroom at MacEwan University and launched into a lecture about strategic communications and the courage it takes to ask the right questions to frame the challenge properly. As I talked, I clicked through a Google Slides presentation on the big screen behind me so words and pictures matched.

Thanks for being out there, friends.