Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 140: experts, tomatoes, relay

If I had a happiness and gratitude sonar, these would be the three pings from last week. 

Three Things, episode 140: 

                           

1. Experts 

Before social media and the democratization of knowledge made everyone an expert, there was a class of people called, well, for lack of a better term, experts. Newspaper editors. Doctors. Politicians. University professors. Civil servants.  It wasn’t necessarily the best of times. Many other voices weren’t heard, lots of experience was somehow ruled to be of no value.  I worked in newspapers as the hierarchy of knowledge came crashing down on some bewildered gatekeepers who I can still see walking out through the debris of fallen pillars as the influencers sashayed in. Those technocrats are not the experts I want back, but I do miss some experts. Or, at least, one specific category of expert. I miss the disc jockey.

I still prefer my music to be served up by a human being in voice. Or, at least, a human being I know or can picture or hear behind a shared list or link. I grew up on AM radio before it was news, weather, traffic and talk. I didn’t get Sultans of Swing from a Sunday chill mix. I got it from Len Thuesen. At night I could bring in the voices and the music from radio stations Washington State and even California. So, there’s nostalgia in the mix, for sure. But there’s also, in my preference for DJs, a reminder that music is social. It’s Brucey down the back lane saying you gotta hear this new band called Boston. It’s Shelagh taking over the record player at a party at Sue’s back in undergrad days. It’s Dave leaving a John Hiatt mixtape with me in Vancouver, explaining that Hiatt could make a song out of a word just by the way he sang it. It’s Lloyd saying give Sam Baker a try. It’s Russ’s Lost in the Noise on Spotify. It’s Dylan in DJ character before playing a song by soul singer Sterling Harrison.

“Before he died he was singing for dollar tips at a barbecue joint at 82nd and Weston. There is great music happening all over the country. Sometimes you gotta seek it out. If you don’t seek it out, it’s just gonna disappear.”

It’s Mulligan Stew on Saturdays on CKUA. 

Music is intensely personal, of course. Which is why it matters when someone who has put in the time to seek it out takes the time to reveal a bit of themselves by saying, hey, listen to this, you might enjoy this. I’m getting a little weary of what I like. It’s more interesting to hear what others like, especially when they put their voices into it.

2. Tomatoes 

From the third week of May until about this time of year, I start my workday mornings the same way: stop at the toilet, get the coffee going, confirm that it’s not Saturday or Sunday, start the Spelling Bee, look out the kitchen window at the tomatoes. The outline of the plants is all that’s visible now that we are slipping into the dark. But I can picture them. I know some of them individually. We go back, those tomatoes and I. This year we planted six seedling varieties in one of the big backyard container gardens, one each of Little Bing, San Marzano, Red Grape, Lemon Boy, Better Boy and, in this corner, the heavyweight Beefsteak Hybrid.

The tomatoes put in a good performance this growing season. Better than their neighbours, the  indolent cukes. The beans, carrots, onions, lettuce and zucchini had a good 2023, too. But it’s the tomatoes, right? It’s always the tomatoes. The tomatoes are a different breed. They need more help. They accept more help. They need their suckers pruned. They need dedicated water beyond what the sky drops. They need staking and tying. This year, the Red Grape has grown so high that I had to electrical-tape a length of tent pole to the original wooden stake to keep the plant pointed up. The San Marzano Tower needed an extra stake, so a cross country ski pole was pressed into service. Tomatoes welcome the time I spend shuffling through the garage looking for an old tent pole imagined anew. Around the tent pole, the little grape tomatoes hang in clusters like 16th notes up the register. Down below is a dotted whole note, a massive beefsteak that’s grown out from the cover of its leafage. It’s like a small green pumpkin. Every morning and every evening I check on its colour. Every morning, every evening, no change. It has been a long, stale green light of a tomato. Until Tuesday when quietly, faintly, it signalled, with a new streak of orange-red on its skin, something else. The season is changing. Soon it will be a time to uproot. And, then, as the temperature falls, a time, in our lit kitchen, to make sauce.

3.  Relay 

I remember reading that one of the big riddles to be solved by the inventors of the telegraph was how to keep the electrical current strong enough to get the original message through over a long distance, and received clearly.  Some kind of relay station was the answer. This was the informational beauty of the double play the Blue Jays engineered against the Yankees in the first game of their series. With runners on first and second and one out, Giancarlo Stanton was at the plate as the tying run. He grounded to short.  Bo Bichette fielded the ball. Instead of tossing it to third base for an easy force, he threw back against the grain to second where Davis Schneider was ready for the catch and the instant relay to Cavan Biggio at first in time to double up the batter by a step. 6-4-3. Over and out. 

Thanks for being out there, friends. Go, Jays!