Glenn Kubish

  It's the end of the week as we know it, friends. Here is this week's Three Things podcast. 1. Jars Apparently, I am also from Chortkiv in western Ukraine, and not just Delwood in northeast Edmonton. Thanks to my mother’s record-keeping, I can trace my family back four generations on her side to the small city of 30,000 people, which is where my great-great grandparents Maria and Dmytro lived and where their son Yosyp was born. It’s close, 100 kilometres or so, from a recent Russian missile strike. I don’t know if I still have relatives there. I have never visited or done an ancestry search. For me, the old country is St. Basil’s Ukrainian Cultural Centre on 109th Street. The siege on Ukraine has brought back flashes from my youth. Ukrainian dancing ribbons for my sisters’ hair. Perogies and cabbage rolls pronounced “pedaheh” and “holopchi.” Borscht made deluxe with spare ribs. The sweet smell of hot wax for Easter pysanky. A blue-covered book on conversational Ukrainian by Y...

From Edmonton, Canada, happy end of the week, friends.  Here are three things that I noticed made me happy or grateful this week.  This week's podcast and transcript. 1.  Human beans  ☕ I was out for a morning bike ride and was coming up to a construction crew putting in new sidewalks on Saskatchewan Drive near the Humanities Building. Infrastructure scenes are rich. Hard hats, big boots, worn jeans, rumbling cement trucks, laughter, cigarettes held ash tip and ember pointed in—and the greatest care with rakes and trowels to set the sidewalks as perfect as paragraphs. Anyways, three workers were just ahead of me, kneeling down, stirring their coffees.  “Looks like I arrived at the right time for coffee,” I said as I passed, as a joke, a throwaway question.  Without a second of delay, buddy says back to me, “Brother, how do you take yours? Cream? Sugar? Just black?”  “Half a cup,” I said, “just black, you are very kind.”  “Absolutely,” he said, “it...