Glenn Kubish

To keep the feeble noticing equipment from completely seizing up, I try each week to think about three things that left behind tracks of happiness or gratitude. The snow is good for tracks. Episode 95:                      1. Fables   I was lyin’ on the living room couch in, if not quite, pain, then, at least, unease, as Shelagh, bent over over under the lamp, sterilized needle in hand, face set in determination, pricked the sole of my right foot. For days, I had limped around with a sliver in the ball of my foot. I had to modify my walk down the stairs to footfall on the heel. Pedalling was a pain. Shelagh is a sliversmith, though. And, after a minute of “come on, alreadys,” she got it.   This sliver that had come close to incapacitating me, was, as I looked at it, thinner than the 1/8th inch notch on a tape measure. Undone by so tiny an intruder, I felt slightly mortified. But Shelagh made the reasonable point that log, ...

This week's Three Things podcast is episode 50 . This week's three things that made me happy or grateful are:  1. Sardines This year for Christmas, our eldest son, Alex, is getting sardines. I found them with the other candy at the checkout till at the Italian Centre Shop on 170th Street. They are milk chocolate sardines. Before he died, my grandfather, for whom Alex is named, put down an account of his life in 10 pages of handwritten, blue ink. The story starts in October 1914 in a village in the partitioned territory of eastern Europe. My grandfather recalls how, as a six-and-a-half year old boy, he overheard the men talking as their ordinary lives were being pulverized by the machinery of war. He writes: “We were ordered by government to prepare to leave our homes, bake bread and other food, be ready when order comes to go. Men talking between themselves. What to do?  Leave and go, but where? Born here, grown up, that is our home.”  This is a terrifying scene. I admire...