Glenn Kubish

Happy end of the week, y’all! Here are three things from that past week that for now have left behind some tracks of happiness and gratitude.                                         1. Big smiles   We filled up on beers and bar food at Towers, and, then, Shelagh and I brought down the average age at the MacEwan University pub by paying our tab and leaving. We walked up a few blocks, took the bridge over 109 Street to Allard Hall and got seats at a fundraising concert for Ukraine. It felt quite downtown-y and undergraduate-y. The pianist John Stetch was the draw. He banged out variations on J.S. Bach, F. Chopin, N. Diamond, T. Swift and S. Twain during the concert, which also featured a jazz take on Beer Barrel Polka, I think.  Stetch, who grew up in these parts, used the word “tentacles” to describe the connections re-experienced being back in his Edmonton roots. My tentacle to ...

On the hunch that remembering once a week to make note of the things that make me happy and grateful will make it easier to notice more of what is waiting to be noticed... Three Things, episode 90:                                1. That delicious moon   It’s hard to make a nutritional case for the perogy as the one food I would take to a desert island, but chekay, chekay, as my grandparents would say, wait, wait just a second, there’s more in a perogy than potato and cheese. For one thing, a chunk of my childhood is in those dumplings. Both my grandmothers made perogies. My Winnipeg grandma made exotic blueberry perogies. My parents have kept the tradition alive, although my dad devotes as much time and care to the butter, onions and pepper in which the perogies swim as to the doughy packets themselves. I have, so far, not kept up what’s expected of me in the family perogy-making chain.   We order ...

Outside, the pickup trucks flowed along Stony Plain Road at a predictable pace, announcing themselves with muffled throbs of acceleration. Across the street, the Pizza 73 awning stared in unblinking blue and yellow. Inside, the force came from the piano, and the colours flashed from the piano, and the piano was being driven across the darkness by John Stetch. Stetch at The Dish That was the wonderful ride we went on last night in our city. Stetch, the Edmonton born and raised jazz pianist now pounding out a living in Harlem, was back home and playing a resto-house concert at The Dish. The menu—the traditional 12 courses of Ukrainian cookery arranged from Stetch's grandmother's cookbook that, itself, now duct-tape bound, sat on the top of his piano—was itself a work of art, and served professionally and reverentially by workers who understood. Mini Borsch. Lamb Shashlik. Kotlety. Zucchini Rolls. Smoked Trout Pate On Rye. Perohy. Nachynani Yayechka. Smoked Salmon. Eggpla...