Glenn Kubish

It's 3:03 a.m. Just like that, sleep has thrown me up on the shore. My legs are planks. My eyes feel stretched over my temples. The curtains let in slivers of streetlight. With the earbuds cord in my right hand, I fish for the iPhone in the comforter depths. There it is. And now the blur. I hit the eighth note icon and find the song. Music fills my empty concert hall skull. The song is As The Moon Starts To Rise by The Milk Carton Kids. It's been the song of the pandemic for me. It has all the gifts a beautiful song bestows. Consoling harmonies. The shining sound of guitar strings. Snapshots of happy days past shared by, I think, a parent and a child. The sad passage of time. The moon. The stars. A telescope. Parting. Love. Death. Connection. An unanswered question. A twist ending. And place names that are thrilling in the way place names are thrilling when, as a tourist in a car below, you see them in gigantic font on highway signs above, when everything, even a highw...

My inbox immunity is low. Still, the message from the Winspear Centre hit home. Soon after Alberta Health Services recommended on Thursday that large gatherings of more than 250 people be cancelled, the Winspear scratched its March concerts. Helping to flatten the curve means instruments down. "The health and well-being of our patrons, staff and musicians are of the utmost importance," the email said. So, for now, the music dies. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that live orchestral music should be maintained in a pandemic. I'm just saying I remember what C.S. Lewis wrote in 1948 in a piece called On Living in an Atomic Age. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let the bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our fr...