Glenn Kubish

And that's a wrap on the week, friends!   Here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude. Three Things podcast, episode 118*:                         I bought a pizza from a vending machine last week. No, don’t report me to Sonia   Piano. It was for science. I wanted to know if the pizza was as good as, say, Tony’s on 111 Avenue. It was not. The crust, the sauce, the cheese, the haphazard pepperoni placement, the pepperoni, the fact I couldn’t get into the machine to watch the pizza being made—all of this made the encounter with the food machine unnerving. It was the sound, though, the lack of human sound that really got through. The machine pizza itself was disgorged like a tired bus passenger.   At Tony’s there was a hum. The servers wore black, the cooking staff wore white, together, as they moved back and forth at the kitchen counter, never colliding, they struck me as a kind of...

It was the font. It was that familiar Miyata font—the lower-case, Japanese-styled letters with breathing room between them, and the way the decalled m , i , y , a , t and a leaned slightly forward, and, placed on the down tube, the way they guided the eye up, reminiscent of a bicycle moving slowly up a mountain pass—that took me in, and for a couple of seconds, made me stand there the other day, just stand there, staring at brand sticker on a bicycle locked to a street sign, staring standing still, while old images flickered back to life, and burned. Back in the 1980s, I had a grey Miyata 1000. It was a touring bike – it had a long wheel base, it featured "triple-butted chromo tubing," which, I think, meant it had a strong and stiff frame made to carry a lot of gear. If it was a bit slow and ponderous to maneuver in the city, with the city's stops and starts and turns, it became what it truly was doing work out in the open on the highway. There, it was a stead...