Glenn Kubish

It’s the end of week as we knew it, amicis.    Here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude.   Listen to the Three Things podcast, episode 119:                                1. The Stoics   “But, you ask, if a wise man receives a blow, what shall he do?” the Stoic philosopher Seneca asked in an essay written almost 2,000 years ago. He answered himself: “What Cato did when he was struck in the face. He did not flare up, he did not avenge the wrong, he did not even forgive it, but he said that no wrong had been done.”* The “struck in the face” part feels very 2023. It’s a big part of the first round of the NHL playoffs, striking in the face is. I’m picturing the padded punches to the kisser in scrums after the whistle that the cameras love, the face washes as they are euphemistically called. This is where Stoicism has something to teach the players—and to teach ...

Happy end of the week, friends. I don’t recommend ignoring the horrific news of the past week. I just think it is still somehow worth the effort of noticing what we notice that makes us happy or grateful, remembering it, recording it. Here’s my list from a tough week.                                            1. The oilers   The spit and sizzle of a couple of breakfast eggs frying in olive oil in a small pan in the kitchen last week was a good sound. I haven’t given enough thought to olive oil. We are oil-rich at our house. There’s stir-fry oil, canola oil and peanut oil. We have olive oil for cooking and olive oil for finishing. I know the difference because Auntie Shelagh has attached a piece of green tape to each bottle, and, in black Sharpie, printed the words “cooking” or “finishing” so I don’t mix them up and use the $30 bottle of Lorenzo to fry my greasy spoon eggs....

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...

The University of Alberta President, David Turpin, stood on stage at convocation ceremonies and asked the graduates seated before him to look back. "Your parents, your siblings, your grandparents, your spouses, your children, your friends, let's turn around and say thank you," Turpin said. Under Turpin's baton, a couple hundred gowned students rose in a wave from their floor seats in the Jubilee Auditorium, their mortarboards bobbing, their academic hoods, red for Law, white for Arts, shining. They cheered and clapped and received back hoots and hollers and hellos from the balconies. It was something to behold from our seats in row C of the first balcony. It is something again to behold from the stage. For a couple of years I sat on Alumni Council. Among the thanks for the early morning meetings on campus was the chance to represent alumni on stage during convocation.  It wasn't much of a chance, actually. It was a privilege to sit gowned up with th...

I am putting this in the blog so I don't forget the question I texted to eldest son Alexander tonight. And the answer I got back about 20 minutes later.  I asked Alex about margin because I am working on a presentation that hinges on a creative handling of the word marginalization. On my own, I had made an etymological connection between "margin" and "margarine," but Alex advised that was "flimsy" and, moreover, "false." Why I thought I could venture out all on my own when we have a son trained in classics at the University of Alberta is beyond me. Actually, it's pretty much all beyond me. A classics degree is not the most obvious path to take in a technocratic, careerist world, but our technocratic, careerist world needs classics kids. We need their perspective, their long view, their commitment to learning and accuracy and the concepts the gird public life. Gratias tibi agimus, Alex. With Alex, in classi...

Here is Steinbeck: It occurs to me that, just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat. These words are sown 50 pages into Travels with Charley in Search of America, the author's account of his drive across the United States in 1960 in his GMC camper truck, Rocinante, and with his poodle, Charley. It remains a thrill to have a good book on the go. And by book I mean a physical, in-your-hand text that can be bent, its pages dog-eared, written on, marked up, lived with. The confident print just stands there, letter upon letter, word after word, unmoving, brought to life by the scanning eye that sees that it is good. We are a family of booked words. Here is the column of Alex's classics books on the dining room table tonight: Okay, we...

I'm sure I learned a lot in grade seven. Some Australian history, some Guy de Maupassant, some wrestling moves in gym class, no doubt. I think I learned how to light a stage in drama class and, in health class, how cows reproduce. I began to learn that some teachers were only a day or two ahead of their students. But I also learned in grade seven how to be alone. And that was a lesson courtesy one of the few great teachers I have had in my learning life. I've never forgotten it. It was Mr. Litwin's science class at St. Francis of Assisi School in wide open northeast Edmonton. It was a time when teachers were known by their first names. Those names were either Mrs., Miss, or, as in Mr. Litwin's case, Mr. Of course, he had a first name. It was Nestor. It was still a few years before I would learn that Nestor was an iconic name, one of those names that might, in fact, indicate one's character, fate. For, Nestor was a Greek commander, counsellor to Agamemnon, kn...