Glenn Kubish

Here are there things that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness this week:                                1. Boss   For those of a certain vintage, and I’m checking my look in the mirror here, word that Springsteen is coming to Edmonton in November calls to mind the saga of Pete The Rocker. Back in the early 1980s, Pete engineered a ceaseless lobbying campaign to get Springsteen to play Edmonton. He wrote letters, he hounded his management company, he put together a 50,000 name petition, which I signed. Pete loved the Boss, that was obvious. He also loved Edmonton, and was open about it, which was different. Edmonton was a place to be from, a place to grow up in, a place to get an oilpatch job, but people my age here didn’t seem to love their hometown like people in, say, New Jersey, or anywhere else did. Pete, who I’ve never met, but whose son also rocks and is a friend, turned the equation ar...

Happy end of the week, y'all! From Edmonton, where August’s average high of 26.5 degrees C, call it 80 degrees Fahrenheit, was the second warmest since 1880 (thanks, Chris), here are three things that made for some happiness or gratitude this week.                           1. This time of year   There’s a lot going on. Young people are going back to school. Canadas are in test flight mode. Tomatoes and cucumbers are coming off the vines as gardens descend into ruin. The sun sets before midnight. It is a letting-go time. It’s a tuning-in time. Every pitch and every swing matter in baseball. U.S. Open tennis is on its two-week off-Broadway run under the lights. (I would cancel my sports cable channels if it wasn’t for live sports. That’s not quite true. When Ken and Ivanka on Sportsnet are on their game, they are worth extra bucks a month. But the big voices from the big desks, the swirling music and the hit-me-in-the-...

It's the end of another week of staggering carnage in the greater world and of small happinesses and gratitudes in my little one. Here's the Three Things podcast, episode 63 . 1. Eyes and ears March madness is on bloody and terrifying display in Ukraine. In that arena are two colleagues, doing work for good. I admire them both. Tim, who is a videographer, is on professional assignment for the national news. Jerry, who was a reporter, is on a personal mission. Both are doing what journalists do, which is to use the least private of the human senses—sight and sound—to convey something that is out there, an objective world. “This is such an important story to tell,” Tim said in a message. “So important to hear the voices from the people here. It’s heartbreaking.” For his part, Jerry booked three weeks off work and headed 8,000 km for the Ukraine border. “I’m really here just to grow and learn as a person in no official capacity,” he said, adding that that has meant “carrying lugga...

  The little Three Things podcast  is where each week I try to notice three things that I noticed that made me happy or grateful. Not the biggest things in the world, just things like: 1.  Frazil Ice 🧊 🥘 In the days before the North Saskatchewan River freezes, it blooms with floating ice pads. These are those short days, and the mosaic pieces of ice are called frazil pans.  Frazil, F-R-A-Z-I-L, what a great word, the F-R of freeze and frigid and fragile, the shard of the Z, and the way the L lingers and trails off like in the words gentle and beautiful and peaceful. My hydrologist friend Steffen can explain how frazil ice forms at northern latitudes when the atmospheric conditions and heat exchanges are conducive to its making. I phoned Steffen at his ice-free retirement home and we talked ice. I asked him if he missed frazil ice.  “I definitely miss them,” he said from Ladysmith, BC. “I loved going onto the Terwillegar footbridge and just watching them go by....

Happy end o’ the week, friends. I try to scrabble the meaning of three things that made me happy or grateful each week. Here's this week's Three Things podcast: 1. A healthy injection There were 96 commercials during the broadcast of World Series Game 4 between Atlanta and the Astros. 95 of them were in the same basic category—attempts to get my attention and then my money to consume beer, fast food (especially the Burger King Crispy Chicken Parmesan), winter tires, power tools or the Rav-4. There were commercials to get me to consume Hollywood movies. Ads to bring big pieces of exercise equipment into my house. And a surprising number of commercials to convince me to bet against the house—gambling site ads are in high rotation. One of the 96 was not like the others. It was a story. With a beginning, middle and end. With a reminder that I’m not just a consumer. This was the Heritage Minute, the story of Banting and Best, and, I learned, Macleod and Collip, and the story of L...