Glenn Kubish

Once a week I put out a podcast episode chronicling three things that left behind marks of happiness and gratitude. In part to keep the noticing equipment from rusting over completely. If you listen, you are guaranteed to smile. I mean, if you’re not smiling after thing 2, you qualify for a full refund, operators are standing by.                               1. Remains   I have a passing acquaintance with debris and litter. As I pedal through the city I make and then instantly erase a visual catalogue of things blown away or tossed away or lost: pine cones, branches, cigarette butts, lotsa them, busted coffee lids, plastic wrappers, cash register receipts, soiled tissue, dirty string, candy bar wrappers, ketchup packets, feathers, straws, bus transfers, tape, cardboard, napkins, shoes, hats, pants, fragments of shingles, shattered ballpoint pen barrels, balloons, old election candidate signs. I see and then...

Happy end of the week, y’all! Here are three things from slightly off the path that left behind some happiness or gratitude this week.  Three Things, episode 79:                                             1. Local news 🪰 Of all the news that has broken in the past week, of all the voices that I’ve heard talking about everything from the heat to Hockey Canada, of all the stories watched or read that I can’t quite recall, the story and the sound that have stayed with me were <Jeopardy music here>...cicadas. You’ve all heard them, but did you know they were here? I owe the fact that cicadas are in Edmonton to Taproot Edmonton reporter and recorder Brett McKay . I enjoy their sound. I like the sound of the word itself—cicada, three syllables, unstressed, stressed, unstressed, which makes it an amphibrach, the name for that kind of foot in poetry. Like Versace or Fi...

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...

Happy end of the week, friends! 🚨 Understatement Alert: These are strange and troubling times.  I find it helpful sometimes to go small, and, while not ignoring the latest giant outrages, and reacting to them, I try, too,  to notice what I notice that makes me happy or grateful. To secure the bastion of sensation, as Heaney might say. It might be the only way to preserve myself. This week's podcast . This week's three things: Sisters in session, far right 1. Fashion statements It was Auntie Shelagh’s birthday last week. Her four sisters who live in these parts took her out for lunch at Juniper in Strathearn. The topic of conversation turned, as it typically does, to stories of childhood. Childhood was six girls and three boys, so, there are some real yarns. I like listening to them talk, the sisters, sometimes all at the same time, about their clothes from those fading days. Their mother, Phyllis, was a prodigious sewer. Clothes for holidays, school pictures, occasions, weddi...

It's the end of October, it's 3 degrees Celsius, it's raining, it's dark, the wind hits my wet face at about 15 km/h. A great night for riding a bicycle in Edmonton.  Let me explain myself.  Which is the point, actually. What I'm searching for is myself. For me, a bicycle has just been the most reliable interrogation device I have ever found. I keep running my questions through it.  I am just back from a 50-minute pedal from the north side. My tan Levi's went from pencil points of rain to splotches to tiny islands of dry fabric. The new asphalt shone oily. The green and red traffic lights projected lightsabers. Car tires sloshed. My nose leaked. I wasn't exactly warm. I felt alive.  Hannah Arendt wasn't talking about riding a bicycle, I get it. But, still:  Vitality and liveliness can be conserved only to the extent that men are willing to take the burden, the toil and trouble of life, upon themselves, Arendt wrote in The Human Condition.  The unexpecte...

My winter bicycle is a lot of things. It's my primary mode of transportation. It's how I get exercise for cheap. It's how I have learned not to drive an automobile everywhere. My winter bike is way to save money and stress. It's a conversation starter. It's nostalgia. A way to notice things. A reliable way to feel alive. My bike is also the needle on a turntable. The way the bicycle moves along groves of ice or lanes of snow, and the way it makes a crackly sound when the tires cut into the snow and ice. That precious, scratchy sound sounds like a needle moving across a vinyl record turning around and around. My bike is a radio dial, too. I’m thinking now of the nights as a boy in the basement of the dark house when I would go from station to station and watch the glowing dial move across the grid on the face of the set. This is what I remember as my bike glides across the shadows of the elm trees on 102 Ave. When I sing a bit. ...