Glenn Kubish

Back to school is in the air. Hope you all have your duo-tangs, hole reinforcements for binders and your inky-pink erasers, or have helped others get the same. Here are three other things from the past (week) that left behind traces of happiness and gratitude.   Three Things, episode 138:                                 1. Microscopes I remember the moment so vividly still because it was pickled in the brine of junior high school fear and doubt. Grade 7 science class. Mr. Litwin was our teacher. He wore colourful silk scarves around his neck to hide, he said, the marks of the stitches left behind when his head was completely severed and sewn back on after a plane crash in the war. He would tell that story and gauge our reactions and smile. We were studying cellular structure one week. There were illustrations in our biology textbook showing the differences between plant cells and animal cells. It was ou...

So the noticing equipment doesn’t completely seize up, here are approximately three things I noticed that made me happy or grateful, notwithstanding everything else, of course.                          1. Stopping   For all of the good things about moving in the city by bicycle, and the list is legion—fresh air, exercise, smelling home cooking when you pedal by a house with a working kitchen, being under the sky, the stars, the clouds, in the snow and the rain, smiling hellos to strangers as they pedal by, primo parking by your table at OTTO, propelling yourself, not having to pay 5 bucks a gallon, and so on—the prime good of getting there by bicycle is how easy it is to stop on the way. Stop to talk, stop to listen, stop to look.   “Hey, that’s Mrs. K,” Auntie Shelagh said as we pedalled by the boys’ elementary school teacher walking with her daughter and husband. Back Shelagh flew on the 142 Street service road...

  Here are three little things that found their way back in, leaving behind either some happiness or gratitude. Three Things from Edmonton, episode 66: 1. Bubbles Bubbles…it’s a fun word to say, bubbles…bubbles stop me as they go by. Trains, too, I will stop to watch a freight train pass in any season. Geese overhead this time of year, they will carry my attention away. And polite children firing bubbles at me on a cold spring day, they stop me, and take me back—and aback. Jasper out of Place The pair, a sister and her older brother, I guessed, stood, parka hoods over their heads, next to each on their family’s front lawn last week. At his side the boy held a plastic toy bubble gun, a delightful version of a Gatling gun. As I walked by he cranked the handle a couple of turns, looked at the barrel when nothing emerged, shook the weapon to agitate the dish soap in the chamber, earnestly fired again, and, this time, watched bubbles spit out of the ...

Happy end of the week, y’all! Each week, I try to notice three things I noticed that made me feel happy or grateful. Noticed that I noticed, because it’s good to try to be semi-conscious. Happy or grateful because anger and outrage, because how’s that working for everybody?  Here's this week's Three Things—episode 41 (5 minutes, 3 seconds):   1. Hauling dolly! There are days, we all have them, where you have to haul a 50-pound delivery dolly downtown and your driver’s licence is two years past its renewal date, so, putting the wheeled contraption in the trunk of the car isn’t going to work. And there are times, we’ve all felt those times, when your commitments to yourself, your very identity hang in the balance, even with mundane challenges like how to get the dolly downtown. And there are, to keep everything together, we all have them—bungee cords. I used eight bungees to secure the dolly and its handle to the back rack of my mountain bike last week. It was a spider web, a mu...

That was as close to a sublime rainbow as I have ever witnessed. I almost missed it. I was pedalling east down the MacKinnon Ravine. I had just said hello to the stand of spruce trees I greet going by.  It's curious to hear your own voice talking to trees. I have done this for years. After the trees, the trail curves to the right and then swoops to the left and, ahead, a woman stood off to the side of the trail. She was pointing to the sky behind me. I stopped. A rain drop hit the top of my hand. "Look," she said. "Look" does not give a person much of a clue about what is about to be seen. I turned around. I saw a ribbon of lights arced across the western sky. And before I had the instant needed to apply to it the concept of rainbow, I saw it as a colossal faucet turned on full bore, emptying a torrent of coloured water into the sink of the North Saskatchewan River. In another instant, it stopped being a spout of light, and became, again, properl...