Glenn Kubish

  From the maelstrom, here are three things that notched some gratitude and happiness this past week. Three Things, episode 112:                         1. Medium/message   The day I realized that all the places I would like to travel to I won’t travel to because as I get older it will be harder to travel to, and that I might have <knock on world> another decade and a half to make tracks, get back to Tulsa, get back to Ottawa and Montréal, see the Maritimes, that day was an eye-opening, bucket-list-editing day. The quantity of time isn’t the same thing as the quality of time. Well, huh, didn’t quite grasp that at 25. Same thing with all the things I would like to understand. It might be a smarter strategy to concentrate my dwindling resources on a few key teachings and then knuckle down and try to get a hold of them. For me, McLuhan’s maxim that the medium is the message is one of those elusive things. It h...

  It's the end of the week as we know it, friends. Here is this week's Three Things podcast. 1. Jars Apparently, I am also from Chortkiv in western Ukraine, and not just Delwood in northeast Edmonton. Thanks to my mother’s record-keeping, I can trace my family back four generations on her side to the small city of 30,000 people, which is where my great-great grandparents Maria and Dmytro lived and where their son Yosyp was born. It’s close, 100 kilometres or so, from a recent Russian missile strike. I don’t know if I still have relatives there. I have never visited or done an ancestry search. For me, the old country is St. Basil’s Ukrainian Cultural Centre on 109th Street. The siege on Ukraine has brought back flashes from my youth. Ukrainian dancing ribbons for my sisters’ hair. Perogies and cabbage rolls pronounced “pedaheh” and “holopchi.” Borscht made deluxe with spare ribs. The sweet smell of hot wax for Easter pysanky. A blue-covered book on conversational Ukrainian by Y...

It feels difficult and wrong and even obscene to fiddle around with three little things when such big things are going wrong, and when ordinary people are forced onto the unarmed road of flight. But I am grateful for my little life. I hope it can stay this way. It is heartbreaking to see everyday lives clawed apart by the powerful. Against the historic backdrop of our dark times, I offer this week's Three Things подкаст . 1. Reappearing act   The doorbell rang. Our friends Lori and Murray were on the front step, carrying a gift from the beyond. Back in the 2000-2001 minor hockey season Murray coached the KC Annunciation Rink Rats novice team on which our son Alex played. Coach Murray had things under control, including the most important thing for a coach to have under control: himself. He was calm and knowledgeable and made the season fun for the eight- and nine-year-olds and their fans. He was in it for the team. (The mistakes I would go on to make as a hockey coach I wouldn’t h...

What I understand about the game of curling would not, melted down,  fill one of those little rye bottles you used to get on airplanes. Okay, sure, I understand that you throw rocks down a pebbled sheet of ice, that the rocks don't go straight as much as they wander off line, and that the whole thing is to figure out how much weight to throw so that the rocks wobble like you want. There's other stuff that's barely comprehensible, like the role of the sweepers. And the seemingly contradictory orders yelled out by the stone thrower (No! Way off! Whoa!) and the skip (On it! Hard! Hurry hard! Clean!) And, then, there's some totally opaque stuff, like the way the team members talk it out as they compose the next shot. I am writing all of this watching the 2017 Brier on TV.  This is what I just heard from Team Northern Ontario's deliberations. "I don't think it matters, Brad." "Either that, or do you go all the way around?" "Whad...