Glenn Kubish

I am back in the grip of the New York Times crossword. I can't see if this will end happily. Seeing is my challenge, actually. Take 31 down in today's puzzle, which I started last night,  Kitchen drawers?  Six letters. I immediately pictured the drawers in our kitchen and saw spoons, ladles, cheese graters and the rest of the silver mix of implements Shelagh uses to concoct the most delicious dishes, lately from cookbooks by Ottolenghi and Molly Yeh. I was off track. And stumped. What is another name for a drawer? Compartment, container, something that slides in and out, furniture, chest. Nothing fit. Then I looked closer at the clue. "Kitchen drawers?" The question mark suggested some wordplay was afoot. Words can act like planks on a theatre stage, seemingly strong and solid enough to stand on, but also trap doors through which certainty disappears with a whoosh. Where you come down on this magic of words, the way they move and molt and mock, separates tho...

Seeing Edmonton from the 21st floor of the downtown tower where I work makes clear one thing about the streets and the cars below where I pedal. It's a foolscap world in the city, friends. View from above (Foolscap. Just saying that word is fun. Foolscap. Foolscap. Foolscap!) Foolscap, or course, was the marvellously medieval name for the sheets of lined paper we were issued in third grade, that year when we traded pencils for pens and were initiated into the slow mystery of cursive handwriting. The horizontal lines on those pages were our borders. They kept the stops and starts of the inky flow organized and moving in something resembling the right direction of a sentence. From my vantage point, the concrete sidewalks are those foolscap lines. The asphalt roadways they border are the stacked spaces through which the coloured dots of cars trace their paths. Under this spell, the amber lights are reimagined as commas, and the red lights as periods that mark the ends of b...