Glenn Kubish

Happy end of the week, y’all! Here are three things that made for a little, okay, more than a little, happiness and gratitude.                            1. Hope and feathers   Stockboys at   IGA glanced over at him as he stood there near the eggs, feathers still fluttering free from the gash in the right sleeve of his winter jacket. A little girl pushing one of those little shopping carts pointed at him and was gently hushed by her mother who would likely explain later in the car that it’s not polite to stare at strangers. The object of this attention was my friend Darren, the intensive care physician. He had set out for the grocery store on his bike and had taken a wooded, downhill route, misjudged his position or his speed or his age and smashed into a bristling spruce tree. Like an opponent’s spear levelled in a joust, the branch knocked Darren off his mount, slashing his puffy armour and lacerating the ...

  In the event I want to or have to one day or 20 minutes from now retrace my steps back to happiness and gratitude, I make a record of the three things each week that helped produce those goods. Here is episode 67 of the Three Things podcast.                                               1. Jazz Like olives, tomatoes, scotch whisky and basketball, jazz is one of the good things of life that take getting used to. Jazz strikes me as the kind of music most aware of its being built and rebuilt. When I listen to jazz I feel like I have wandered into a workshop where notes are being split and sounds are being hammered out in new ways on the spot by craftspeople. The trumpet, sax, drums and bass are instruments (as in tools) used to make pieces of music. To the brass, ivory, mahogany, maple, birch, polyester, ebony and steel of those implements, musicians add their bre...

                             Happy end of the week, friends! This is where, once a week, I try to notice three things from my life that made me feel happy or grateful. So the outrage algorithm gets a day off. Here's Three Things podcast, Episode 47 . 1. Tail lights From Auntie Shelagh I have new, battery-operated winter gloves with three temperature settings indicated by tiny LED bars that glow red-orange. Those little dashes of light are specks of memory, too. I recall the hours that one night driving through the Rockies, aiming for Vancouver and a first job away from home, with two consolations for company: A cassette tape of Jennifer Warnes singing Leonard Cohen songs, and two tail lights ahead on the only other vehicle on the road. My little motorized auditorium, a red Nissan Micra, rolled through the dark, as I sang with all my might, my eyes trained on those holes burned through the curtain of black that...

The pieces have been swirling around. On Facebook, my friend Steve had posted a winter-arrives-in-Edmonton pic with the advice to embrace the elements. For the first time, I heard elements. On Twitter. my friend Brett had retweeted the East Village news that Calgary's 9th Avenue cycle track between Macleod Trail and 4th Street was now open. "Your commute in and out of East Village has gotten a little bit sweeter." For the first time, I heard sweeter.  On the sidewalk along the 102 Ave bike lane in Edmonton, a parka'd child sat on the concrete, legs below the knees splayed out in the way we bend before growing inflexible, the bundled one's attention on a mitten full of snow, while, from above, the mother asked the question: "What do you think?" For the first time I heard the question directed at me. What do I, 56-year-old Glenn , think of winter weather? On the pedal home today, the pieces came together in a kind of equation from Grade 7.  CO 2   +  H 2 O...

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...

At the Winter Bike Congress in Calgary earlier this month, I said, in a kind of convoluted manner that took six minutes and 40 seconds to spit out...I said, in 20 slides, some of which were painful to relive, some nostalgic...I said, in words I tried to get right in the one shot I had in front of some of the very people who I most wanted to say the word to...I said: thanks. Here's my Pecha Kucha called We Winter Together. This was me. Making a heartfelt point about Russia at last year's Pecha Kucha night in Moscow. I fell in with a stellar band of winter bike riders and storytellers that night. It would take me another month to fully appreciate what I'm doing in this picture. I mean, look! I am lifting my left arm. This was a month later. This was my left arm. My shoulder is fractured and dislocated. I fell off my bike. Like Caesar, I did not beware the ice of March. But I was aware of how beautiful the ride was on the decline before the fall! ...