Glenn Kubish

  Back from Vancouver with three things that left tracks of happiness and gratitude in the sands of time. Three Things, episode 125:                                 1. Bridge lights   We got to Vancouver, got up to our hotel room, opened the curtains—and saw Dave Mowat standing there. Not the Dave Mowat, late of ATB Financial, but a way of seeing things like Dave Mowat sees things was out there over the Burrard Inlet to be clearly seen. The Lions Gate Bridge stood in the dark, its lights hanging like a garland of starlight. Or pearls. Memorably, Dave once likened the festooned lights on the First Narrows Bridge to pearls. He was doing a Pecha Kucha at the Horowitz Theatre at the U of A, pitching the idea of lighting the High Level Bridge in Edmonton. For the crowd, he pictured the Lions Gate at night.   "There's a sense of dance of light, a dance with a bejewelled partner," he said, noting the...

That is my old Miyata Six Ten leaning against the trash can. This is my fave piece of sidewalk. Behind the white chair I’m sitting on is Transcend Coffee, and behind and below Transcend Coffee is Pharos Pizza. Great Popeye there.  Pharos sat on the corner of 109 St and 87 Ave, and it was west along 87 Ave that we would take Sunday drives with my grandfather in his 1965 Ford Custom. When motoring mattered. He would take us through the University of Alberta campus. Years later, I got glimpses of Athens and Jerusalem there. I saw Shelagh in Dewey’s there.  South down 109 St was Miami Pizza. We’d take food back to J + M’s place and listen to Neil Young.  Across 109 St sits the building that housed the restaurant I had breakfast in the morning Shelagh and I got married. I think. I can’t remember what it was called. Thirty years ago this summer.  To the left of the restaurant building and back 45 years or so was the Kinsmen golf course on the o...

The penny dropped . I love that idiom. I am old enough to remember pennies. I was around when the government dropped the penny from circulation. I love short sentences. I love the stubbornness of solid idioms from analog times. What's better than that click sound I hear in my mind when someone voices the idiom? (The absolute best is when banker Dave Mowat employs it.)  The penny dropped is the sound of realization, the testimony that insight, like starlight, takes time to arrive, and, when it does, it resonates. Just like a coin-in-slot machine come to life when the stuck penny drops. Peas, too. Shelagh was talking the other day about children and their young taste buds. I don't know how the subject came up. For the most part I stay in touch with the subject matter of current podcasts when Shelagh summarizes key points from the 100 or so she stays current with. So, maybe the observation about taste buds was from a pea podcast she had heard, I don't know. The t...

It remains to be seen what will become of Dave Mowat's idea to illuminate the bridges of Edmonton, achieving for each a signature look and for the city a sense the dark will not overcome the light. But it sure feels like a brilliantly simple win. Who, asked Mowat at Pecha Kucha Night 14 in Edmonton last week, has ever seen a postcard or stopped to take a picture of the Groat Bridge at night? Case made, case closed. Here, thanks to the PhotoShop work of Neil Graham, is what the bridge could look like with a few strands of eye-catching pearls added: The massive High Level Bridge will next year mark a century of standing there, quietly linking the once-separate communities of Edmonton and Strathcona. It is a channel for vehicle, pedestrian and bicycle traffic, and has a streetcar rail running along the top platform. At night, it is an accurate reflection of Edmonton in the autumn and winter. You can't see it. But what if, besides being lit for utilitarian function...