Glenn Kubish

The waiting room at the Medicentre on Jasper Avenue and 117 St is a lot of things. As a waiting room, it is a reminder, of course, of a strength imbalance: those without power wait. It is a processing plant (numbered patients are transformed into hopeful prescription carriers), it is a soundscape (sniffles, coughs, sighs, the squeak of adjusted chair legs, the so-predictable radio songs). It is a wailing room, a mourner's bench, an unlikely-intersection-of-lives point. It is a camera tight shot, as features of fellow patients are studied, furtively. It is a leveller and a lottery. It is a tinder-dry piece of ground for short tempers. It is a borderland, a purgatory, a confessional, an examination room itself. It is a maze of thoughts backward and forward, and it is a loneliness. And last week, thanks to a painful and persistent pinched nerve in my neck, it was where I sat. Facing a three-hour-plus wait. But, for that wait, I have Twitter and the characters on the other side ...

I work downtown. And that means I get to see a lot more than I would if I were working where only cars can get to. There are little sidewalk scenes of humanity. They make you think. Yesterday, two young people, well acquainted with life on the street, walked along Jasper Avenue, east  of the 97 St. divide. Young faces, but old clothes. Their clothes didn't fit. Neither hers, nor his. But they held hands. In the young man's free hand was a long-stemmed rose. He gave it to the young woman. And she smiled. They walked past the open door of a tavern beside which another man stood. And that was all I saw of their little motion picture through the windshield of my car. Today, another short story as I sat in the car waiting to turn out of the Vinomania parking lot and west and home along Jasper. A woman wearing a Y windbreaker, walking with a walker, moved slowly along the sidewalk. As I waited for her to walk across the driveway in front of me, I saw a nicely dressed woman wa...