Glenn Kubish

Happy end of the week, y’all. Here are three things from my life up on latitude 53 that made for some happiness and gratitude this week.  Three Things podcast, episode 80:                       1. Big world   Sitting at an airport, looking at the different planes from their different places, re-lights the longing that would come over me as a kid, watching freight trains go over the Fort Road. Most of the cars were CN, but some had different names. Santa Fe. Burlington Northern. If I was lucky, I’d spot a boxcar from the Illinois Central, like the sublime train in the Steve Goodman song. My first sense that it was a big world came from the livery on those cars. Like sentences being read, the trains and their fonts shuttled by. My horizon was a receding train.   Air travel doesn’t have the romance of the rails for me, but seeing planes from Southwest Airlines or KLM or El Al or Aeroflot on our various travels takes me a...

  Here are three little things that found their way back in, leaving behind either some happiness or gratitude. Three Things from Edmonton, episode 66: 1. Bubbles Bubbles…it’s a fun word to say, bubbles…bubbles stop me as they go by. Trains, too, I will stop to watch a freight train pass in any season. Geese overhead this time of year, they will carry my attention away. And polite children firing bubbles at me on a cold spring day, they stop me, and take me back—and aback. Jasper out of Place The pair, a sister and her older brother, I guessed, stood, parka hoods over their heads, next to each on their family’s front lawn last week. At his side the boy held a plastic toy bubble gun, a delightful version of a Gatling gun. As I walked by he cranked the handle a couple of turns, looked at the barrel when nothing emerged, shook the weapon to agitate the dish soap in the chamber, earnestly fired again, and, this time, watched bubbles spit out of the ...

Joe South said it pretty well then: Oh, the games people play now/Every night and every day now/Never meaning what they say now/Never saying what they mean. Eliot found words for the way words don't want to be found: Words strain/Crack and sometimes break, under the burden/Under the tension, slip, slide, perish/Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/Will not stay still. I listened to South as a boy. My parents had cool LPs. I found Eliot as an undergrad. I love those lines from Burnt Norton. The poet uses perish and decay to talk about words! As if they were alive. And that word still that ends the line, what connection is there to the plea in Ash Wednesday to teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still .?  (Perish. St. Francis Parish. Larry Parrish. Parrish played for the Expos before the parish had perished, and before the Expos had, too. Perish/Parish/Parrish the thought. Anyways.) I was considering these and other things yesterday a...

There must be imperceptible valleys of isolation between us. Email has revealed this communication gap. You email me. I see it drop onto the top of the ladder of messages on my smartphone. I am content for now to know that your message has come in. I do not respond. You may feel slight anxiety with my delayed response to your call. I respond later. This is called asynchronous communication. But it is all asynchronous communication, isn't it? The email version is just easy to see. Like the interval of white space between communication  in the previous paragraph and It is at the start of this paragraph is easy to see. After I had hit the enter/return button. Yesterday, Coffee Outside was marvellous. Most Fridays for almost three years now, summer or winter, for 10 minutes or two hours, a group of us bicycle riders in Edmonton have met in Faraone Park to drink and brew coffee and talk about the weather, the city, our travels, the media, bicycle components, issues of the d...

Something about who we are in language struck me last night at Hawrelak Park. We were at the Interstellar Rodeo. It's a new festival. Our friend Murray, who can swim in the words deep end, describes it as the folk festival for the one percent, because it's built around a concept of pairing the musical acts on stage with a wine. And, so, it's not just Texas roots-punk-rocker Alejandro Escovedo, it's the underground-and-always-threatening-to-be-pulled-into-the-mainstream Alejandro Escovedo and a glass of De Angelis Rosso Piceno with which he shares a commitment to quality and an ambivalence to commercial success. But that's not the item. What is the item was the young boy, Mason, who was sitting alone with his family in front of us on the hill who, at turns, crushed plastic cup, broke tree twigs, and opened and closed and open and closed (repeat) his mother's umbrella. "It's a peacock," he told me, as he held the umbrella behind him and trig...