Glenn Kubish

Here are three things that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness last week.   Let’s start at the end. 1. Cemeteries   Lyle Lovett and his Large Band played the Jube last week.   There were notes of mortality in the auditorium. Lovett talked about becoming a father of twins at age 59 and then doing the math and then realizing it’s best if he doesn’t do the math. He told the story of the family cemetery in Texas. The graveyard is in a “pretty little clearing at the edge of Sam Houston National Forest next to a little tributary of the main creek the old folks call the branch,” he said. Family graves there go back to the 1870s. “It’s the cemetery, really, that kinda keeps our family together, keeps us all associated,” he said. Lovely Lovett ambiguity, there. Is the family kept together in death? Or does the family stay associated in life by tending to the dead? Or both? Or something else again? He let the possibilities hang there before clearing it up, sorta. “We’ve a...

Happy end of the week, y’all! Once a week,   I try to notice three things that made me happy or grateful, as a way to remember to notice things that make me happy or grateful. This week, under the spell of México:                                  1.   The oilers   We are back from the carnival that is México, a country where the virgin is still a topic of passionate conversation.   “So to cook eggs with extra virgin olive oil: cold frying pan. Cold extra virgin olive oil. Put your eggs on it. Set it on your stove. Set it at the lowest setting. Walk around. Make your coffee. Five to ten minutes later, your eggs will be done perfectly. Your oil will not smoke. And you will have great tasting eggs and great tasting olive oil.” That was Victor Gutierrez, the patron at the Finca Luna Serena olive oil farm (and pickleball courts) outside San Miguel de Allende, where Shelagh booked us a vis...

  Thanks for stopping by the Three Things podcast.  Here's my bet. Maybe it's a long shot, but, here it is. If I can do a better job noticing the things I notice that make me happy and grateful each week, and then say those things out loud, then I won't feel, when it's time to add things up, that I have wasted my time. That's the judgment I fear the most. You wasted your time, Glenn Kubish! Here is this week's Three Things podcast: 1. Firestarter A couple of days ago, I found a black Bic lighter on the sidewalk downtown. I don’t smoke, I have virtually no need for a lighter, but whenever I see a discarded lighter, I pick it up. It’s a story in my hand. Scene 1: Man walks across Jasper Avenue. Scene 2: Man spots lighter, wonders if it works, spins spark wheel, waits. Scene 3: Finger of flame emerges. The end. Standing there on Jasper with my new lighter, I flashed back to a conversation about fire with Wallace from the Alexander First Nation a few days earlier. W...

Driving home Highway 2 at between 121 and 130 kmh, the sun starting its dip down in the west, Lyle Lovett on the car stereo, clouds shuttling across the sky -- what a time. It's two hours and 25 or 30 minutes of waiting for thoughts to arrive at between 121 and 130 kmh. The lanes remind me of lines in a measure of written sheet music, the sports cars, sedans, pickups hauling trailers, semi-trailers the various lengths and kinds and vintages of notes. A silent music moving in both directions. A collision involving a horse trailer near Didsbury in the Calgary-bound lanes stalls traffic. Four bar rests. Some of the notes are packed with meaning not immediately discernible to the first time listener. Lovett is singing South Texas Girl . It is a powerful song, and it's about everything. It's a prayer for travellers, a memory of childhood, a tribute to faded cowboy voices, it's a meditation on the passage of time, and it's pure poetry. And it all seems to...