Glenn Kubish

Ciao, ecco tre cose della mia piccola vita che questa settimana hanno lasciato tracce di felicità e gratitudine, or something like that. Here's Three Things from Edmonton, episode 141:                                   1. Italy      Shelagh is off to Italy soon for a couple of weeks. It will be a belated milestone birthday vacation celebration with her friend Sheryl. I’m staying home to keep an eye on the tomatoes. If it frosts, someone has to cover the plants. Italy as a holiday destination makes deep sense for Shelagh. She took night-class Italian lessons a decade ago at Ainlay. Her accent is a-pretty good. She studied the literature and the architecture of the country as an undergrad. She spoke real Latin, actually. She made me watch Don’t Look Now with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. She shops at Spinelli’s in Little Italy. She knows Moonstruck by heart. A favourite exchang...

  It’s all a gift, worth trying to notice algorithm free. Three Things this week: 1. Reliable sources 📰 The Lektriever, of all things, somehow surfaced in back-and-forth with Hogey as we pedalled last week. The Lektriever, how to describe it? It was a kind of giant mechanized memory machine, a chairlift of files holding news clippings organized by topic and author. The contraption was in the library at the back of the Sun newsroom in the 50th Street building when I worked there as a young reporter. You’d get your assignment from the desk, you’d go back to see John or Bruce or Ileiren in the library and get your files, so that,  before doing any interviews, you had a handle on what had previously been reported on the story. The librarians would get the old Lektriever chugging, and hit stop when the tray with your files came to the front. Very analog. Kinda like how my memory works some days. Which is what Hogey and I were talking about...getting older….forgetting stuff….ca...

If memory is a guide, I've now been sick for exactly two weeks with a virus that planted its flag in my throat and then advanced to my lungs, sowing a confusion of drip and phlegm on its march. My artillery has coughed out weak replies. To those feeble rattles, the mocking invader has blanketed the countryside with "remember to breathe" tissues. I do wonder if it has actually been two weeks of coughing and hacking and sinus congestion like the Groat Road Bridge at automobile rush hour. Am I remembering right? The days blur into each other under a pattern that goes like this: sleep, take pills, use inhaler, swallow cough medicine, consciously inflate my zeppelin lungs. Then: watch whatever Top 100 sports highlights package is on TV, make it to No. 98, fall asleep under the sway of the monitor's hypnotic colours. I have omitted the less elegant aspects of the assault and retreat.  This is how desperate things have been. I haven't been on my bike for two w...