Glenn Kubish

  Happy end of the week, friends! I am no fan of death or dying, but I do enjoy a good graveyard every now and then. This week's podcast . Here are three things I noticed that made me happy or grateful this week. 1. Stamp collecting Walking through the rows of headstones at the St. Joachim Cemetery off 105 Avenue reminded me of leafing through my childhood stamp album. Before I ever heard of George Gershwin, I had a George Gershwin stamp, US Postal Service 8 cents, 1973. And an Emily Dickinson stamp from 1971, and, from 1975, a 10 cent Paul Laurence Dunbar, American poet, stamp. These postage stamps, and the ones of kings and queens and prime ministers and presidents chancellors and moose and the St.Lawrence Seaway and International Women’s Year, were miniature windows into big worlds far away from mine in northeast Edmonton. On my Germany page was a stamp from 1948 of a sour looking dude called G.W. Fr. Hegel, whom I wouldn’t meet until university, drinking beer at Dewey's. ...

Stamped on me When I was young, being no stranger to feeling comfortable alone, I collected stamps. Before I first crawled through the wardrobe behind the Pevensie children, my windows into worlds beyond and ages ago were stamps. Philately, it was called. What language was that? For whatever reason, my imagination was fired by U.S. Civil War postage. And Lincoln. And Whitman. And civil rights themes. And authors. My childhood stamp album has survived the waves of decluttering that routinely roll through our bungalow and break into the dump, and it sits in a box in the garage, preserved, protected, waiting.  I still pause to look at new stamps when I'm at the post office, but an Edmonton Eskimos stamp or an Edmonton Oilers stamp doesn't quite carry the thrill of 4-cent Lincoln words. I hope there are still kids who collect stamps and dream of cold camps in Antietam (without yet knowing how to pronounce Antietam) when rain falls outside. But, for me, these are post-postage ...