Glenn Kubish

Carol! Today, I met Carol. What a joy, what a character. She works in ATB's archives and she is somehow the present and the past and the future all at once. Going to see her at work means dropping down an elevator shaft into the concrete hallways and beige paint of the document storage rooms. There, giant, floor-to-ceiling stacks just stand there shoulder to shoulder, holding seven decades of history safe from gravity and forgetfulness. Lady Managers You get the sense that Carol's work joy is rooted in the ability to rescue what she calls "points of time," whether in the form of text, film or video, from that oblivion. Carol is irked when documents are not dated properly, she is saddened by gaps in the company record of, say, the succession of branch managers. She knows the evanescence of digital records is a challenge for her craft. She has an ear for how the documents tell stories that weren't obvious when they were composed. For instance, that ha...

Yesterday evening (it's almost 1:00 AM as I write this, and later than I thought) I got a little look, I think, at what it is to get old. Rink and Rick It didn't happen during opening night of the pond hockey tournament at the University of Alberta. Mitch, Kelly, James, Rick and I put together a UA-NAIT alumni team and we skated to a 18-15 loss against the Dekes fraternity during opening round action in the outdoor 3-on-3 tournament.  They were a younger team, good with the puck, fast, able to turn 3-on-3s into 3-on-2s. And, besides fighting vigorously for the puck when it's buried in a snowbank, that's the key. It didn't happen during the game, because a game necessarily pits two opponents against each other. They face each other, they react off each other, they battle each other. There is a dialogue, of sorts. One may be turn out to be stronger than the other, but strength and victory are somehow relative terms. The handshake after the game seals it: you...