Glenn Kubish

  In the event I want to or have to one day or 20 minutes from now retrace my steps back to happiness and gratitude, I make a record of the three things each week that helped produce those goods. Here is episode 67 of the Three Things podcast.                                               1. Jazz Like olives, tomatoes, scotch whisky and basketball, jazz is one of the good things of life that take getting used to. Jazz strikes me as the kind of music most aware of its being built and rebuilt. When I listen to jazz I feel like I have wandered into a workshop where notes are being split and sounds are being hammered out in new ways on the spot by craftspeople. The trumpet, sax, drums and bass are instruments (as in tools) used to make pieces of music. To the brass, ivory, mahogany, maple, birch, polyester, ebony and steel of those implements, musicians add their bre...

Happy end of the week, friends. Here are three things that made me happy or grateful this week. I am trying to build noticing those things into a habit. Noticing them and then saying them out loud in the Three Things podcast , too. Here's this week's list. 1. little trees 🌱🌱 Our sons, now in their late 20s, don’t remember Arbor Day and they don’t remember or really care that their parents neglected to plant the spruce seedlings they came home from Grade 1 with. But their mom remembers.  Because in her heart is the kind of significant soil where those memories stay alive.  Auntie Shelagh remembers: “When our boys got their Grade 1 trees, I was excited about the concept. But we did not need a tree in our yard. And, so, I said, why don’t we find out if there’s a new community that could use a tree. But between hockey and music and school—Michael was in pre-school when Alex was in Grade 1, we just never got it done. And I really regretted that.” On the weekend we tried to make ...

That is my old Miyata Six Ten leaning against the trash can. This is my fave piece of sidewalk. Behind the white chair I’m sitting on is Transcend Coffee, and behind and below Transcend Coffee is Pharos Pizza. Great Popeye there.  Pharos sat on the corner of 109 St and 87 Ave, and it was west along 87 Ave that we would take Sunday drives with my grandfather in his 1965 Ford Custom. When motoring mattered. He would take us through the University of Alberta campus. Years later, I got glimpses of Athens and Jerusalem there. I saw Shelagh in Dewey’s there.  South down 109 St was Miami Pizza. We’d take food back to J + M’s place and listen to Neil Young.  Across 109 St sits the building that housed the restaurant I had breakfast in the morning Shelagh and I got married. I think. I can’t remember what it was called. Thirty years ago this summer.  To the left of the restaurant building and back 45 years or so was the Kinsmen golf course on the o...