Glenn Kubish

Here are three things that made me happy or grateful this week. Before they get away from me. (They're also in this week's Three Things podcast .) 1. The happy couple I will remember the music from that day. Aleasha’s grandpa read a Wendell Berry poem. Alejandra, who officiated, looked around and sang a few bars from Lin Manuel Miranda’s Schuyler sisters. Wedding vows included references to The Hold Steady. Dylan was quoted during speeches. Sean P. spun the dance tunes. People sang ABBA. And emcee Stephen brought some Yeah Yeah Yeahs to the reception. Well I may be just a fool But I know you're just as cool And cool kids They belong together All of this went down at the wedding of our youngest son (known to his friends as Kubish) and wife Aleasha. The term wedding reception has a double meaning. It’s a social gathering where people are welcomed, of course. But reception is also about broadcasting. Reception means the quality of a signal. What, of any value, can we capture ...

A group of us, I think Blatt was there and McIntosh, too, were on the 11th floor of the Tory Building where Professor Carmichael was talking excitedly about the Challenger crash, his eyes magnified by his glasses as he made an ancient point. Carmichael translated the explosion's skywriting from the Greek. Daedalus and Icarus, he said. It's Greek mythology on CNN, he said. Flying too close to the sun. The sky was always a thing for me. As a boy growing up in the north end, I was routinely sent outside by my mother to lie on the lawn and look up at the sky to look for the shapes of animals in the clouds when I was bored, which was pretty much all the time. There wasn't much else to do in those summer days. It was still a few years before you could buy the Coleco Electronic Quarterback at Eaton's or Woolco. So, the big book of analogy illustrated in endless blue and puffy white it was. I found elephants and dogs and lions. In those days, the Canadian Forces base at...