Glenn Kubish

  Back from Vancouver with three things that left tracks of happiness and gratitude in the sands of time. Three Things, episode 125:                                 1. Bridge lights   We got to Vancouver, got up to our hotel room, opened the curtains—and saw Dave Mowat standing there. Not the Dave Mowat, late of ATB Financial, but a way of seeing things like Dave Mowat sees things was out there over the Burrard Inlet to be clearly seen. The Lions Gate Bridge stood in the dark, its lights hanging like a garland of starlight. Or pearls. Memorably, Dave once likened the festooned lights on the First Narrows Bridge to pearls. He was doing a Pecha Kucha at the Horowitz Theatre at the U of A, pitching the idea of lighting the High Level Bridge in Edmonton. For the crowd, he pictured the Lions Gate at night.   "There's a sense of dance of light, a dance with a bejewelled partner," he said, noting the...

Springsteen sings Hungry Heart in Vancouver, with, um, well, me. A Springsteen concert is about a lot of things, some of which will be revealed only in the fullness of 4/4 time. Trying to make stand still the essence of seeing him perform live is beyond me. Besides, seeing him is not really about standing still at all. And double besides because another great chronicler of America, John Steinbeck, famously reminded would-be reporters that what is there to be seen depends as much on the seer and the light and the time and the inner music as what is supposedly there. "I discovered long ago...that...what I found was closely intermeshed with how I felt at the moment. External reality has a way of being not so external after all," he cautions. Caution heeded. The best I can do is record that in the screen shot above, not seen but standing beside and slightly down from me, are Mikey and Shelagh. And that we sang our lungs out to Hungry Heart, punctuating Baltimore with a ...