Glenn Kubish

I want to tell you about Andy, but, first, I want first to try to explain why I didn't stop to clean up the shards of broken beer bottle glass on the shared-use path this morning. I can't. I don't know why I didn't stop. I did see the shards. But I swerved, content not to hear from my tires the poof of rubber's deflating surrender to glass. I might have weakly dangled a left-arm warning to the bicycle rider behind me. That was it. That was the extent of my flaccid public spirit muscle flex. Having neatly navigated through the peril, I quickly forgot about the glass or how it might undo others. It was on to Coffee Outside in Faraone Park, a Friday morning meetup ritual with fellow bicycle riders. Like the rest of the Coffee Outside gang, Andy was there with his bike. Unlike the rest of us he was there with his aluminum trash grabber arm. On the tip of the device is a retractable blue claw that, when triggered at the handle, squeezes closed, securing wh...

The first time I ever lost my grip on things I was maybe six or seven years old,  and the garden behind our house in the northeast end had been shredded by summer hail. I stood in the back porch down the three stairs from the kitchen and looked through the glass and metal and mesh of the storm door at the frame of devastation. The hail had knocked everything flat. Carrot fantails were bent over and smeared into the soil. The potato plants were pulverized. The food that took shape above the ground—the peas, the cukes, the green beans, the precious tomatoes tied for support by sections of my mother's old nylons to slender wooden sticks—were destroyed. I stood still in the porch and watched my parents in the garden here and there reaching down to collect handfuls of shredded lettuce, letting them drop dead. The sight of the fractured corn hurt the most. My parents had put so much work into that garden, and I could tell they were sad. Now, as I stood still in the back porch,...

There are bicycle rides where I just know I'm going to keep seeing interesting things. This morning's was one of those rides. Starting with the Husky pup on the sidewalk along 101 Ave. What a face. I watched a hare change its mind, and then again, and then again, about which side of the avenue it would aim for. I saw a cyclist prepared to fix a puncture. A Glenora skateboarder projected a giant shadow mask. Shelagh pedalled by wearing her helmet that looks like a scoop of gelato. Eden entertained us with tales of basketball and beer in the place we, as children of the age of cable TV,  both grew up: 500 West Boone Avenue, Spokane, Washington, the Inland Empire, where you could shop at Rosauers. Look closely at the guy on the porch of the house with Richard Avedon's Nastassja Kinski on the fence. He's sanding a wooden donkey sculpture. At 109 St a vaper exhaled a thought balloon as he considered things. I love riding my bik...

As I remember, the machine was called the Lektriever. The device was from another age of recall. It was a giant electronic carousel of a contraption that contained terraces of newspaper clippings organized in files according to the reporter's name and subject matter. Under the eye of the Edmonton Sun librarians, John and Bruce, it would wheeze and kerchunk around until arriving at its destination. Summoning the Lektriever was how you would find, say, a news story by Quig or Roberta Staley or Dean Bennett that you would need as background for the story you were working on that night for the next day's newspaper.  I loved how the archeological Lektriever spun and dug into and served up the past.  The old Lektriever spun back into view yesterday, unexpectedly. Like memories do. I had phoned my mom with a request. Do you remember the old photograph of me when the men landed on the moon? She remembered. I grew up in a family of photograph takers. Everything ...

Unlike a book held by the person reading it, a smartphone—opaque, impenetrable, typically black in colour—does not betray the content being consumed by the person holding it. I knew, for instance, that the MacEwan University student we met outside the Dirtbag Cafe last week had given his attention to Finders Keepers by Stephen King. Roddy Doyle was the companion of the woman walking across the Groat Bridge as we pedalled by this afternoon. The man sitting in a red chair at the downtown farmer's market was considering Harari's argument about the future of humakind in Homo Deus. What the teenager at the table across from ours at Filistix was looking at while his mother and grandmother talked to each other, no clue. Compared to the protective casing of a smartphone, a book, with its illustrated and printed dust jacket, is a giant-sized billboard, and an invitation to engage in small-talk conversation. "What are you reading?" is easier to ask when you already kn...

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...

Halfway through my second beer of the Edmonton Jazz Ensemble's reunion at the Yardbird Suite, I saw it all quite clearly. I know, I know.  A jazz club on a June 30 afternoon is a peculiar place for illumination in Edmonton. It was 23C outside, blue sky, soft wind, the kind of gentle weekend day that Edmontonians pine for during the winter months up here on latitude 53, the kind of day to be outside in the river valley—or, at least, to luxuriate in the walk across the warming asphalt from the car to the mall. But there I sat, inside, in a kind of reverse hibernation den, and, with 150 others,  listened to the sextet dig into songs from 30 years ago. The music was superb, as far as I understand jazz, which is not far. I love jazz, I marvel at the way its practitioners are able, to my ear, to detonate single notes and then walk around and play in the fallout. Like they are inside a snow dome of their own shaking. I love the horns, especially. Watching Jim Pinchin on tenor s...