Glenn Kubish

That was as close to a sublime rainbow as I have ever witnessed. I almost missed it. I was pedalling east down the MacKinnon Ravine. I had just said hello to the stand of spruce trees I greet going by.  It's curious to hear your own voice talking to trees. I have done this for years. After the trees, the trail curves to the right and then swoops to the left and, ahead, a woman stood off to the side of the trail. She was pointing to the sky behind me. I stopped. A rain drop hit the top of my hand. "Look," she said. "Look" does not give a person much of a clue about what is about to be seen. I turned around. I saw a ribbon of lights arced across the western sky. And before I had the instant needed to apply to it the concept of rainbow, I saw it as a colossal faucet turned on full bore, emptying a torrent of coloured water into the sink of the North Saskatchewan River. In another instant, it stopped being a spout of light, and became, again, properl...

You never forget how to ride a bike. In those simple sounding, nostalgically lacquered eight words divided neatly between two thoughts, a) you never forget and b) how to ride a bike, and in the even distribution of syllables across those two thoughts, you ne-ver for-get (1-2-3-4-5) how to ride a bike (1-2-3-4-5), and in the memorable way those two thoughts of five syllables displays the storyteller's proportioning out of tension and release—first, the tension of You never forget (never forget what? What is this thing that cannot be forgotten? In a world where our grip on so much, namely, names, ages, dates, facts, memories, computer passwords, the TV remote, loosens, what is this thing that we cannot but hold tight to?) and then the release of how to ride a bike  (yes, the satisfaction of a proposition posed and not left suspended), in this artful use of tension and release that makes a story memorable, that saying,  you never forget how to ride...

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...