Glenn Kubish

Happy end of the week, friends!  Here is this week's Three Things podcast (5:27): I use this list to gently force myself to do a better job noticing the things I notice that make me feel a bit happy or a bit grateful these days. Because, these days. These days can make you feel obliterated. Maybe that's the play. Anyways, I don't have the words, the personality or the stomach to make my stand in the anger arena, so, as my friend Fish points out, I go micro.  This week micro sounds like:  1.  Snap! The wind was King Lear wind and it brought the curtain down on the mountain ash tree in our front yard in Parkview where it had stood and served for more than 50 years. Spring after spring, the tree was a public house for travelling waxwings out to drink in a bit of the shiny, new world. In summer, it gave us cool shade. In fall, the tree plugged into an invisible electrical current, and glowed. In winter, the red berries held tiny mounds of snow to resemble the hats of so...

From Edmonton, Canada, happy end of the week, friends.  Here are three things that I noticed made me happy or grateful this week.  This week's podcast and transcript. 1.  Human beans  ☕ I was out for a morning bike ride and was coming up to a construction crew putting in new sidewalks on Saskatchewan Drive near the Humanities Building. Infrastructure scenes are rich. Hard hats, big boots, worn jeans, rumbling cement trucks, laughter, cigarettes held ash tip and ember pointed in—and the greatest care with rakes and trowels to set the sidewalks as perfect as paragraphs. Anyways, three workers were just ahead of me, kneeling down, stirring their coffees.  “Looks like I arrived at the right time for coffee,” I said as I passed, as a joke, a throwaway question.  Without a second of delay, buddy says back to me, “Brother, how do you take yours? Cream? Sugar? Just black?”  “Half a cup,” I said, “just black, you are very kind.”  “Absolutely,” he said, “it...

  Happy end of the week, friends! I am no fan of death or dying, but I do enjoy a good graveyard every now and then. This week's podcast . Here are three things I noticed that made me happy or grateful this week. 1. Stamp collecting Walking through the rows of headstones at the St. Joachim Cemetery off 105 Avenue reminded me of leafing through my childhood stamp album. Before I ever heard of George Gershwin, I had a George Gershwin stamp, US Postal Service 8 cents, 1973. And an Emily Dickinson stamp from 1971, and, from 1975, a 10 cent Paul Laurence Dunbar, American poet, stamp. These postage stamps, and the ones of kings and queens and prime ministers and presidents chancellors and moose and the St.Lawrence Seaway and International Women’s Year, were miniature windows into big worlds far away from mine in northeast Edmonton. On my Germany page was a stamp from 1948 of a sour looking dude called G.W. Fr. Hegel, whom I wouldn’t meet until university, drinking beer at Dewey's. ...

Happy end of the week, friends! 🚨 Understatement Alert: These are strange and troubling times.  I find it helpful sometimes to go small, and, while not ignoring the latest giant outrages, and reacting to them, I try, too,  to notice what I notice that makes me happy or grateful. To secure the bastion of sensation, as Heaney might say. It might be the only way to preserve myself. This week's podcast . This week's three things: Sisters in session, far right 1. Fashion statements It was Auntie Shelagh’s birthday last week. Her four sisters who live in these parts took her out for lunch at Juniper in Strathearn. The topic of conversation turned, as it typically does, to stories of childhood. Childhood was six girls and three boys, so, there are some real yarns. I like listening to them talk, the sisters, sometimes all at the same time, about their clothes from those fading days. Their mother, Phyllis, was a prodigious sewer. Clothes for holidays, school pictures, occasions, weddi...

  Here is this week's Three Things podcast . The podcast is my experiment in trying to notice what I notice, and not what is noticed for me by the algorithm. 1.  Life and Death Valley In the MacKinnon Ravine park, between the trailhead at 149th Street and the Groat Bridge, there are, by my count, 17 wooden benches embedded with memorial plaques. “In memory of Darlene James. Be present. Cherish the moment,” one says. The children of Lorna A. Flett quoted Yeats and said their mom “enjoyed poetry, nature and the peace of this river valley.” “In loving memory of Mar Walker 1923-2004 who watched the seasons change along this path for over 40 years.”  I do the math on another plaque and exhale as I realize Baby Xavier Grey Thompson would now be going into Grade 2.  Bill Osadchuk was “a true gentleman who loved running in this river valley.” Kayleigh Butler was 27 years old when she died. Josef Lapes co-founded Pemco Construction Limited. On the plaque of  Kervin ...

  Tough, tough week or not, I try to notice three things that made me happy or grateful. So whatever part of me does the noticing gets a bit of exercise, and offers some resistance to everything else that would do the noticing for me, you know? Here's this week's Three Things podcast. 1. Sibilance From far away, I still hear the sound of the gigantic traffic signs in the U.S.—the ones high above interstate lanes that spell out in Highway Gothic an exotic sounding city up ahead. That’s how I first experienced  “Salt Lake City.”  I’ve never been to Salt Lake City, but when we were in Vegas a few years ago I read the Salt Lake City sign out loud like a poem. The Killers have a new album now. It’s different. It’s got a song called Quiet Town, another rock song about drugs. The song is dark and shadowed, its conspiratorial mood is conjured in part by the poet’s use of the letter s. I quote here without permission, but with admiration. Listen how the s’s in the first nine lines...