Glenn Kubish

  This week we travel by pod to various places, including Bing’s corner store in 1971, Beale Street in Memphis last week, the 1980s, the Jasper Place Library and the intersection of 170 St. and 95 Ave. in Edmonton. Here’s Three Things, episode 55 , baby! 1. Pop music They Don’t Know is irresistible. The melody, the lyrics, the bridge and the hook and Kirsty MacColl’s voice and Tracy Ullmann who made it a hit back in a special place called the 1980s. The song shone then and it still shines. A bit of shine helps the heart in the fifth wave of the pandemic in the freeze-thaw that is this January in the grey-brown that is this Edmonton. Even if you don’t know the song, you know the song. Against all advice from the chorus of them who don’t know, the girl defends her boyfriend, who is a very down-to-earth version of her ideal love. A star in the night sky is the star as it was light years ago. Same thing with a song. When They Don’t Know came into the musical universe, it wasn’t with a ...

Three Things, episode 54 , has a bit of Auntie Shelagh solving a Wordle (and me solving, tentatively, an old question between wives and husbands), some Mozart, some Boston (from the first album) and some notes about being summoned to the boss's office.  1.  Word up It recently came to pass that Auntie Shelagh and I didn’t agree on something. What it was doesn’t matter. Okay, it was whether Wordle will give you more information than you have a right to after guessing one correct letter in the wrong spot. Like, if you guess, say, V as in Victor, and it’s in the wrong spot, but there are two Vs in the answer, will Wordle give you not just one but two yellow indicators? Auntie Shelagh said yes, or, at least, it should. I said no. When we’re at an impasse like this, we usually make a friendly wager. Whoever is right gets the book of her or his choice. We marshalled our arguments. I felt my competitive juices start to simmer. And then I remembered, of all things, graduate school, an...

  Happy. End. Of. The. Week! This is where once a week I try to remember three little things that made me happy or grateful and then record it in a short podcast. Here's Three Things, episode 53 . 1. Showing your routes I fight in myself the modern impulse to bail out of a newspaper story after the first 10 seconds of reading. I always feel I have something else to look at. I’m a child of print swimming in a visual mediascape designed to keep the attention of goldfish. I mean, look: A 30 second TV commercial for a home exercise machine has 18 cuts and all kinds of effects to keep my attention. Lack of attention is assumed by social media. A typical Twitter user takes about three seconds to decide whether a tweet is worth staying with. We scan, we swipe, we scroll, we, basically, confront written material like we are television viewers, trained to expect a new shot every second. Which is exactly how you don’t read a newspaper. Poor newspapers. All that non-moving black print on un...

  This is where, despite it all, or because of it all, I try to notice three things from my ordinary life that made me happy or grateful, and unpack them, so I keep an idea of the kind of stuff I am carrying around with me. Here is Three Things, episode 52 . 1. Cemeteries On New Year’s Day, I go for a walk in a cemetery. I’ve done it for years now. This year it was the St. Anthony/Mount Pleasant graveyards on 106th Street. I like the feeling of being in a graveyard, the feeling of knowing that I am in a graveyard and, especially, the feeling of walking out of a graveyard. I go to graveyards so I can still leave. My number isn’t up yet. In a graveyard, I’m nobody’s number. I mean, there are no neon or flashing signs or eye-catching vide there. I’m not being sold anything. No logos or brands. Just granite and upper case fonts, a lot of Times New Roman, if I’m not mistaken. It’s dramatic to be in the Mount Pleasant cemetery, standing on the hill, to the left a slope of snow-covered to...

Happy end of the week, happy end of the year, friends! Once a week I try to unwrap three things that made me happy or grateful, and then say them out loud. Three Things podcast, episode 51 . 1. Air drop When I was a boy, I had an Astronauts lunch kit. It was still the Cold War. Simpler times. Carrying that lunch kit to school as I balanced along windrows of snow left by the graders on 66th Street made me feel like I was on a top secret mission. The kit was metal, not plastic, and on each panel was a scene from the Apollo 11 story. The rocket blastoff…the lunar lander detaching from the service module…the touchdown on the moon…the splashdown with the red and white parachutes. The lunch kit came from Aladdin Industries Incorporated, Nashville, Tennessee. Inside the lid was a poem from the National Safety Council. One of the couplets: There's really no need to play in the streets Since playgrounds are better places to meet! I know the lunch box so well because I’m looking at it ri...

This week's Three Things podcast is episode 50 . This week's three things that made me happy or grateful are:  1. Sardines This year for Christmas, our eldest son, Alex, is getting sardines. I found them with the other candy at the checkout till at the Italian Centre Shop on 170th Street. They are milk chocolate sardines. Before he died, my grandfather, for whom Alex is named, put down an account of his life in 10 pages of handwritten, blue ink. The story starts in October 1914 in a village in the partitioned territory of eastern Europe. My grandfather recalls how, as a six-and-a-half year old boy, he overheard the men talking as their ordinary lives were being pulverized by the machinery of war. He writes: “We were ordered by government to prepare to leave our homes, bake bread and other food, be ready when order comes to go. Men talking between themselves. What to do?  Leave and go, but where? Born here, grown up, that is our home.”  This is a terrifying scene. I admire...