Glenn Kubish

  In the event I want to or have to one day or 20 minutes from now retrace my steps back to happiness and gratitude, I make a record of the three things each week that helped produce those goods. Here is episode 67 of the Three Things podcast.                                               1. Jazz Like olives, tomatoes, scotch whisky and basketball, jazz is one of the good things of life that take getting used to. Jazz strikes me as the kind of music most aware of its being built and rebuilt. When I listen to jazz I feel like I have wandered into a workshop where notes are being split and sounds are being hammered out in new ways on the spot by craftspeople. The trumpet, sax, drums and bass are instruments (as in tools) used to make pieces of music. To the brass, ivory, mahogany, maple, birch, polyester, ebony and steel of those implements, musicians add their bre...

  Here are three little things that found their way back in, leaving behind either some happiness or gratitude. Three Things from Edmonton, episode 66: 1. Bubbles Bubbles…it’s a fun word to say, bubbles…bubbles stop me as they go by. Trains, too, I will stop to watch a freight train pass in any season. Geese overhead this time of year, they will carry my attention away. And polite children firing bubbles at me on a cold spring day, they stop me, and take me back—and aback. Jasper out of Place The pair, a sister and her older brother, I guessed, stood, parka hoods over their heads, next to each on their family’s front lawn last week. At his side the boy held a plastic toy bubble gun, a delightful version of a Gatling gun. As I walked by he cranked the handle a couple of turns, looked at the barrel when nothing emerged, shook the weapon to agitate the dish soap in the chamber, earnestly fired again, and, this time, watched bubbles spit out of the ...

  “Andrew said to me, ‘Mom, have you played Wordle?’ and I said, no, don’t talk to me about Wordle! Every morning I get up and it’s just <bing, bing, bing, bing, bing> on my phone because all of my siblings have started to play, and they all share their results and then they all like everybody sharing their results, so I said, no, I’m not doing Wordle…” That was my sister-in-law Kathy recounting the story of her son making the case for Wordle, which she brushed off, but, then, changed her mind about. Good thing. Five-lettered Kathy is a natural at the game. A couple of weeks ago, she solved the puzzle in one try. Last week, she followed that up with what for her must have been a demoralizing, two-guess triumph, which she’s done a few times. “The day I got it in one guess, I put my word in, it was green, green, green, green, green. Oh, this is a good game, I like this. It’s like winning the lottery," Kathy said. H-A-P-P-Y end of the week...

The idea with the Three Things podcast is to isolate three things from my little life that delivered some happiness or gratitude each week. Here is episode 64:                                              1. Help from above It was a memorable week for going off script, to say the least. In a speech to NATO allies, The U.S. President said, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” of the Russian dictator Putin. White House staff tried to walk back that shot across the bow. During the Academy Awards broadcast, the actor Will Smith assaulted the comedian Chris Rock with a shot across the brow. The Oscars decided not to walk Smith out the back. Then there was the bit of ad lib provided by the University of Arkansas cheerleading team and the backboard during the men’s game between the Razorbacks and the Duke Blue Devils. Let me draw this up. March Madness is the year-end...

It's the end of another week of staggering carnage in the greater world and of small happinesses and gratitudes in my little one. Here's the Three Things podcast, episode 63 . 1. Eyes and ears March madness is on bloody and terrifying display in Ukraine. In that arena are two colleagues, doing work for good. I admire them both. Tim, who is a videographer, is on professional assignment for the national news. Jerry, who was a reporter, is on a personal mission. Both are doing what journalists do, which is to use the least private of the human senses—sight and sound—to convey something that is out there, an objective world. “This is such an important story to tell,” Tim said in a message. “So important to hear the voices from the people here. It’s heartbreaking.” For his part, Jerry booked three weeks off work and headed 8,000 km for the Ukraine border. “I’m really here just to grow and learn as a person in no official capacity,” he said, adding that that has meant “carrying lugga...

  It's the end of the week as we know it, friends. Here is this week's Three Things podcast. 1. Jars Apparently, I am also from Chortkiv in western Ukraine, and not just Delwood in northeast Edmonton. Thanks to my mother’s record-keeping, I can trace my family back four generations on her side to the small city of 30,000 people, which is where my great-great grandparents Maria and Dmytro lived and where their son Yosyp was born. It’s close, 100 kilometres or so, from a recent Russian missile strike. I don’t know if I still have relatives there. I have never visited or done an ancestry search. For me, the old country is St. Basil’s Ukrainian Cultural Centre on 109th Street. The siege on Ukraine has brought back flashes from my youth. Ukrainian dancing ribbons for my sisters’ hair. Perogies and cabbage rolls pronounced “pedaheh” and “holopchi.” Borscht made deluxe with spare ribs. The sweet smell of hot wax for Easter pysanky. A blue-covered book on conversational Ukrainian by Y...

  It’s probably the truth that there’s something wrong with you if there’s nothing wrong with you these days. Making note of three things that made me happy or grateful means only that, as Craig Finn has said, there’s some comfort in the ritual. Here is this week's Three Things podcast . 1. A proposal The wind blew and door chimes jingled madly. The wind blew and snow came unfastened in sheets from the street. The giant elm trees in the wind were just giant elm trees in the wind, but they were also, for a second or two, ancient pens, their top branches lashing back and forth like quills chasing turbulent thoughts. All around was wind. A siren rose in the dark. We were in the elements, Auntie Shelagh and I, as we walked down the aisles of snow on 148th Street. It was cold, this wind with teeth from the north. From the sidewalk, I saw people inside their living rooms. A man with the back of his bald head to the front window sat bathed in the blue pulses of his television. At a din...