Glenn Kubish

Happy end of the week, y’all! Here are three things that made for a little, okay, more than a little, happiness and gratitude.                            1. Hope and feathers   Stockboys at   IGA glanced over at him as he stood there near the eggs, feathers still fluttering free from the gash in the right sleeve of his winter jacket. A little girl pushing one of those little shopping carts pointed at him and was gently hushed by her mother who would likely explain later in the car that it’s not polite to stare at strangers. The object of this attention was my friend Darren, the intensive care physician. He had set out for the grocery store on his bike and had taken a wooded, downhill route, misjudged his position or his speed or his age and smashed into a bristling spruce tree. Like an opponent’s spear levelled in a joust, the branch knocked Darren off his mount, slashing his puffy armour and lacerating the ...

Once a week here, I register three things from my little life that left behind signs of happiness and gratitude. Here you go, the U.S. Thanksgiving edition, with some CanCon to bring it home:                         1. Taxes, El Paso   The great French essayist Michel de Montaigne established the voice of conscience as humankind’s absolute sovereign. He wrote to the powers that be: “You may impose as heavy and ruinous taxes upon us as you please, but to command us to do shameful and dishonest things, you will lose your time, for it is to no purpose.” Of the causes of sedition, the great English essayist Francis Bacon included, along with advancement of unworthy persons, taxes. Of taxes, the American DJ Bob Dylan, speaking of the Jamaican singer-songwriter Prince Buster, said:   “Like all great artists he was able to turn things that bothered him into three minutes of musical pleasure.” I was wide awake after midnight ...

Happy end of the week, y’all! Here are a few things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude this week.                   1. Well, well, well   I don’t need to know if there actually is a term for the accumulations of snow and ice that build up inside the wheel wells of automobiles. If you live in a wide-open winter city where occasional driving is a fact, you know what I’m talking about: those dinosaur-tooth-shaped accretions that are so strangely satisfying to kick loose.   [insert that sound here] Evidently, I am not the only one who enjoys this. Take a look at surface parking lots these days. They’re dotted with these mashes of potatoes. There’s a routine. Car comes to a stop, ignition is turned off, and, then, before the driver heads for the mall, it’s kick-kick-kick with the heel, leaving behind, when the car again moves away, four mounds of snowy slop—four cairns of winter.   Whatever they’re called, there is s...

To keep the feeble noticing equipment from completely seizing up, I try each week to think about three things that left behind tracks of happiness or gratitude. The snow is good for tracks. Episode 95:                      1. Fables   I was lyin’ on the living room couch in, if not quite, pain, then, at least, unease, as Shelagh, bent over over under the lamp, sterilized needle in hand, face set in determination, pricked the sole of my right foot. For days, I had limped around with a sliver in the ball of my foot. I had to modify my walk down the stairs to footfall on the heel. Pedalling was a pain. Shelagh is a sliversmith, though. And, after a minute of “come on, alreadys,” she got it.   This sliver that had come close to incapacitating me, was, as I looked at it, thinner than the 1/8th inch notch on a tape measure. Undone by so tiny an intruder, I felt slightly mortified. But Shelagh made the reasonable point that log, ...