Tilting at Windmills

Where Is Jeremy?

2012-01-31T00:01:00.000-05:00

I’m enslaved, by a habit that’s not just part of mydaily shopping routine, but the best part. You'll know it when you read it. On my way home every afternoon, I swing by my localgrocery and avail myself of their make-your-own-damn-salad bar as I prepare myhealthy lunch for the following day.

At the rate at which I make and eat salads, I should be so healthy I glow in the dark. I eat salad because I’m told it’s good for me; I have noidea or proof of truth and have even less interest in finding out. I dobelieve if there is a just and merciful God S/He could have had broccoli taste likechocolate, thus making those created in Her/His image very happy. And healthy.

There’s not a lot of variation in how I assemble thesalad-lettuce, peppers, those goofy small tomatoes that explode everywhere whenyou cut them into smaller pieces (but they’re too large to not cut), some spinach, pieces of pineapple, a few sliced strawberries,cranberries and some pieces of white meat chicken all go in the aluminum foil and I pop a plastic lid on top (so the salad can see where we’regoing?).

I use the self-checkout register because it’s almost always openand there’s no line, especially after I too not softly whisper “I own you now” afterevery purchase crosses the scanner. You'd be surprised how quickly people find other lines. The self-checkout has TheVoice encouraging me to use my market’s preferred shopper card and then thanking me for so doing.If I have bar-coded items, all of that merchandise goes first. I put the things inthose terribly thin plastic bags which are impossible to separate so you endup with hundreds of landfill-choking plastic bags you can never use for anything elseand you dare not throw away.

Yesterday I also bought eggs as we had none at home. Every home should have an eggscess of eggs. I can't understand why that slogan still hasn't caught on. Your loss. I buy HUGE eggsbut there’s always one I forget to check that’s welded to the bottom of the cardboardcontainer by escaped egg insides which have now hardened. This means for theprice of twelve eggs I purchase eleven. I do this with a consistency I no longerfind funny. I blame the chickens for the broken eggs; perhaps that whyI eat my salad with chicken pieces, but never chicken salad. Perhaps not.

Anyway. The salad doesn’t have a bar code (yet), so when I place it on the scanner/scale, I have to touch the screen display for produceand The Voice explains “touch the item to purchase.” That, of course, is crap.What I have to do is touch the image on the touch screen showing a salad (notunlike the one I made). Touching the salad itself accomplishes nothing. Iknow this because I do it at least once every day, more often if there’s no onebehind me. Every time I do as The Voice directs, and nothing happens, I go“no?” in a tone of wounded surprise that sounds genuine even though I know it’snot. And I smile because I just crack myself up with this routine every single day.

Why am I telling you this? Because if you’re a resident ofFlorida and are voting today in your state’s Republican presidential primary, Iwas hoping to distract you from so doing since I’m pretty well convinced,despite history to the contrary, there are worse things that can happen to usthan a hanging chad. And three of your choices have the same number of lettersin their first name. May I offer you a lightly used egg?

-bill kenny

Learning to Fly

2012-01-30T00:01:00.000-05:00

It's difficult to believe the first month of the new year is almost over. So far, so good; so what? Not sure what we accomplished in the first thirty days but I'd hope it sets us up in good position for what's left of the year, starting with whatever's going on in your hometown this week.

Around here, here being Norwich, Connecticut, The Rose of New England (though based on my honker you might better have guessed 'Nose of New England') we have a full week of meetings of all kinds and sizes as citizens volunteer not only make a difference but try to be the difference. We are all better for their helping hands.

This afternoon at five in Room 210 of City Hall it's a special meeting of the Redevelopment Agency, and for background on the Vibrant Communities Initiative, which is what the Cecil Group is all about, visit here.

Tuesday afternoon at 2:30 in Room 335 of City Hall is something called C.O..O.L. Directions. This is all I could find out about it, but it's a start and if you go and share what you find out, we're all better off.

At 5:30 in the Latham Science Center on the campus of the Norwich Free Academy it's a special meeting of the Board of Trustees. The item of greatest interest on the agenda is (for me) #4, NFA's next budget, which will directly impact next year's tuition payment by the Norwich Board of Education which will be funded within the next city budget and paid for by all of us. My point: I, too, 'don't have kids at NFA anymore', but still care about the school and so, too, should you. Something about no man is an island, though whether it's Block or Coney is always unclear to me.

And at 6:30 in Council Chambers in City Hall, it's a training session for the members of the Council on Zoning Rules and Regulations (and all this time I thought just like the old NBA, we had to play man-to-man defense. Live and learn, preferably in equal amounts).

Wednesday afternoon at 5:00, it's a regular meeting of the Emancipation Proclamation Commemorative Committee whose meeting minutes remain missing. Remember: history rhymes with mystery. Now roll up for the tour.

At 5:30 in the Kelly Middle School Library it's a regular meeting of the Norwich Public School's School Building Committee. This is where the minutes of the previous meeting would be, if they were but they're not, so they aren't. Subject to your questions, that will conclude my briefing.

At six, in the community room of the Greeneville Fire Department, it's a Matryoshka doll meeting (of sorts) with a regular session of the Greeneville Neighborhood Revitalization Committee; you'll find their December meeting minutes, in draft form, here. The Matryoshka part comes from a second meeting inside this one-aimed at residents of the "Greeneville/Taftville villages" (but the rest of us are welcome as well) soliciting input to update the City of Norwich Plan of Conservation and Development. If you're going, read this; if you're not going, why not? Whose job do you think it is to redesign where we live, if not ours?

And at seven, in Room 335 of City Call, it's a regular meeting of the Republican Town Committee. I wonder if they're going to solicit for volunteers for Newt Gingrich's moon colony? I'll bet their brethren across the aisle already have a nominee.

Thursday evening at seven, in the conference room of the Planning Department at 23 Union Street, it's a regular meeting of the Inlands Wetlands, Watercourses and Conservation Commission. You'll find their January meeting minutes here.

And that is that for this week in these parts, as far as public meetings go. That doesn't mean you get to sit at home and mutter about all the situations in Norwich you're unhappy about. The person to best affect change is staring back at you in the mirror. Do something and then do something else; as a mater of fact, keep doing something until it becomes a habit. Anytime you think you've thought of everything, think again and learn to fly. See you at something?
-bill kenny

Killing the Muse in Music

2012-01-29T00:01:00.000-05:00

Unless you're lactose intolerant, like me, you probably like ice cream. We may have flavors, chocolate chip or mocha swirl, we like more than others, and perhaps a few we're not enthused about, pistachio, I'm talking about you, but when asked we plead guilty to liking ice cream.

I'm the same way about music. I just like it-and I don't spend a lot of time labeling it though sometimes that does help, I suppose. I will admit I'm not a big fan of Rastafarian Country and Western and genres like crunk and death-metal don't do much for me (each sounds like a cat dropped in a blender, but I'm showing my age).

When I worked in broadcast radio I was always impressed by how many different idioms we could create to explain separate nuances of the same expression, all the different charts ranking song popularity in Billboard Magazine-while at the same time, the speaker in the car dashboard or sitting on the book shelf let the music flow.

Before any of us, okay, most of us, walked the earth, people figured out how to attract more ears to their respective radio stations, by playing music more, not fewer, people liked. This attracted audience, in turn, was delivered to advertisers who bought air time on those radio stations to sell us products. It stood to reason some of us would really like some of what we heard on the radio and would go to a brick and mortar shop to buy it to play at home (remember, this was a long time ago; if you're under thirty: think downloads but without a mouse or double clicking).

We had other people who would count how many of which songs sold, per week, per day, per hour in some cases, as if that meant anything and from all of that evolved the various charts, trend trackers, and other measurement devices that now allow us to do just about everything imaginable these days with music except enjoy it.

We have a variety of awards programs for different musics, though my genre, the 'dumb white guy with the bald spot, sliding his feet a little bit arrhythmical and humming off key' doesn't yet have a show (a boy can dream) but the Really Big Show is the Grammys (are the Grammys?) coming on 12 February. Maybe.

Starting this year the show will be streamlined as The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (thank goodness pomposity isn't a crime, eh?) slimmed and trimmed the multitudinous plethora of categories to a not-quite-so-large number. Fewer categories means fewer winners, and less exposure (in theory) and fewer opportunities to slap stickers on CD's that say "Grammy Nominated." Oh, you just said, this is about commercial advantage. Yeah, actually it is.Oh, I forgot to mention-they did this pruning back in April of last year. Check the calendar and now practice your look of surprise.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson's olfactory sense has detected injustice and perhaps oppression and he's decided to weigh in on this whole abridgment of expression of individual rights. My gratitude knows no bounds . I keep praying, play on words, Kirk Franklin intercedes and persuades him to turn his time and talents to something more in need of Divine Intervention. Otherwise, how long before the folks from the other side of the ideological swamp show up and there's so much yellin' and screamin', we'll have lost sight of the music we wanted to honor in the first place.

It'll be a miracle, another play on words (I am so on a roll!), if we get to hear any music at all on the night of the awards over the politics and posturing. Music, like other forms of expression, can build bridges between dissimilar people and bring them closer together. Or it can used to build walls to keep them apart. One note at a time.
-bill kenny

Jip, Jip, Jorge!

2012-01-28T00:01:00.000-05:00

Joe Dimaggio, who was the Yankee Clipper decades before hewas Mr. Coffee, was famous for saying “I want to thank the Good Lord formaking me a Yankee.” Tuesday afternoon, another Boy of Summer from a differentdecade of dominance, Jorge Posada, took his leave from the N. Y.Yankees and professional baseball and the Almighty deserves at least a tip of the cap.

Seventeen seasons, seven World Series and enoughchampionship rings for a hand, to include the thumb, and the Core Four, Jeter,Petite, Posada and Rivera, are now the Dynamic Duo, Derek and Mo. When you’verooted for the Yankees your entire life, suggested a friend in Germany alifetime ago, it’s like cheering General Motors (or applauding ConsolidatedEdison). In this case, fans feel like they've known these guys their whole (public) lives because they have.

No one, sorry FC Barcelona, Manchester United, AC Milan, Montreal Canadiens, or Boston Celtics, no one inprofessional sports has the tradition of continuous competitive excellenceand success of the Bronx Bombers. I’m not a kid anymore, despite a degree ofchildishness some find disturbing, but following the Yankees is somethingI, as an old man, share with the boy I once was. They are like breathing out and breathing in-and if you root for a baseball team, any team, your aspiration and respiration arethe same.

Jorge Posada was one of the homegrown playersharvested from the Yankees farm system, transplanted to the most inconspicuousplace in the entire media universe, The House that Ruth Built, who bloomedbrilliantly and allowed a legendary franchise that had suffered a decade longdoldrums through the early nineties to blossom once again.

Baseball, beneath all the myth and romance of “The Show”and “Field of Dreams” is a business. That’s why we fans can love Yogi Berra andJohnny Pesky while the owners fear Scott Boras (and why the latter is far moreinfluential than the former in our National Pastime). Only in professionalsports is a forty-year old man considered old and Jorge Posada is forty. Histime for leaving had come and gone.

Pitchers and catchers will report for spring training inthree weeks. This year Jorge Posada will join us in a bleacher seat somewherewhile we root, root, root for the home team even though every time someone ofhis caliber leaves the field for the final time it gets just a little harder toremember when we were all kids at the sandlot and harder still to remember wewere gonna play this game forever.

-bill kenny

Seriously? Seriously!

2012-01-27T00:01:00.001-05:00

I realize this is piling on and I don't blame you for being angry about what will, for all intents and purposes seem to be an egregiously cheap shot, except I swear the guy broke the branch off himself, whittled it down to a strong switch, put it in my hands, took two paces back, dropped his britches and begged me to wail away.

Newt Gingrich. I know, again. This time colonizing the moon and granting that colony statehood before his second term as President is over. I take back all the mean things I said about him just the other day (okay, now I'm lying, but Gingrich started it). I love this frickin' guy! Tell you who else does, too-Barack Obama, that's who.

Half a year ago, to hear people tell it, my Aunt Tillie could've whupped the incumbent President in an election. And now? Tillie is staying on the porch and the goofiest group of stuffed suits since the last Republican Presidential primary are playing whack-a-mole with one another as they roll across these, on occasion, United States.

Rick Sanctorum, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, each of them have a special brand of crazy but nobody but Newt has the moon. Not just barking at it, my brothers and sisters, building a settlement on it, a second Plymouth Colony if you will. Someplace where the illegal aliens are us, again dammit! Sure, there are treaties and agreements about the moon and colonization; ask the Native Americans how well the US Government keeps its agreements. Help yourself to a blanket for your trouble. Take one home for the little lady, too.

The guy I visualize leaving an oil slick when he goes underwater in a swimming pool, that Newt Gingrich, is going to take up JFK's mantle--turns out they already had so much in common and now, to the moon, Alice. I can hear Joe Cocker warbling at the Johnson Space Center already. Makes me thirsty just thinking about it. Can I offer you some Tang?
-bill kenny

Low Hanging Fruit

2012-01-26T00:01:00.000-05:00

There are days that trying to be positive and upbeat andsome kind of a happy idiot is just harder than it needs to be. All that Hooked onPhonics stuff later and I have a dickens of a time assembling a sentence; andgathering my thoughts can seem more like shepherding cats.

I had every intention of offering some clever and pithyobservations on the retirement of Jorge Posada and the end of a Pinstripe Era,and I’m pretty confident I shall do just that real soon, but not today. On theway to here I fell over my current favorite useless mass of flesh on theplanet, Kim Kardashian, who has had an even busierweek than Mitt Romney’s tax accountant.

Tangent: I don’t understand the smiley-face talk shows ontelevision weekday mornings usually after ‘news’ programs that look and smellan awful lot like the gabfests that are on to get us to noon news, soap operasand afternoon happy talk shows. Dear TV guys: when you don’t have anything tosay, just sign off and go to black. I never disliked shows like “Regis &Kelly” or whatever permutation it is now; I just don’t care about them.

They are a platform that requires pap and pablum to remainon air. We already have the 24/7 news outlets getting lost in the tall grass,and if you don’t think so try to watch an hour of MSNBC or Faux Gnus not thatCNN is all that much better. Talk is cheap goes the adage and in terms ofproduction costs, talk is cheapest. We don’t have to budget a bunch ‘o’ bucksto host a lot of talking heads and they don’t get paid by the word.

Celebrities, which is what poor, little naive heart-brokenKim is (just ask her), aren’t a whole lot more expensive. They exist for no reasonon earth that anyone has figured out-perhaps they always existed and we’vegotten so stupid from the TV that’s built on them that we simply cannot rememberwhat life was like before and without them. The Lindsays, Parises, Nicoles bythe bushel and Jessicas by the freight car, plus a small city of people whosenames we don’t remember because they themselves are so forgettable could wellbe an optical illusion since when you stare hard they do seem to disappear.

These folks have no visible means of support or even a reasonfor being. They’re passengers on a Streetcar Named Desire who’ve missed theirstop, relying on the kindnessof strangers, and that kindness grows stranger with every passing day.

-bill kenny

Blue, Baby and Otherwise....

2012-01-25T00:01:00.000-05:00

I was tempted to call this "Stopping by the Reid and Hughes Building on a Snowy Evening" but feared my attempt at an homage to Robert Frost would be unhappily received. Point in fact, I don't care but should really try to be nicer, so I shall.

In a downtown Norwich filled with broken promises and missed opportunities, the Reid and Hughes Building is neither. It's a piece of the city's past we've passed out of. I appreciate the hard work the volunteers on the Reid and Hughes Committee invested in their efforts with Becker and Becker to develop a plan to repurpose the building, but there comes a time when there is no longer time.

The warmth of memories about this building's past which seem to be a primary component of the remarks offered to the City Council last Tuesday evening for redevelopment consideration simply don't survive the light of a new day when framing an argument for resuscitating another ruin. I wasn't here when Reid and Hughes was a landmark and a destination for downtown Norwich-from the photos I've seen, it must have been something. I arrived here quite some time ago, twenty years, and the building was broken, empty (and broke-ass) then. Time does NOT heal all wounds and the years haven't been kind to that building at all.

It's not just I who cannot recall Reid and Hughes being anything other than skeleton framework, empty and alone. Looking at the U. S. Census 2010 figures for Norwich, nearly 40% of all residents are 30 years old and younger, and have no memories of this building as a department store or anything else because it has been empty all of their lives.

We have confused cause and effect, yet again. Because we want 'something' to happen, we draw on misty-colored memories of glory days and suggest vaguely that history could repeat itself. We're all too polite to point out it never happens.

Try as we might to be 'data-driven' in our development decisions, we can't help ourselves when it comes to that old school tie. The difference between a rut and grave remains the depth of the habit. And when it comes to Reid and Hughes, old habits are hard to break. Just because a developer (on a grassy knoll?) hasn't shown up at City Hall in a pumpkin coach pulled by six mice transformed into horses, doesn't mean it won't happen today, or tomorrow at the latest. Will it help if we click our heels three times?

I applaud the optimism of the reclamation proposal but seriously, more ground floor retail space with high end apartments above street level at a cost no one can accurately forecast because the plan to make all of it happen is not much more than a conceptual framework?

At the risk of being called unfair let me point out we have (practically) an entire Chelsea downtown district in the same sad state with funding already in place for a voter-approved, professionally managed development program we hope will succeed but whose results are yet to be visible.

Norwich has more than enough buildings, once built and/or refurbished, that were going to 'turn downtown around'. We've turned around so much, I'm dizzy, and not with glee. There's Artspace, the Wauregan and the Mercantile Exchange, to name three; they're all lovely and, quite frankly, they're all islands, isolated and alone, not connected to a unified development program or to one another. Who among us wants to do the math on the total public dollars invested and the return on that investment? I don't have the heart for it.

I'm sorry Dwight Eisenhower's not the President anymore and, if it helps, I'll apologize for how cheap cars and even cheaper gas seduced us into moving farther and farther away from traditional city centers, basically abandoning them to those who made empty promises backed with empty pockets.

We have spent too much to continue to live in the past--too many dollars and far too many days. We like the past best when we can use it to hold our own future hostage. We do that too often and too well and the time for that to stop has arrived. We know how this story ends-it's time to turn the page and write not just a new chapter, but a new book.
-bill kenny

Sometimes this Stuff Writes Itself

2012-01-24T00:01:00.000-05:00

The results of Saturday's Republican Party primary in South Carolina are in and former Speaker of the House (I almost typed ‘serial adulterer’ and then realized I did type it), Newt Gingrich, is the winner. (Now you know why I didn't need an exclamation mark at the end of that sentence) I’m not a member of Mr. Gingrich’s party so I ask your forbearance when I note, less than helpfully as is my wont, that the race among those (still) seeking the Grand Old Party’s nomination for president most closely resembles a ‘who is the tallest dwarf?’contest.

I keep wondering what happened to our democracy from the Revolutionary War until now. Look at the signers of the Declaration of Independence and then remember our American History about the earliest Presidents and leaders. I’m always amazed at the number of men (forget not the times in which our country was founded; we were pretty fly for only white guy(s)) who never became President.

Fast forward to the here and now and we’re spoiled for choice. I’m supposed to believe the announced candidates and the incumbent are the very best we can do. Seriously? Anyone else think we should be getting a refund because we didn’t get the whole ride?

Meanwhile, barreling towards Florida (look out, Mom! Stay indoors!), for whenever their primary is held (before B-I-N-G-O, that's for sure) are the Republicans with no clear-cut leader either in the polls or among themselves. In all of that churn, meet Dr. Keith Ablow of Fox News Medical “A” Team (he looks nothing likeGeorge Peppard) who postulates Mr. Gingrich, or ‘King Bee’ as I like to think of him, would be a better choice for President because of, not despite, his history of infidelity.

The good Doctor offers, “When three women want to sign on for life with a man who isrunning for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for athird Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.” Sounds like a graduate of ofthe Frito-Lay University School of Psychiatry or someone who's interested in just how thinly you can slice bovine excrement.

I’m not sure I understand why Fox News has a Medical “A” Team or what their function is (purely decorative, perhaps?) though I am reasonably certain my health insurance doesn’t cover their use. We’ve all heard about the problems of fidelityFDR, JFK and Clinton all had  (I’m assuming with phonographs and radio receivers) so it’s refreshing, in a way, to elevate the whispers to screams this early in the contest.

Besides, if Mr. Gingrich does capture the White House, we can all look forward to a serenade at one of the Inaugural Balls by BillyPaul. Perhaps as a sing-along?
-bill kenny

龙快乐的一年

2012-01-23T00:01:00.000-05:00

Welcome to 4712, the Year of the Dragon. If you're one who observes such customs, much fun and happiness with only a small portion of dragon (save room for dessert), unless that's considered poor form.

It's a busy week in these parts and not just in shoveling snow and other four letter words starting with 's.'

This morning at 7:30 unless the snow has changed their plans, it's an annual meeting of the Regional Planning Commission of the Southeastern Connecticut Council of Governments in their building in the Norwich Business Park. I did, to tell the truth, expect an agenda but would have been surprised had it actually been on their website.

At five, in Room 210 of City it's a regular meeting of the Redevelopment Agency, who are in the process of adding deeds to words, as evidenced by their agenda. .

Tuesday afternoon at 3:30 in their offices at 90 Town Street, it's a regular meeting of the Norwich Public Schools Board of Education Policy Committee, who last met, if their website posting of minutes is accurate (capital I and capital F), last June. Might want to work on rewriting the sentence at the top of the page, too.

At four, if necessary (i.e., a meeting is requested by someone appealing a decision), in the Planning Department conference Room, conveniently located in the Planning Department at 23 Union Street, it's a regular meeting of the Building Code Board of Appeals, whose page on the city's website is old and obsolete (unless, of course, it really is January of 2010).

At five, in Room 219 of City Hall it's a regular meeting of the Harbor Management Commission, whose agenda is very ambitious (and should be, or what's a heaven for) which is all the proof you should need that much must be done.

At six, in the conference room of the Norwich Public Utilities at 16 Golden Street, it's a doubleheader, as the Board of Public Utilities Commissioners and the Sewer Authority meet. I'm disappointed the excellent maintenance of the NPU website for meeting agenda and minutes is now a thing of the past, the distant past, as nothing has been updated since October(ish).

Also at six, in the Buckingham Memorial, it's a regular meeting of the Public Parking Commission, (I was taught to spell meetings with a silent and invisible Q) whose November minutes are here.

There's a note on the city's municipal meeting calendar for Wednesday about a 3:30 meeting of the Board of Education's Building and Space Committee but the note doesn't make a lot of sense (what was cancelled and when?) while a visit to the Norwich Public Schools' website makes even less sense. I enjoyed September 2010 immensely-not enough to want to stay there, but to each his own.

Wednesday, afternoon at five, in Room 319 of City Hall it's a regular meeting of the Emancipation Proclamation Commemorative Committee, whose listing on the city's website will occur, I'd hope, (if only) shortly before the actual 150th anniversary.

At 5:30 in the planning department conference room at 23 Union Street it's a regular meeting of the Dangerous Buildings Board of Review, whose most recent meeting minutes posted on line, November, are here. I think there should be a contest entitled "what does this mean" or perhaps "what language was this written in?" for Item 6 Public Comments.

At 6:00, as in o'clock rather than million, is a regular meeting of the Reid & Hughes Committee whose report to the City Council last week, will be the subject of a public hearing at a Council meeting on February 21st. I'd point out the entries on the city's website are woefully outdated, but you suspected as much.

Also at six, in the Recreation Department offices at Dickenman Field, it's a regular meeting of the Recreation Advisory Board. According to the city's website, the last meeting was, seemingly, in December of 2010. I'm happy they're not waiting any longer in this decade to hold a follow-up.

At seven, in their offices (the Mark Twain Pavilion?) on New London Turnpike, it's a regular meeting of the Norwich Golf Course whose December meeting minutes are here.

Thursday morning at 7:30, in the Norwich Inn and Spa (on Route 32), it's the annual meeting of the Norwich Community Development Corporation Board of Directors, whose regular meeting minutes and agenda are available after accomplishing a mailing address request found here.

And at seven in the evening, in Room 335 of City Hall, it's a regular meeting of Norwich Democratic Town Committee; maybe tonight's when they become their name.

If you have pictures of Norwich, here's your chance to let the rest of us see what you do. And if we all have to buy bigger wallets, maybe that's a store that could wind up in downtown(?)

Suspect more than a few of us are reconsidering that "I want a sled" wish we made at Christmas, but the exchange and refund window is closed for the season. We'll have to make the best of what we have, as has always been the case. Like most places on earth, we are a work in progress and can use all the helping hands we can get, to include yours. Put it there. See you at something?
-bill kenny

He Lives in a Matchbox

2012-01-22T00:01:00.000-05:00

I was very grateful we have had the winter we have had so far this season. I did not dance in the street all 'Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee' full of schadenfreude, while watching The Weather Channel reports on four feet of snow in Square Butte, Montana or Dickshooter, Idaho.

I have patience, if not faith or hope. I figured we'd get ours. And we did. Something else I have is a snow blower. And while there are certainly other ways to spend not inconsequential portions of the weekend, reading Proust, digging Django are two that come to mind (though not mine), neither does a whole lot of positive about moving that pile of snow the city plow dumped at the foot of the driveway.

Brute Force, and Ignorance-at your service. Five forward speeds and two reverse. Sometimes I'm not sure if I'm guiding the snowblower or an anchor it's trying to slip. Most of the time outside, I just pray it doesn't turn on me since next to nothing I've ever been involved in with it seems to so much as slow it down. Get too close to the chute and I'd have a whole new career in landscaping, as ground cover.

We have four seasons here in New England. The fourth arrived, more or less, Friday. I suspect it'll be staying a spell, so keep the shovels and the scrappers close by. I keep mine on the shelf next to the snowblower, one of the finest inventions in the history of Christendom. While you stare at your boots, and the words float out like holograms, ponder that. If you don't think so, ask someone who owns one. My hand's up, feel free to call on me.
-bill kenny

That’s Why We Say “Man’s Best Friend”

2012-01-21T00:01:00.000-05:00

If it weren’t for the unusual news on line, I could get through a world summary of daily events in less than a minute. Not because I speed read, mind you, but, rather, because I really don’t care. As someone who truly believes we are each tuned to WII-FM (What’s In It For Me), much of what some call news is for me, noise. Yes, the 'big world' is important but no, not much of what goes on in it is subject to any of my desires or demands. Merde!

In South Carolina today, members of the Republican Party will choose, well, they’ll choose the lesser of three evils, I guess (is that all that’s left?). There’s a guy who thinks it’s still 1811, and the one who isn’t just The 1% but more like POINT ONE % and don’t let me forget the Adulterer in Chief. But aside from that dab of drive-by snarkiness (just to stay in shape), es macht doch nichts (it doesn’t matter). Enjoy yourself.

I live for the lunacy-for the implausible, for the ‘you cannot be serious’ dispatch. The item your eyes skim, the mouse has already double clicked, the screen has refreshed when your brain suddenly realizes what it just read, slams on the brakes and goes “waitaminit!” Up to the top of the screen you race, hit the back arrow and we have a pearl of great price, a story like this one, Man Tells Court it Was Dog Who Strangled Wife.

We wasted all that time in a treehouse with Lassie, while the game was afoot? Actually my favorite part of this story was“Doz”, the commenter, wondering how long it took to train the dog. I’m a guywho has spent most of his life unclear about which end is for petting and whichfor pooping and this Dusseldorf Dog Lover not only trained his pooch to playdead but to play for keeps. Respekt!

-bill kenny

Where’s the Promise from Sea to Shining Sea?

2012-01-20T00:01:00.000-05:00

As small kids in the primary grades at St Peter’s (sic)School in New Brunswick we took recess on the street to the side of the schoolthat had police barricades set up and then taken down every school day, disruptingthe traffic in and around the neighborhood. We children had no knowledge ofthat-we just knew to stay inside the area protected by the white saw horseswith black lettering.

It wasn’t hard. We were, after all, Catholics, raised tobelieve in things we couldn’t see. If the saw horses kept us safe from cars,who were we to wonder how they did it? There were hundreds of us on a not largestreet and the turf battles between those in the ‘other’ grade (I was in 3B andour mortal enemy was 3A) were reasonably pacific but hard-fought nevertheless.Actually they were mostly staring contests that would end after minutes of peering at one another with someone sneeringly suggesting ‘why doncha take apitcher? It’ll last longah.’ (I don’t have a Jersey Kid dialect type font onthis keyboard. Who knew?)

Perhaps a photograph might have lasted longer, but the folkswho brought us Ektachrome and Kodachrome and Tri-X and Plus-X may not be aroundmuch longer. Eastman Kodak, the pride and joy ofRochester, New York, have filed for bankruptcy while vowing to remain inbusiness. I remember coming off the schoolbus up the driveway on Bloomfield Avenue and checking to see ifthe mailman had been there with a delivery from those faraway labs that processed all the rolls of slide film Dad used totake.

Years later, I and many others, discovered an alternate usefor the metal screw top film containers that every cherry-top in New Brunswickalso knew but never enforced otherwise most of the class of ’71 through’77would have been wearing caps and gowns in lock-up. Few things, to me, are more “American”(whatever that means) than Kodak. And underscoring how God has a skewed senseof humor, overshadowed or smoke-screened by the Kodak story, is Boeing’s decision to close up shop inWichita, Kansas, after 80 years. “Them steady jobs, they’re going, boys, andthey ain’t coming back.”

This is a Presidential election year-one of the parties iselecting the President of South Carolina tomorrow and after the seers read the entrailsof whatever animal is slaughtered they’ll unearth the significance of whatdidn’t happen, and people who don’t know what it means (mostly cable news because their audience never realizes they’resmarter than the people in the box) will attempt to explain it to people who don’t care(us).

It’s important, maybe, but, dammit Janet, we’ve got football this weekend tosee who’s going to the Super Bowl in a sport no one else on earth plays, whichmay be why we still can boast of being the best at it. National priorities and concerns such as the National Defense Authorization Act, Stop OnlinePiracy Act and the like will bother us another day, if we remember, but notthis Saturday and Sunday. Call the turn-down service and leave a wake-up callfor after the Super Bowl (but beforethe NBA play-offs).

Good thing we’ve gotcameras in our phones now. Otherwise, we might not have pictures of thefly-over they do before the kickoff. What was that about the planes?

-bill kenny

Kaddish

2012-01-19T00:01:00.000-05:00

I never met him,except through the ether and the wires of the Internet. I made his acquaintancethrough Floyd’s old board in August of 2001, unaware that his effort was stillfledgling and fluctuating.

Bob had served inthe radio newsroom of the American Forces Network Europe, the largest affiliateof the largest radio and television operation in the world that you’ve probablynever heard of, about half a decade before I had arrived there.

That was as close aswe ever got to meeting. He had been in Vietnam before he had been in Germanyand shortly after the assignment in Frankfurt he, recently married, decided topursue his broadcasting on the home front, in this case in South Carolina.

Sometime betweenworking for the ABC (I think) affiliate in Charlotte, pursuing photography(really his first love) and living quietly with his wife, he found the time tostart up a newsletter before all of this world wide web stuff was even a gleamin Al G’s eye. I’d hate to think what he spent in postage, but I know he didn’tregard it as an expense or as work.

The newsletter, as Isaid, became a Yahoo group which was an accurate enough descriptive as well asbeing the name of the ISP that supported it. In short order he went from ahandful of subscribers to a fistful to an armful to well over four hundred.

I knew him for overa decade and admired his ability to keep hundreds of thin-skinned, large-egoedbuttheads (it takes one to know one, she said) who loved to hear ourselvestalk, or in this case, type, from eating one another hair and all (the good newswas some of us were getting up in years and hair was a rationed commodity).Someone had to use a chair and a whip on occasion and Bob was that someone.

His online group, Ithink a therapy for him, was the bridge many of us from differentdecades of service used to find one another. In many instances that notorious sixdegrees of separation often only reached three and you would be among friends.

His health was never good. He had COPD when I first began corresponding with him and within afew years he was alone as his wife was ravaged by Alzheimer’s and his ownhealth continued to fail. We spoke once years earlier when I called him afterhe had been hospitalized for a shortness of breath that nearly killed him. Hewas in constant pain and used his time online with his virtual friends todistract himself while amusing and amazing all of us.

Despite his historyit was still an unhappy surprise two days ago to read a posting by someone(else) whom I didn’t know, telling all of us he was hospitalized yet again andwas failing badly and rapidly. The watch startedand the stream of updates was relentlessly grim. Each posted report was bleakerthan the one preceding it. His heart and lungs, weakened from five or sodecades of three plus packs of cigarettes a day, betrayed him and it was hissister, Bea, who had to decide to remove him from life support when all thatcould be done had been.

Bob assisted byaccomplishing DNR and end of life directives years earlier. I can still recall exchanges he and I had on the subject and the eloquence with which wrote underscored the passion he felt on thedecisions he was making. Yesterday afternoon it was time. He lived anunassuming, purpose-driven life, and his departure reflected all of that.

Large events movedacross the world’s stage, thundering and reverberating as they will. In thesilence between those rolls of thunder, Bob stopped hurting, finally, took hisleave and hundreds of us across the globe and across the generations, can donothing more than try to hold back our tears, remember the kind words and warmthoughts and be glad we knew him.

If prayers can help,and I’ve long since stopped believing they do, then I hope for the departed andthose left behind, here’s one that does.

-bill kenny

Leslie Gore and Will Rogers Move to Norwich

2012-01-18T00:01:00.000-05:00

I thought about a delightful quote from Will Rogers last week while reading about the indoor fireworks at the Democratic Town Committee meeting that seemed to suggest while the Town Committee is bigger than any one person, there is at least one person, Greeneville's Ron Ward, for whom it has no room at all.

Rogers once offered, "I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat." And while he reportedly never met a man he didn't like, there's no record of his ever visiting Norwich which might have put his legendary amiability to a severe test.

I'm NOT butting in, or piling on, when I comment about what went on last Thursday. I'm a registered Democrat--only because I thought years ago I'd get a chance to vote for Bill Bradley in a Presidential primary that eventually went to Al Gore. So, in that sense, Mr. Ward and I are in the same party (as are all those chosen to serve on the DTC for the 46th, 47th and 139th districts), though there are probably some members less than happy about how all of that worked out.

Freedom to disagree or to be disagreeable are not actually enumerated in the Bill of Rights, but they don't need to be expressed as they are implied within the protections of freedom of speech. As a practical matter, freedom of speech is often hardest to defend when you don't like what's being said or who is saying it. And for months people took exception to things Mr. Ward has said or done. That, is their right, freedom of association for which they need not apologize in much the same manner as Mr. Ward need not change his beliefs to accommodate or appease anyone else.

Quite frankly, from what I know of him, he wouldn't, even if he could, so it's just as well he can't or won't. I am chagrined when stories like this make the front page, and our front lobes, not because, channeling Rodney King, I wonder, "Can we all just get along? (Mom raised crazy children, not stupid ones) but because we have so many other and more important concerns and challenges facing us as a city, a state and as a nation.

An intra-party quarrel over membership on a committee that by the end of the evening still had vacancies seems childish very probably because it is childish. We can do better than behave in a manner first described by that well-known political scientist, Leslie Gore, and acknowledge political parties are often alliances of convenience for a greater good than any of its members, alone, can achieve.

And for Ward's supporters, and he had (and has) them, who see the Norwich DTC as an 'old boys club," remember the words of Karl Marx's brother, Groucho, "I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member." Seriously.
-bill kenny

The Earnestness of Everyday Returns

2012-01-17T00:01:00.000-05:00

The business of local governance at least here in Norwich resumes Today, and is impressive for both potential importance as well as impact and influence. This afternoon at 5:30 in the Latham Science Center on the campus of the Norwich Free Academy, it's a regular meeting (and first one of the year) of the Board of Trustees whose November meeting minutes are here.

At six, in Room 319 at City Hall it's a regular meeting of Personnel and Pension Board, whose late December meeting minutes are here. Some of the appointment dates listed on line for members can do with some freshening up. At seven, in Room 335, in City Hall, Republicans meet to endorse candidates for election to their Town Committee. If either Mark Burnett or Ron Ward are in the area, there's a rumor that these folks have snacks (unlike those other guys).

Also at seven in the Planning Department's conference room at 23 Union Street, it's a regular meeting of the Commission on the City Plan. A review of their meeting agenda doesn't suggest any items the City Council can completely ignore, but perhaps something will be added under suspension of the rules. Kidding aside, the City Council meets at 7:30 in Council chambers with a full agenda to include the report of the Reid & Hughes Committee and a not small amount of housekeeping on appointments to committees.

Wednesday morning at 8:30 in their offices in the Norwich Business Park it's a regular meeting of the Southeastern Connecticut Council of Governments whose meeting agenda is absent, along with their December 2011 minutes, from their website. Imagine my surprise (c'mon you can do better than that).

At nine, in The Dime Bank (on Route 82) Community Meeting Room, it's a regular meeting of the Norwich School Readiness Council (Children First) whose web presence continues to be little more than a rumor. They're not on the city's site and their own site is old and badly outdated, to be kind. Their Facebook page was last updated a month ago, before all the schools had a holiday break.

At five, in Room 319 of City Hall is another regular (they meet weekly) meeting of the Emancipation Proclamation Commemorative Committee, which, aside from the meeting calendar, still hasn't surfaced anywhere on city's website, most especially the listing of 'Boards, Commissions, Committees and Authorities' (I don't know why they're not alphabetical, either).

Thursday afternoon, at five thirty in the Norwich Arts Council Coop office at 60-64 Broadway, it's a regular meeting of the Downtown Neighborhood Revitalization Zone (NRZ) whose page on the city's website remains a work in progress with no progress to report. Not sure what those who are supposed to be responsible for the city's website maintenance and update do, but this ain't it, or even close to it.

At six, in The Rink on New London Turnpike, it's a regular meeting of the Norwich Ice Arena Authority. Again, nice work on updating the city's website (I couldn't find the snarky font). Perhaps the problem is Thursday? Here's their Facebook page which is more current than the municipal website, sort of.

Friday morning at nine, in Room 319 of City Hall, it's a regular meeting of Chelsea Gardens Foundation but you'll have to look elsewhere aside from the city's website to find out anything about it (except it's very successful in getting financial support from the Sachem Fund). Their website is here and you can join their mailing list, which I did, though your mileage may vary.

And Saturday morning at nine, at the Laurel Hill Volunteer Fire Department, it's One City Forum. I'd tell you what we've gotten accomplished so far, but I've been sworn to secrecy (actually there was just a lot of swearing; I'm not sure how secret it was). My point is if you keep sitting around thinking 'somebody should really do something' why not join us and be the Somebody. Although sometimes, I admit, we may call you another name (but never to your face, promise). See you at something?
-bill kenny

And May Your Dreams Be Realized

2012-01-16T00:01:00.000-05:00

If we here in the Land of the Red, White and Blue Round Doorknobs can't make it a three day holiday, we may not observe it at all. Yesterday was the 83nd birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr..James Earl Ray made sure he would never have to blow out all those candles by murdering him almost forty-four years ago. The deaths of American icons you've read about in history class in school, JFK, Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, I was alive for all three and lack the words to tell you what we were like as a nation before their passings but I assure you we are better people because they lived.

I was a high school sophomore, a pimply too-loud white preppie kid, wandering around Washington D. C. on a school trip my father organized through the middle of Resurrection City, just weeks after Dr. King's assassination. I was stunned at the scale and scope of the settlement, the audacity and eloquence of the vision that propelled and compelled it into existence and the pervasiveness of the poverty and despair that made it inevitable and necessary. Reinventing American society so that the reasons why it had to be would became history and aren't part of our present or future, is a part of the legacy of Dr. King.

Today across the country there are ceremonies and commemorations. Ours in Norwich at City Hall starts at a quarter of two this afternoon with some speeching, a little preaching (I suspect, having attended this every year for the better part of a decade) as well as singing followed by a march to Evans Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church for warming words on what is usually a typical New England winter's day and then we'll all go home, back to the lives we lead and the people we are.

I hope this year, unlike any other before it, across this country, we can seize a moment from whatever we do today to celebrate the dream of Dr. King, make it our own and keep it on our hearts. And then, beginning tomorrow for all the days that remain, use it as a fulcrum, as he did, to change the world. Again.
-bill kenny

Of Course!

2012-01-15T00:01:00.000-05:00

It felt Friday around here as if Winter has started to arrive. We had just about every kind of weather you can have all in the same day (Tony would have appreciated the idea, I'm sure, but, perhaps wondered a bit about the zealousness of our execution). By late afternoon we had rather ferocious winds sweeping across the region from Bar Harbor to Cape Hatteras with some unkind gusts thrown in for good measure.

When I got up yesterday morning it was about twelve degrees Fahrenheit cooler than it had been on Friday. So crisp, in fact, that the weather station our son got us a decade ago with outside monitors that transmit their readings wirelessly to the collection station were on strike. All I could read for temperature was "--.--" which is Radio Shack weather station code for 'get your butt out on the porch and see for yourself." I enjoy the notion the temperature readout offers decimals on every degree as if 28.1 feels warmer than 27.9.

I don't mind winter's arrival because there's not much I can do about it (pouting, while therapeutic, changes nothing) and I figure we got away, so far, with about five more weeks of Autumn than we usually have, so it's all good. Out for a morning walk I was reassured at my own mortality because I could see my breath with every stride and I had the sidewalks to myself around Chelsea Parade and Washington Street (allowing the cars on Washington to stay where they belong and I'll do likewise).

Coming towards me, and making me shiver just to look at him was a man with black baggy shorts and a dark (not Navy) blue tee shirt with some kind of writing on the shirt. He wasn't running but he was power walking at a pretty good rate. As he neared I could see his footwear was a set of those new (to me) sneakers that are like having a second skin and, say devotees, make you feel like you're running barefoot. Considering the number and texture of surprises lurking in the grass throughout Chelsea Parade, I'm not sure how much of the attractiveness of barefooting argument I'm buying.

As we briefly met and then passed one another, I saw the lettering on his tee-shirt, "University of Alaska Track and Field." Proving again there's no place like Nome. Well-played, sir!
-bill kenny

The Triumph of the Old School Tie

2012-01-14T00:01:00.000-05:00

I’m not sure if it’sthe three-day holiday weekends that attract the odd news or vice versa (I’mthinking not so much versa as opposed to salsa but that’s how I roll) but Isuspect attempting to get from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Christie Carr ofBroken Arrow, Oklahoma, and not exceed the legendary six degrees of separationmay be close to impossible. As it is, getting from Christie to Irwin is quite aleap, figuratively if not physically.

Read this for yourself; I’ll wait here. Our children are fans of something called First World Problems, and its thousands ofvariations and permutations and Christie and Irwin are, I imagine, somewhere inall of that. I appreciate the story’s thoughtful sidebar on “What States Allow Ownership of Exotic Pets?”This is exactly why God (and His servant, Al Gore) invented the Internet. Myinitial reaction is Oh My.(Tell me Bert Lahrdoesn’t know a set-up when he hears one.)

I know someone fromOklahoma-we met when he wasn’t there but in Germany. He has since returned(someone paid the deposit I guess) and lives, I think, in Tulsa. He has adoctorate and a marvelous life with a wonderful family, but does not own akangaroo so I can’t claim to have the all-important ‘eyes on the ground’ to getme any real-life, real-time background.

I admire thereporter’s straight face while noting Christie “dresses (Irwin) up each time heleaves the house. The clothes — a little boy's shirt cut and sewed toaccommodate his neck, sometimes a tie, and jeans or slacks with a hole cut forthe tail — are necessary for therapeutic reasons and to protect him againstgerms.” All this time, I thought thatflu shot I got in the Walgreens in October was why I hadn’t had a cold. I weara shirt and tie every work day-I think those vaccine guys got some ‘splainingto do.

Stories like thisare why I’m happy nothing else on the planet knows how to read. If other speciesget wind of how goofy we are, some of them might to tell us to take ouropposable thumbs and big brains and go pound sand. And now thanks to that damn list, we know exactlyhow near the animals with the tools and teeth to back that up have to travel. Terrific. I’ll go into the basement now andget the suitcases because we may need them sooner than we think.

And that won’t endhappily either as I suspect Irwin will have gotten so used to riding shotgun onthe drive to McAlester, he’ll be a real delight totravel with. Whatever you do, Christie, don’t let him order at the drive thruwindow at the Jackin the Box. That line of cars behind you will end up stretchingpast Lake Talawande all the way to Bugtussle.

-bill kenny

Sink or Swim

2012-01-13T00:01:00.000-05:00

We’re having a lot of rain mostly in piddles, but not puddles, the kind of rain when you wear glasses you squint a bunch and more extremely as you walk along because these microscopic drops eventually adversely impact your vision (insert your “feel like a registered Republican in a primary state” joke here) and you wind up in places you hadn’t intended. Today is a lot colder than it's been so the drops can sting a bit.

I shouldn’t complain, not because I haven’t had enough practice at it (ha-ha thunk! The sound of me laughing my as-head off ), but because it’s the middle of January in the middle of winter in the middle of Norwich, Connecticut, in the middle of New England and we have rain and not snow. Not snow is my favorite kind of weather. Actually “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Bubonic Plague Weather” is my favorite, but not snow is a photo finish second.

I work with someone who believes I should feel cheated because I bought a snow blower three years ago ‘and you hardly ever get to use it.’ Yeah, it sucks to be me. I’m so disconsolate I’m organizing a block-size pity party for myself about that. As long as I don’t have to reschedule it because of snow, and no one arrives for it in a sleigh, I’m delirious with delight over what I don’t have to use.

None of that has anything to do with this. I was speaking of places I hadn’t intended to travel and I wound up yesterday someplace I’ll blame on a Jersey Girl (actually a woman, sorry Tom) I’ll never meet and of whom you may not have heard (yet) but probably will after she grabs a Grammy this year, Linda Chorney.She cracks me up with her blog but what I most appreciate is the sound hermusic and lyrics make together. As someone who’ll always regard New Jersey as my home state shemakes music that tells me I’m there, evenwhen I’m not.

And yet, that’s stillnot it. Actually, thisis. This fellow writes so effortlessly, he makes me want to unplug my keyboard,dig a hole in the backyard and bury it because I’m really wasting my time. Andwhile I appreciate the offer of your shovel, I was (of course) speakingmetaphorically. Nice try. Snark much?

Sometimes the path less traveled proves to be a trap but othertimes it reveals itself to be a treasure.

-bill kenny

Happy Trails Has Fewer Letters

2012-01-12T00:01:00.000-05:00

Sometimes we end up learning stuff we didn’t set out to learn about mostly because we live in a world of converging and colliding information. Not that long ago it was sort of funny that we took a goofy word, google and used it as the name of a search engine and then made it a verb and then a gerund and practically baked it in a pie with four and twenty blackbirds.

Speaking of which in rapid order, we started tweeting about stuff we’d googled, and vice versa and then to a far greater degree than we ever did with my space we facebooked everything on earth at least twice. I have long believed that in the face of the events of 9-11and the total failure to successfully impose any order and understanding on what happened and why, we constructed a pink noise generator to insulate our world so we need no longer fear being alone, ever. Hi-Ho.

We live out loud online all the time. That’s what this is, in a less flamboyant way than just about anything else you’ll encounter on any given day of the week out here in the ether. That I’m not advocating we galvanize babies at birth, put the steering wheels of motor vehicles in the center of the front seat or authorize pony rides for everyone’s birthday doesn’t mean I’m sane or that this collection of electrons isn’t a cry for attention. I just can’t be pushy enough to become a roadside attraction; we should both count our blessings.

Our world has become a fever ward where our ability to tell one another the most excruciatingly embarrassing things vastly exceeds our desire to know and overwhelms any obligation to care. Take this “news” story at whatever level you like, and tell me I’m wrong to cringe. I appreciate your unhappiness over the lack of imagery to support the copy. An editorial consideration, I’m sure.

Of course I have questions, as if you don’t. For openers: does the big gentleman work for a travel agency? What is the rate of incidence for this type of phenomenon (is that the word to use? And if not, what is?)? Who keeps them and where? And how did he know the words were all spelled correctly?

Somewhere Trigger just whinnied as if to ask is that a handheld needle in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? Happy Trails, little buckaroo, which rhymes with tattoo. Just how many letters is Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain and will anyone need to buy a vowel?

-bill kenny

A Day of Miracles and Wonder

2012-01-11T00:01:00.000-05:00

Often we go through life missing and mourning what we don't have instead of celebrating that which we do. We live in an age where the miraculous has been often reduced to the mundane and where amazing is perceived as commonplace.

Not all of us can enjoy all this amazement all the time. Javon Oates has learned a great deal about advances in medical science in the course of his life-but his life has been only a little longer than a year so perhaps you've already guessed Javon has challenges.

Actually what Javon has is Pfeiffer Syndrome, Type II, a genetic condition resulting in a premature fusion of certain bones of the skull that prevents further growth of the skull affecting the shape of the head and face. Pfeiffer Syndrome occurs about once in every 100,000 births

Javon has already had nearly two dozen separate operations and is currently in the Intensive Care Unit at the University of North Carolina Children's Hospital in Chapel Hill. His mom, Dawn, is from Norwich but she and her family have recently relocated to North Carolina. Because of his hospitalization, Javon's family are facing hard times with a long road ahead of all of them.

Shem Adams, and Shirely Briones, the owners of Phillys, A Taste of Philadelphia, at 32 Sherman Street, concede they can't do everything but know they can do something. And today is the day you can, too. From the opening at 11 AM until closing tonight at 7, today is Javon's Day at Phillys. All of today's profits will be donated to Dawn. You can help out on line, too, by going to http://javonoatesfund.chipin.com/javons-fund and making a donation.

Having an authentic Philly Cheese Steak, Ivo, Kobe, Stilt, Doctor, or Broad Street Bully (it's a Philadelphia thing, you wouldn't understand) will not only make your stomach smile because they're just that delicious but will also be helping out a family in need.

Phillys has been a phriend to Norwich neighbors since it first opened in July, helping celebrate a Cheez-Whiz covered conclusion to a successful 2011 season by the Norwich Free Academy football team this past fall and if you can't come to them, place your order at 860.912.1057 and they'll come to you.

Philadelphia is known as the City of Brotherly Love, and, Phillys, its embassy here in The Rose City is doing what it can, courtesy of some mad grill skills, to spread smiles as wide and deep as the dipping sauce on the pizza fries. Today, help Javon but help yourself to some extra napkins-because it you're not getting messy while eating one of these sandwiches, you're just not doing it right.
-bill kenny

William and Shirley

2012-01-10T00:01:00.000-05:00

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” which is all well and good Julie baby, but what should one make of an inmate in Madison, Wisconsin who goes by the moniker Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop. You just know he’s the kind of guy who, in response to ‘how do you spell that?’ deadpans with ‘just the way it sounds.’

This is why I love the United States. We used to make things here-important, solid, somber things from cars the size of city blocks that handled like double beds with box springs to rockets that took people to the Moon and, more importantly, brought them back home again. No more.

We all fell in love with getting our MBAs and maximizing our ROIs and not too long after that we stopped making just about everything except a horse’s behind (sorry Bentley) out of ourselves for the amusement of the rest of the planet. I’m surprised every US birth certificate doesn’t come with a complementary red nose, a squirting flower and really big, floppy shoes.

Especially for someone named Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop-it just rolls off the tongue, don’t it? I suspect instead of an ambulance, his pregnant mom went to the hospital’s delivery room in a clown car. Of course, that’s not really true. Bill Novak, crack crime reporter (pause for the back of the room to get the joke… and we’re walking) explains this tongue twister of a miscreant spent most of the first three decades on Earth answering to “Jeff.”

I wanted more than this unassuming crime in the heartlands story could have ever had on the why (because we like you!)of how B-E-E-Z-O-W became who he is and not a name formed from the Periodic Table of Elements (which, by the way, will always be incomplete until it includes the Element of Surprise). Between us, I suspect his first night on the cell block no one was calling him Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop. Talk about a little trick with Nick? You wouldn’t believe the magic behind making a cellmate disappear for an hour.
-bill kenny

Game Face On

2012-01-09T00:01:00.000-05:00

If you got a sled for Christmas, my apologies that you have to drive for hours to use it. I wish it were days. And please forgive me because I hope you have to drive all winter (though I know in my heart you won't). The rest of us, when not pining for the fjords, are perhaps more interested in what is going on locally to make where we live better. That, at least in theory, is the premise behind this note about what's going on in Norwich, Connecticut.

I'd like to think we have so many volunteers engaged in various boards and advisories, not because we need so much help, but because we have so many open-hearted people who want to lend a hand. Your mileage may vary, mine always does so sometimes I walk.

This afternoon at five, we have dueling meetings in City Hall (what ever became of Eric Weissberg anyway?) with both the Volunteer Firefighters' Relief Fund Committee in Room 209 and the Ethics Commission next door in Room 210 (December's meeting minutes aren't on the city's website) .

At five thirty, around the corner, at 23 Union Street in the Planning Department's conference room it's a special meeting of the Reid & Hughes Committee to review an amended proposal from the same developer, who, a decade ago did the Wauregan Hotel.

Tomorrow morning at 8:30 in Room 335 of City Hall it's a regular meeting of the Youth and Family Service Advisory Board, whose most recent meeting minutes, from November are here.

At 4:15 in the Public Works Director's office at 50 Clinton Avenue, it's a regular meeting of the Public Works & Capital Improvements Committee who have, seemingly, close to an infinite mission with very finite resources. Based on their agenda, they're not easily daunted.

At 5:30 in cafeteria of the newly renovated Kelly Middle School, it's a regular meeting of the Board of Education, whose most recent meeting minutes as posted on their own website are from the middle of November.

And at seven, at 23 Union Street in the Planning Department conference room, it's a regular meeting of the Zoning Board of Appeals. Assuming the minutes' posting on the city's website is accurate, they haven't had a meeting since May. And since these are actually 'as needed and requested' meetings, it may be a placeholder and not a hard and fast meeting. If you're planning on going, call first.

Wednesday morning at 8:45 (what's with quarter hour start times? Perhaps the city could sponsor an essay contest and find a good explanation; the winner gets a watch) at 23 Union Street (the Planning Department), it's a regular meeting of the Rehabilitation Review Committee. Looking at the city's website, they met last in April (begging the questions of function and exigency). Here's another question: if the decision to salvage the Reid and Hughes building is made in the affirmative, does the building then become part of this committee's purview or do we just continue to stumble along with two committees with overlapping responsibilities? I'll bet we both know the answer; and keep your chocolate out of my peanut butter.

At two, in their offices at 132 Military Highway, it's a regular meeting of the Southeastern Connecticut Regional Resource Recovery Agency, SCRRRA. And at 4:30, in their offices at 10 Westwood Park, it's a regular meeting of the Norwich Housing Authority, whose page on the city's website is an unshirted disaster. Here is a comedic classic. Now check their page and try to guess why this file was listed as minutes of a September 14th meeting. Pathetic.

At 5 PM in Room 319 of City Hall, it's a regular meeting of Emancipation Proclamation Commemorative Committee, whose membership, meeting minutes and, actually, any information whatsoever about their function and purpose at all is conspicuous by its absence from the city's website.

At six in Room 210 of City Hall, it's a regular meeting of the Baseball Stadium Authority, whose page on the municipal website is in need of updating: members, members' appointments and meeting minutes.

And at seven, in the Occum Fire Department, it's a regular meeting of the Public Safety Committee whose last meeting, if the city's website is accurate and current (pause for laughter or expression of dismay) was in September .

Thursday evening at six, it's a regular meeting of the Mohegan Park Improvement & Development Advisory Committee in Room 210 of City Hall. I worry if that becomes their new meeting location we'll very soon need another way to drive to City Hall. I, for one, would appreciate the same degree and depth of concern about the timely, and legally--mandated, posting of current meeting minutes. My dark blue suit already matches my eyes.

If you are a website developer, or know someone who is, and you'd like to leverage available technology to speed and enhance communication, and make some money while so doing, please bid on the Request for Proposal to "web site design, development, hosting and maintenance services" for the city of Norwich's municipal web site. Please? Thanks! And see you at something, somewhere this week?
-bill kenny

The Devil is in the Details

2012-01-08T00:01:00.000-05:00

A year ago today, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat representing Arizona's 8th District, which includes Tucson, was holding a "Congress on Your Corner" (a Town Hall type meeting) with constituents when Jared Lee Loughner, a very disturbed 22 year old man opened fire into the crowd.

Loughner wounded nineteen people to include Congresswoman Giffords whom he shot in the head at point-blank range. He killed six people, among them a nine year old girl, Christina-Taylor Green, whose birth date was September 11, 2001.

Giffords' recovery has been just this side of miraculous no matter how you measure progress. She and her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly (he has the Tang to prove it) will be joined by many of their neighbors as well as friends they haven't yet met for numerous memorial remembrances today for all the victims of that violence last year.

I'd like to believe there's a lesson in what happened and (more especially) in the response to the carnage that followed but I just don't see it, as hard as I've tried. Our political rhetoric, which may have set Loughner in motion down a path of no return, is just as hateful and hurtful now as it was in the days, if not years, that led up to the shooting.

The Video Vultures and Bloviaters on cable news of all political stripes have long since agreed that nothing they said about those with whom they disagree had any impact on the emotional and mental swamp Loughner carried around in his head. My mom says a guilty conscience needs no accuser and anything I'd offer about moral culpability at this point would be piling on. You can do the math.

The national election of 2012 will be different from any that has ever preceded it. Christina-Taylor Green, 9; Dorothy "Dot" Morris, 76; John Roll, 63; Phyllis Schneck, 79; Dorwan Stoddard, 76; and Gabriel "Gabe" Zimmerman, 30 won't be part of the discussion we should have as a nation on whom we select as our next President. Their deaths were not accidental or acts of nature, unless we include human nature. They are victims in our ongoing war of words whose consequences no one owns and no one can, or will, ever stop.
-bill kenny

Rox in the Box

2012-01-07T00:01:00.000-05:00

I go back to work for the first time this year on Monday. I knew exactly when it would be from the day I first took off in the old year, but knowledge is NOT always power because I'm still not happy about going back.

And if you think I have a sad heart wait until you see the red behinds on the people I work with by noon on Monday. You'll think you're on a mountain monkey reservation, except most of them are better shaved. Usually I look forward to going to work-if I were being (more) honest, I'd admit that I've allowed what I do for a living to define in its entirety who I am (and then wonder why I see more couches than an IKEA salesman in so many doctors' offices).

I'm working really hard in 2012 to learn to exhale (unlike another Bill) and part of that exhalation process, I hope (and you should, too) is that I feel the need to invest smaller amounts of time into these notes. They are, after all, far more ephemeral than letters to Santa burned in the chimney in that they don't actually exist anywhere, but, rather, reside, someplace and I don't know where.

Writing this is like talking to myself, but out loud where I cannot be unhappily surprised if overheard since I was, after all, engaged in a public display of attempted mental hygiene. I had a note from someone the other day whom I have met as a result of these daily burnt prayers who confessed she read this in the way she'd look at a wreck on the highway. Wait until the firetruck gets here, baby, to hose down the pavement and get the larger chunks headed towards a sluice. We'll have you back to doing double nickels in no time.
-bill kenny

Haben Sie Feuer?

2012-01-06T00:01:00.000-05:00

The line between bi-polar and bi-coastal got a lot smaller really fast when law enforcement in Los Angeles slapped the cuffs on Harry Burkhart for close to forty fires he allegedly set in three days because, as he phrased it, a 'rage against Americans.' Talk about bringing it all back home.

Our household is American and German, just as it was when we lived in my wife's country. Interestingly enough for all the years we lived in Germany, everyone, regardless of nationality, liked her and couldn't understand what she was doing with me. That pattern remained the same even when we switched to the other side of the ocean; I'm thinking it's a good thing to be a constant in the universe (and may start listing that on my business card).

After thirty-four plus years of marriage to me, I would have to believe if anyone were capable of being provoked into a rage against (an) American(s), singular or plural, it would be my spouse. I guess that means I'll have to add self-control to her list of attributes that already includes the ability to explain the same thing over and over to me without ever losing focus (though it's obvious to both of us I do), to repair everything in the house in which we live (since I possess my father's mechanical aptitude) and a relentless optimism that allows her to see the bright side in every situation (even when I'm knee deep in another misadventure).

Harry, Schämen Sie sich but make sure you stay on the other side of the country and don't give anyone any ideas, okay? If Arthur Brown could see you now, he would be profoundly disappointed. And while the BIC lighter folks are looking at a possible endorsement deal, Springsteen's people have already nixed a licensing deal, so you're on your own.
-bill kenny

Nuts and other Legumes

2012-01-05T00:01:00.000-05:00

I have never been to Iowa-but no gloating out there, please. Your luck could run out and I hope you'll be good sports about it. I rarely vote in national elections for Republican Party candidates, so I'm treading carefully as I join the Chorus of the Arrogantly Ill-Informed offering drive-by analysis of the aftermath in Tuesday's tectonic plate shift (and you must always remember the "f" in that word) of the Republican Caucus.

Let me point out the Democrats had a caucus in Iowa as well. You have probably guessed the outcome which is why it didn't get the play the other side of the aisle received. I confess to some titillation over the realization that Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum were in a "tight three-way", most especially because of so many of their followers' positions about other people's sexual politics and preferences. How hard do you suppose you have to work to so thoroughly anger the gearheads at urban dictionary and who wants to ask the Rickster?

Forty-eight hours after the caucuses concluded (not to be confused with the mountain range or the skin color though the latter in light of the population breakdown in Iowa is understandable) a lot of time and talent has been focused at the top of the totals boards with those who ended at or close to the bottom more or less being fitted for political body bags.

Joining Herman Cain on the Fascinating Footnotes for '12 Trivial Pursuit play-at-home game are Michele Bachman and Rick Perry (the latter struggling to avoid premature capitulation). I'd wonder what happened to Jon Huntsman, but then again, don't we all? Or is it more that we don't care. Have we finally become a nation, sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon going to the candidates' debate? I'll leave it to you to decide who is catering and who is pandering.
-bill kenny

The Importance of Somebody

2012-01-04T00:01:00.000-05:00

I was taking a short cut the other day across Chelsea Parade. Even though it's ringed by a sidewalk, you can see the private paths many have blazed across it as we step out, if not to a different drummer, than to some form of alternative percussion. I was on a semi-dirt trail passing in front of the Civil War monument that links the NFA Administration building to the parade intersection with Williams Street when I stepped in it, and I'm not speaking figuratively.

I was angry, first at the animal whose droppings I had discovered with my shoe but then, more correctly, at the thoughtless owner, whomever it was/is. While I was cleaning my sneaker and breathing a happy sigh it wasn't July and I wasn't barefoot, I realized it's this 'I am the center of the universe-everything but me needs to change' mindset I'd want us to finally abandon in 2012.

We've all seen this 'the rules only apply to people who don't know better' attitude far too often. Around here, the pooper/scooper requirement is just one of our more casual examples. If I had a dollar for every doggy daddy or mommy I've encountered underway without the requisite clean-up utensils, I could afford to build a second (and much-needed) dog park in the city.

People can be very defensive when called out on this (take my word for it),clutching their animal's leash in one hand while cloaking their embarrassment by feigning indignation with the other. Of course, standing in front of them with dog-don't all over my sneakers doesn't necessarily give me the moral higher ground, though it smells like I may have a point.

We know what the right thing to do is. We just choose to do otherwise and then wonder why so many of our endings are a little light in the happiness department-and whom we can blame. Start with the reflection in the mirror. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Perhaps like you, we're a city filled with people who want nice things. We admire the amenities and enhanced community quality of life other locales across the region have while wishing we had the same. And yet we are unable (actually unwilling) to accomplish those actions to create a foundation to build an environment of excellence.

We complain about trash on our streets instead of picking it up-or more on point, without contacting the Public Works Department who manage the contracts with the refuse removal services to 'encourage' these companies to do a better job. It's too bad because somebody really should get involved, just as long as it's not us..

We all know how effective a Neighborhood Watch can be in promoting public safety where we live and work -and if you don't, contact your local police department and someone will will be very happy to explain it to you in whatever detail you require and desire. But even then, the next time we see something, we'll reach for the curtains before we'll reach for the phone. It's too bad because somebody really should get involved, just as long as it's not us.

Everyone has a story about 'them' and 'downtown' but none of us have stories that place us at a City Council meeting, or searching out a neighbor who is on one of the volunteer panels we have for All Things Great and Small (I think I'm kidding about the name) to see what we can do to help. We won't ask those questions because we can't stand the answers. It's too bad because somebody really should get involved, just as long as it's not us.

If only anybody knew somebody. As Gandhi noted, 'be the change you want to see in the world.' I'm not sure which one of us wanted to be the Intermodal Transportation Center but I guess we'll find that out soon enough. Everything in life changes and not all change is good-but it can be good enough, if we’re willing to work at getting better.
-bill kenny

Changing Direction of the Circles?

2012-01-03T00:01:00.000-05:00

Everything old is new again, so I'm not sure what that make this New Year but we have the luxury of time, practically unlimited, to start over or to start again (or to fall back into the same holes because we choose the same outcomes). It all depends on us, as it always has.

Everything, including liquor stores (gasp!) were closed around here yesterday (bars weren't so it's not the consumption of alcohol we were trying to slow; just sales of it in containers), but we start 2012 in full stride, at least here in The Rose of New England.

The City Council holds its first meeting of the year tonight at 7:30 in Council Chambers in City Hall. The agenda has a little something for everyone, though I suspect the 'communication' the Council received from a resident will offer all of them an earful, and not undeserved. I was pleased to see the Commission on the City Plan (CCP) advocate for a 'have a reason for everything you do' approach to closing roadways in Mohegan Park especially since the law I'm most concerned about, involving unintended consequences, gets broken around here more times in a day than Lady Gaga ruins barbecues.

The CCP should serve as a review for all volunteer agencies proposing City Council action, through the prism and perspective of the Plan of Development they manage and monitor. I'd hope the same process that had them review the Mohegan Park road closure would also mandate more scrutiny of the Harbor Management Commission's "Waterfront Vision" (as well as everybody else's) since there may be some work needed before individual planning ideas can be incorporated into an omnibus municipal document.

Wednesday afternoon at five, the Emancipation Proclamation Commemorative Committee, which has shown up more often on the pages of our local newspaper than anywhere on the city's website, has a regular meeting in Room 319 of City Hall.

The (Kelly Middle) School Building Committee holds a regular meeting this afternoon at 5:30 in the school's library (the school was dedicated in December, ahead of schedule and under budget). I couldn't find their December meeting minutes on the Board of Education's website so here's the November minutes. I'm curious about this 'retribution' mentioned on page one. There's nothing like the smell of smiting in the morning or anytime. Breathe deep.

And at six, in the new Community Room in the Greeneville Fire Department, it's a regular meeting of the Greeneville Neighborhood Revitalization Committee, whose most recent minutes aren't, but you can read that for yourself here.

Thursday evening at seven in the Planning Department's Conference Room, at 23 Union Street, it's a regular meeting of the Inlands, Wetlands, Water Courses and Conservation Commission whose December's meeting minutes are here.

There are, apparently, two different and special Board of Education meetings Friday. One is at 11 in the morning while the other, at two in the afternoon, is an expulsion hearing (and not open to the public). Both are in the Central Office, across from the Norwichtown Green. The closest thing to current minutes are right here, from September (a/k/a 'not really').

Saturday morning at nine thirty, in the community room of the Central Fire House, it's a One City Forum and a chance in an informal setting (I recently learned pants are still required for attendees and that the rear seats of the police cruiser are freezing) to speak about issues important to you with the Mayor, the City Manager, Charlize Theron and various members of the City Council (just checking to see if you were still reading; I guess you were) and get updates on projects in which you are interested.

We have a lot of things worth the time and talents of every interested resident and we can certainly use all the help we can get. We're not the only folks in the world, or Connecticut, struggling to make what we have better, but we're closest to it and can do the most good, if we want to. See you at something?
-bill kenny

Asking for It

2012-01-02T00:01:00.000-05:00

If it snows tomorrow where you are, blame me. If it snows here, people will already blame me. I am so enjoying the definitely not 2011 weather we had this time last year when so many of us were doing our Jack London impersonations. It's not Miami, sorry Bobby DelRay, but it's certainly not New England in the first week of January. I know! Let's blame global warming and everyone on that side of the room mock that claim as bad science. On your marks, get set, stop.

I've been off since since the middle of last month. I haven't had this much time away from work that didn't involve people sawing pieces of me off and replacing them in a decade.I think I like it. The days have started to run together and I've lost track of what is when and where. An elderly gent can get used to this gentle and genteel befuddlement.

I don't miss not going to work and I thought I would. I'm a drone who defines himself by what he does (and no, there is no actual industry known as a$$holism, and thanks for the snarkiness) so I always fear I'll drift without something at the center to define me. There's a lot more to drifting than I was led to believe.

I get up not a lot later than I normally do for work (and shall once again a week from now. That's for anyone from work who reads this; you heard their sigh from where you are) and take a brisk (it's a bit crisp around these parts at oh bright early) walk to get a morning paper and then stretch it out a bit to catch the sunrise and watch the mist start to rise off the lawns and roofs. I really love the long golden rays and the way they bathe the landscape.

The sky around here has been so blue for most of this week you can only smile in delight as you get lost staring into it. The days have been great for March and beyond belief for late December/early January. The other day coming back from visiting our son in Mystic, my wife and I drove behind a thin-haired golden girl (probably my age) in a BMW convertible with a five speed she could barely handle. With temperatures in the middle forties how desperate is the statement you are making when you have the top down (on the car). I was inspired to make a statement of my own, but my wife prevailed upon me to do otherwise.

This will all end soon enough, I am in no hurry. It's not snowing in Rio as they continue working on the Carnival floats-another parade I'll miss, instead mired among the grey-suited grafters, and it needn't snow here if I get a vote. I should move the snow blower out of the garage and under the backstairs, but I've had so many I should's in my life that I'm not especially keen to jump start the causality daisy-chain.

If you got a sled this Christmas and you haven't had a chance to use it, I'm sorry. Drive north for a couple of hours into the 'real' New England as acquaintances from New Hampshire and Maine keep telling me (where men are men and sheep are nervous, apparently) and enjoy it there. When you're tired and cold, come home; I promise to not be unwelcoming. Happiness isn't rationed-but sunshine often is. And cheer up-soon enough we'll get a chance to use some of those other words we've learned for snow.
-bill kenny

Yet Another Fresh Start

2012-01-01T00:01:00.000-05:00

A New Year is a little bit like a first snowfall. We're all very concerned about the first marks we make and then we just go about our business. Too bad we can't bottle that sense of unlimited optimism we feel on this, the first day of the year, and break it out when things get serious and the going becomes harder, like tomorrow and all the days that will follow it.

Be of good cheer (unless you were too much of that last night). We made it to 2012, Mayan misgivings or not (and what if something happened to the person who worked on that calendar and all the other Mayans said, "2012? That's so far off, who cares? Let's work on something else!") and we're worrying for nothing. That would be something. The paths are many, the destination is shared: while some of us arrived in more comfort, health or wealth than others, here we are.

With all due respect to the more stridently jingoistic among us, the farther out in space you go, the more alike we look. Perhaps that might be a visual cue that here on the ant farm with beepers we can leave a little more for somebody else-perhaps take a slightly smaller piece of the pie as the plates get passed around and remember that lesson on the importance of sharing we learned back in kindergarten.

Enjoy today's fresh start-it's like baseball's Opening Day. None of us have lost a step or have an ache or an alibi. We won't all make it to the World Series but we don't know that yet for sure. Today is as close to heaven on earth as we get, and for some of us as close as we'll ever get. Let's get started.
-bill kenny

Take It Easy on the Syne

2011-12-31T00:01:00.000-05:00

This is a day I always get wrong. Do I look back at everything I failed at this past year or failed to accomplish and attempt? That takes care of the sins of Commission and Omission that Father Costello used to warn us about in those uncomfortable lectures he did after Mass on First Fridays at St. Peter's Church. (And it's quite the revelation to see a liturgical equivalent of PayPal. Must be some of that 'moves in mysterious ways' stuff. )

My other choice is to look forward, but to what and how far? Should I be preparing to celebrate a cure for the heartbreak of psoriasis or having a fruit cup with thick syrup? Don't trivialize my choice of alternatives, okay? But feel free to see them as a cautionary tale for yourself if not tonight then at some time.

Do you make resolutions and what are their subjects? I stopped a long time ago, before I met my wife, before we had our children (technically, she had them) and before we came to the Land of Round Doorknobs. The only resolution I can recall ever making, and the one I encouraged our two children to also make, is to do my best everyday. I'd encourage you to do the same and I don't care what it is you do, or don't.

We spend too much time every day interacting with people who did us a favor showing up, be it for work or for whatever the life event is. If you have no passion or reason for doing or being what you are, where you are, spending any amount of time with you is too much. In the year that gets here on little cat's feet in less time than it takes to tell you about it, promise to never be that person, never.

Be an exclamation, and not an explanation. Live out loud and at the top of your voice as more than one person I know is fond of saying. Be happy that you're here, because you won't be here that long, and make sure the rest of us are thrilled about it as well. Leave nothing undone and even less unsaid. Some left us in the course of this year and I hope they were so marvelous that we shall always feel their absence and miss them. Make it a point to toast absent friends, knowing that all of that is part of all of this and the dance goes on even as the partners change because they must. The same procedure this year? The same procedure as every year.
-bill kenny

Sarah Saturday is Getting Nervous

2011-12-30T00:01:00.000-05:00

It may have something to do with math, but not much I suspect. It does make for a strange headline and an even stranger read. Today is tomorrow in Samoa. Why should this surprise you? We put men on the moon-you thought we couldn't disappear a whole day on a small island? There's an app for that, trust me (and we are so getting a different non-Muppet guy to dance in the background next time).

I would imagine children on the island might be wondering why this skipping of a day business couldn't have been arranged for when school is in session. If you were born on this date, you are going to be hard pressed to get a free burger at Red Robin, since it will still be your birthday but the day itself is gone. Sort of a Catch-22 on the next to last day of the year. Who'd have thunk it?

I suspect once the Bombastic Gas Bags seeking new digs in Dodge City get wind of this skulduggery they'll take to the airwaves and the Sunday talk shows blaming all manner of beast and winged thing. I don't expect Governor Perry will have an opinion as he probably doesn't know where Samoa is. Congresswoman Bachman is familiar with Samoa from her days as a Girl Scout leader, running cookie sales. (You thought I was kidding about that app stuff, eh? And now?)

Professor Gingrich will have an amazingly erudite explanation, as soon as you hire him and Governor Romney will simultaneously endorse and denounce the elimination of today in Samoa while also claiming and denying he attempted it while Governor of Massachusetts. Congressman Paul will see it as another evil of Big Government and the other 47,853 people running (that seems about right) will make as much sense as the Lollipop Guild made a difference where Dorothy's house ended up in Munchkin Land.

Leaves us all with just Fred, his sweater, sneakers and the King. I'll bet one of them wishes Samoa had chosen to eliminate Bastille Day.
-bill kenny

Trying to Cheer Up Country Joe

2011-12-29T00:01:00.000-05:00

I had an appointment with my primary care physician yesterday-it was a regular visit and not any form of an emergency. I mention that because we've had our share of those as well. I'm a little unnerved lately at how often he seems to be surprised when I show up for the appointment as if he has an arrangement with a bookie somewhere and I should be seeing some of his action. I should live so long-actually that's why I see him, so mission accomplished I guess.

I'm not fine and haven't been fine for a number of years but both of us are very polite and rarely mention that in the course of a visit. Aside from being older than I was when we last saw one another (as was he, now that I think about it) and not having whacked my head and knocked myself out earlier in the day as was the case on the previous visit, the appointment was entirely uneventful.

I take a large number of medications on a daily basis so for every jacket and tie prep school hockey puck at Browning who whispered all those years ago that I was on drugs, you're finally right. And fuck you, still.

As my doctor was preparing to end our session, he asked me if I had any questions, which I did. I have hypertension and he's treating it very successfully, according to him. I've read too many articles on what time after awakening someone with hypertension should measure his blood pressure, so I decided to ask. We had an informative exchange-my contribution being mostly head nods and mumbled 'uh-huhs.' If you're keeping track at home, his recommendation was mid morning. But here's one for you: could that mean at 6 AM since that is technically mid-morning or the middle of your morning? I have no idea.

When he asked if I had any other questions, I inquired how long I should wait to go swimming after I've eaten. He looked at me evenly for a moment and then responded 'about an hour.' How long, I asked, if you've eaten fish? He told me he would try very hard to look forward to seeing me in four months but couldn't guarantee anything. I'll bet if Thom Yorke shows up he'll pretend he doesn't even know who that is.
-bill kenny

Waking and Dreaming

2011-12-28T00:01:00.000-05:00

John Lennon offered, "A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is a reality." When he gave voice to his dreams through his music only then did we discover how much of those dreams we each shared.

As we near the end of another year of tossing and turning, perhaps our resolution, if not revolution, for the New Year might be to decide if we intend to wake up and show up when it comes making a difference or if we intend to treat one another to another heaping helping of more of the same and hope no one says anything that might require someone to actually do something.

I don't intend to fan the flames of communal memory and review the year past through rose (city) colored glasses, though if you wanted to drink a cup of kindness, feel free and if there are grounds in that cup of dreams, they came as part of the set. If you're willing to agree we're farther along than we were this time last year, I'll agree we have a long way yet to go.

Somehow as we've struggled to reinvent our street, neighborhood, village or city, with equal parts economic development, community involvement and what seems at time to be alchemy, we've forgotten how we got here, separately, and how the only way we can move ahead is by doing so together.

Each of us has a specific reason, not merely emotional and/or physical inertia or exhaustion, that has brought us to Norwich, at this time and which keeps us here. It may be 'only one thing' for you or for me but added together each of our 'only one thing' adds up to many reasons.Just as no single drop of rain holds itself accountable for the flood that follows, while we may feel helpless because we cannot do everything, we should realize we can each still do something. And then do it.

We are fortunate to live in an area that offers so much and so close-from shopping through dining, athletic to artistic and everything in between. Norwich is a wonderful place to raise a family. We've been doing that for over 350 years, each generation always mindful of 'each one, teach one.'

We each have a story to tell, the story of us, the story of how we came to be here, and to be here together at this time.So many have waited for so long for "something good to happen in Norwich." Perhaps we are the something good we have been waiting for and if that is, indeed, the case, we have waited too long.

Let us begin today, at this moment, to become the people we believe we can be, living in the city we know we can have. This new year is perfect for a new beginning that this time has a plan, purpose and destination. It is high time we take ourselves along. Happy 2012! See you on the way.
-bill kenny

It's Not a Question, but a Lesson Learned in Time

2011-12-27T00:01:00.000-05:00

This time next week, it's Next Year. This one, which seemed so promising at its start, as they all do, raced by except when it crawled, and proved not to be, despite the Bard's misgivings, '...a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.'

One of my concerns living in Norwich for over two decades is that nothing is never 'heard no more.' I've encountered life-long residents who speak of failed undertakings, be they in downtown or in one of the villages comprising Norwich, as if they had happened last week but they turn out to be almost half a century old.

When you end up as the owner of a zip code for living in the past, you should concede there's a problem and resolve to move and stop trying to get people to join the Office Block Persecution Affinity.

This is actually a good week to prepare to move to 2012 as there's not a lot of municipal meetings, though there's enough volunteers and neighbors getting together to please anyone who fears we're becoming a nation of loners (I fear the additional "o" far more and have the headlines to prove it).

Actually, I'm not sure about the this afternoon's meeting of the Board of Education's Policy Committee, which is listed on the city's municipal website for three thirty in the Central Office of the Norwich Public Schools, across from the Norwichtown Green, but doesn't show up in any form on the school's website (actually, nothing connected with it has any notes on the school's web page. Insert your expression of astonishment here <>)

At four in the basement conference room of the Planning Department at 23 Union Street it's a regular meeting of the Building Code Board of Appeals whose page on the city's website could use an update and extensive overhaul, speaking as we were of living in the past (Most recent meeting minutes are a draft from August 25, 2009. Seriously?).

And at five, in the City Manager's office (Room 219), it's a regular meeting of the Harbor Management Commission. I'm not able to locate what I'd regard as recent meeting minutes (Hint: Revised September meeting minutes aren't recent when it's the end of December) but if you haven't yet had the chance to read "A Waterfront Vision" you should do so before the next public meeting (sometime in January) on the Plan of Conservation and Development.

Tomorrow afternoon at 3:30, the city's website has a meeting of the Norwich Public School's Building and Space Committee but the Board's website has nothing about it (I'm betting there is no meeting.)

And at five, in Room 319 of City Hall, it's a regular meeting of the Emancipation Proclamation Commemorative Committee, though there's little else I can tell you about who they are, what they're doing and how well they are doing it. I guess we don't have to strike 'better and more effective communications' from our 2012 To Do List. (It's not a question, but a lesson learned in time.) See you at something? (That's a question).
-bill kenny

Has Nothing to do with Ears

2011-12-26T00:01:00.000-05:00

It takes forever to get here, Christmas I mean, and then in one swift night it's gone. Heute ist zweite Weihnachten, today is Second Christmas, unless you work in a mall anywhere in this great nation of ours in which case, you should wish you were in Great Britain or Canada where this is Boxing Day which could cause the MMA fan in your house to get excited except those who follow MMA get excited about everything. That , too, shall pass.

Speaking of which, nearly, one of the nice things about Christmas Passed, at least in my area, is newspapers return to regular size and heft. The Great Depression that isn't, but which we blame on either Bush or Obama (depending upon your politics), hasn't been kind to large amounts of everything that we take for granted and local newspapers are at, or close to, the top of that list. From shortly after Halloween through last Sunday our newspapers were crammed with all manner of fliers and advertising.

I've never appreciated all the filling. I'm willing (in theory), to pay more money for a newspaper, especially the Sunday paper, that doesn't have all of that hullaballo caneck caneck (sorry Rik) but I'm not sure if confronted with that actual proposition I'd be willing to dig a little deeper into my pocket.

And if we're doing Truth or Dare I should admit that aside for dinosaurs like me, the Sunday newspaper isn't especially relevant to anyone. Too bad. Not everything new is better and not everything old can be tossed aside (said the man nearing sixty). I can recall Sunday mornings on the way home from Mass with a stop at the bakery for fresh rolls and at the corner shop (that had all of the out of town newspapers decades before the connectivity of the Internet). Even then, I put all the advertising to one side.

And now, I have some peace from those full page ads from my 'fragrance destination' and from my 'sports headquarters' (I have prosthetic knees, you Dick, what do I play aside from checkers until I pass away?) as I spread the paper out on the kitchen table and work my way through every section (except real estate; I have no use for this part of the paper at all).

Every media outlet does year-end summaries-the biggest news stories, the most outrageous Hollywood Whatevers, the Year in photos, Greatest Pantomimes, Sports Achievements So Monumental They Eclipse Last Year's Achievements, complete with listings and notes on famous people who died (and there's two or more names where you go 'oh, I forgot about her/him'; and more than that for me where I go 'who?').

I suppose we could spend some time this week, learning songs to celebrate the arrival of the New Year, but that's not really who we are as we prefer complaining about the year as it ends. Besides, why would we want to be The Holiday Hipsters anyway?
-bill kenny

And the Bells Were Ringing Out for Christmas Day

2011-12-25T00:01:00.004-05:00

In a way, I suppose, it's fitting that some I know today are celebrating the Birth of God's Son someplace other than their own home and hearth.After all, according to Matthew and Luke in the New Testament, Joseph and Mary (great with child and then, afterwards, not so much) weren't from Bethlehem, but were required to go there as part of the Roman Empire's effort to enumerate the number of subjects it had.

Yeats' power and command of the language notwithstanding, there was far more stoicism than heroism involved in their original journey as there has been for just about everyone following in their path for the last two thousand years or so. Of course there would be travelers underway from somewhere to somewhere else as there are everyday but today please spare a thought for those scattered across our globe in the profession of arms, hoping (and helping) to keep us safe from an ever more hostile world.

Very few of the professionals in our military would choose the places many are today to observe the birth of the Prince of Peace. Many of them are in an environment inimicable to anything even remotely connected to any form of peaceful pursuit, faced off against implacable enemies about whom we hear and read so little in our TMZ and daily gossip information streams.

Sometimes, I fear, we are in what might have been the final days of the Roman Empire because of the distractions we've invented to deflect us from the reality and gravity of the times in which we live.

Luckily, we have a holiday such as the one today that is something different for each of us, without ever being anything special not shared in some way by all of us, in and of itself nearly a Christmas miracle. I would hope somewhere you have a someone who waits for you and for whom you wait.

I've got a feeling this year's for me and you, so Happy Christmas, I love you baby. I can see a better time when all our dreams come true. And God bless us, everyone, at least until the New Year.
-bill kenny

Christmas is all around

2011-12-24T00:01:00.000-05:00

I have a quite lovely black and blue on my upper left arm where someone decided to pinch me not that we have a Christmas tradition like that in my house, but because some of us think we do. It's a perfectly logical consequence in a relationship that began thirty-five years ago on Christmas Day which was when I first spoke to the person I was to marry. I'd note I haven't had much gelegenheit to speak since then, or to get a word in edgewise, but that would probably earn me a matching black and blue on the other upper arm.

I had seen the woman on a number of previous occasions, but could not work up the courage to speak to her. Nevertheless I knew with absolute certainty I would marry her though if I didn't solve the 'haven't talked to her yet' obstacle, it could be tricky. Me and my friend Chris, thick as thieves then and now despite half a continent's distance, had gotten head's start on the Christmas Cheer and had been downing it by the glassful for hours as we made the rounds in the Frankfurt am Main party district, Sachsenhausen. We weren't the only lost and lonely people, swarming like flies, but I believe we were two of the better lubricated.

At some point we came to be in Old Smuggler's a bar near Eschenheimer Tor in mid-town am Main (great restaurants, terrific shopping, none of which we had any interest in). Chris and I were toasting NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as we'd concluded it was in support of the Alliance that he and I found ourselves on the cutting edge of the sword of freedom, not that either of us could actually utter that turn of phrase at that point in the evening. To show you how far we've come, NATO now has a Facebook page. Of course they do, who doesn't?

I got much drunker much faster than Chris, who did a very good job looking out for me which is always necessary since once I got my drunk on I was even more of an ass(et/hole) than when I'm sober. I stopped drinking not because I suffered from alcoholism (I enjoyed it a great deal) but because I got tired of getting the snot beaten out of me mostly by inanimate objects that snuck up and tackled me. To this day, the only chair I trust is the one I'm sitting on and only when I'm sitting on it.

Through a very crowded Christmas night bar came this women who wanted to share our table and whom, in my liquid state, I felt should sit on my lap to save space. When she agreed, I knew it was now or never. (I was successful at falling in love. I hadn't been successful at staying in love. So far). Chris assures me I was very suave when I said to her, 'now that you're sitting on my lap, don't you think you should tell me your name?' Okay, not how Shakespeare scripted it, but, remember, it was a long time ago.

As I munched on some mandelspekulatius today, my second-favorite Christmas memory of Germany, I tried to imagine how things had to happen in just the order they did for she and I to meet when we did as we did. My brain hurts, nearly as much as my arm and again I concede the limitations of a liberal arts education because I lack the mathematical wherewithal to pull off the arithmetic to do the figuring. I just accept some things on faith and how I met your mother is one of those things without question or quibble.

There is a reason for everything we do and everything we fail to do. And as much as I love the 'we're prisoners of an indifferent universe' state of mind, I don't buy it. Hold on and hold out. It worked for me and I would hope no less than the same for you. Love is always a gift, as it can never be earned and this is the season of love and gifts. Happy Christmas.

-bill kenny

Getting Better

2011-12-23T00:01:00.000-05:00

There should be a little more spring in your step today than yesterday. And while it may be hard to measure, you know it instinctively because before we had Big Brains we had reptile brains and they had and have memories.

Yesterday morning in the wee small hours, we had winter solstice, the shortest day. From now through June, the days get a little more daylighty every time. That alone is a compelling reason to get up early so you don't burn daylight. I happen to have brothers whom I suspect have no idea what evening looks like as they always seem to be up and at 'em, at least in my experience.

Sorry about daylighty-but I get giddy once we are past the shortest day. All the oxygen in my blood rushes to my head and I am suddenly so inventive I almost scare myself. Almost, except I'm fearless. Or clueless. I often forget which, but I'll bet you don't. It seems to me the winter solstice, not New Year's Day, is the best moment to make resolutions, not that I make any (anymore).

They say the road to a very warm place is paved with the best of intentions and resolutions do look a little like cobblestones or can be made to. Instead of specific resolutions, such as 'I'll save money for a saddle', why not keep them more general and generic like 'a pony ride for a birthday is a fine thing.' I'm not saying set the bar lower so much as suggesting you open your arms a little wider. It guarantees you that there's more to hug, and this time of year, with the dark and all, some of us can use all the hugs in the world. We did the worst first, now it's getting better all the time.
-bill kenny

Somebody Holds the Key

2011-12-22T00:01:00.000-05:00

For much of the world, this is a joyous and joyful time of the year-filled with promise and hope and, if not, love, something we believe feels a lot like love. I'm off from work, to the rejoicing of many who aren't and yesterday I popped in to check my mail, review messages I've received from the President, and make sure my hallucination medications were up to date (2 of the 3 items in the preceding phrase were correct) and encountered someone I see on a regular, if not especially frequent, basis.

He was struggling a little bit with where he was, geographically, and where his family is, at the moment. I'm always a bit awkward with him because I cannot remember his name. I knew it at one time and then we both went in our separate directions in concentrating on work and when we next were introduced, years later (and also years ago), I sort of remembered the face and had no luck on the name.

Perhaps he's the same way (that would actually be funny-an Abilene Paradox at the interpersonal level. Sometimes, I just crack myself up.) and if I weren't so hung up on my not being able to remember his name maybe I'd notice he doesn't remember mine either. Perhaps we'd both discover we're not work friends at all but no more than familiar strangers. I'm sure if I ran into him in the metro in Beijing I'd talk to him; but years of working in the same organization left us so blase about each other's existence we've come to this. Honey, come meet "what's-his-name-from-work."

Probably a bad example since yesterday in a very brief conversation he made it clear he was having a tough time emotionally this Christmas. He's going through a divorce and I've never met his spouse (didn't even recall he had one), or any other members of his family, so it's hard to know what to say to him since, as I mentioned, I can't even say his name because I don't remember it.

We hear and read a lot about the holiday blues or blahs especially at Christmas, but from what I've come across that's mostly horse pucky on the scale of all the viral factoids on domestic violence and Super Bowl Sunday which is also not true. But, still, it's another traveler on the Big Blue Marble and I'd hate for anything to happen to someone for no other reason than I felt awkward about getting involved. There are times, I suspect, all of us feel alone facing a horizon that stretches forever under a heaven as empty of stars as our soul is of hope.

We have to make of what we are, all we can ever hope to be; and if that's lost and lonely, that's what it is. No matter how often we try to be like Dorothy, there are no ruby slippers and when we open our eyes, it still ain't Kansas and the realization dawns the door isn't merely closed, but it's also locked .
-bill kenny

Talking in a Language I Don't Speak

2011-12-21T00:01:00.000-05:00

The great thing about unsolicited advice is there's no obligation to take it. I promise to not lose sight of that, if you won't, either as I offer an unsolicited observation on a situation I read about it on the front page of a newspaper this past weekend. I'm a registered voter in the same party that's in the story though that's more accidental than anything else (I hope). Let's both pretend that's relevant, okay?

When I tell you sometimes I've voted for candidates for public office who are from the same party I'm in, are you surprised or do you shrug your shoulders? And if I then tell you other times I've voted for people who are not of my party, may I assume the reaction is about the same?

Like you, unless you're lactose intolerant, I enjoy a variety of different flavors of ice cream-I think having the same one all the time would get old and I'm doing a good job of that all by myself. I see political parties as houses, with many rooms and in each, to varying degrees, are people who share, and/or don't, similar values and beliefs. Feel free to add additional rooms or floors (there's an unfinished basement if that helps) and create your own metaphor to describe what you've built.

Ideally, the houses are large enough politically to accommodate all who seek to enter and if we end up with some participants with whom we'd rather not go shoe shopping, what can I say? For a lot of people I am that guy, which explains why I'm often mistaken for Shoeless Joe when I'm really Klueless Kenny.

The adage says variety is the spice of life (I can never find it in the store so I usually get paprika). I think of it as helping put the Pluribus in E Pluribus Unum. A cynic might argue when looking at the 'other' national party, sometimes called "The Party of Lincoln," Abe, himself, might have had difficulty passing muster with many of those who are members today. A less vintage example might be Connecticut's own Lowell Weicker or even Joseph Lieberman, both of whom chose different paths in pursuit of their respective elected offices.

It's not always the singer, so much as it's the song and while many of us can't carry a tune in a bucket, we can always admire the lyrics even if we don't always know all the verses (unless it's Henry the Eighth). And when some of us don't think any of the words have a meaning for us and that no one is listening to the words we choose to use, the question becomes do we keep silent or start our own dictionary.

In this particular instance, I don't pretend to know the whole story but I'm pretty sure what I've read didn't belong in a newspaper. Words, like stones, can be used to build bridges or, instead, erect walls. Which we choose speaks volumes about who we are.
-bill kenny

So Where's this Healing Time Brings?

2011-12-20T00:01:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was my Dad's 88th birthday. He didn't live to see it-he didn't even get close, passing away in 1981. I often thought we didn't get along because we were so different, and I blamed him for that, but in the decades since his death I've come to realize it's because we are very much alike and I've decided all this finding fault junk is foolish, especially since I'd have to be the one to blame.

My dad had a very quick mind and a mouth to match. The laws of probability suggest he wasn't always the smartest guy in the room but I don't ever recall being in a room when he wasn't probably the smartest guy, no matter the subject and no matter the size of the room. He was a natural wonder of the world and while, in hindsight, I realize he was often wrong-he was never in doubt.

I recognized the exact moment I had become my dad, ironically not in any form of interaction with our children (who hadn't even been born yet), but in a work situation many years ago in radio broadcasting with someone who could have been far better than she was, had she made the effort. She explained through tears after an especially caustic critique session that "I can't work as hard as you can!" And though it was my voice, it was my father's words which coldly countered "I don't want you to work as hard as I can; I want you to work as hard as you can."

Where my father and I differed is in our circumstances-I suspect he was far more of a humanist than he was ever comfortable admitting. He was very much a man of his time, born in the years before the first Great Depression of parents who'd migrated to the Land of Opportunity. They had a family of all boys who were strivers, all of them as near as I can remember. In the years since his passing I've thought of them only rarely and lost any means of contacting any of them. I never cared to speak with them since I don't think they knew much more about my dad than I did.

We were six children, two groups of three-two boys and girl in the middle in the first cohort and then two girls and, finally, another boy in the second cohort. We three oldest knew him as a two-fisted force of nature who got up before anyone else in the neighborhood, perhaps even in the whole world, and rode the train to "The City" where he taught the sons of the rich (to little effect as I had opportunity first hand, repeatedly, to discover) and came home when everything was dark. We wanted for nothing and, speaking for myself, I never once considered what it cost him for us to live that way.

Our second cohort had different lives as he died before my middle sister, the oldest of the three, had graduated from high school. By that time, I had gone as far as you can in this world from him, distance wise, only to learn no matter how fast you are you can never outrun your own shadow or your own conscience. When the American Red Cross operator notified me of 'an emergency, a death in the family' I wasn't surprised it was my dad-but my sense of guilt at hearing the news did surprise me. For just a moment I was again that little-too-small and little-too-loud boy who often felt over matched by a father, a Captain of the Universe no less, who never knew what to say to his own children that would sound like the love and encouragement he was trying to offer.

About a year after we married, my wife and I came to the United States. It was very important for me that my father like the woman I loved, even as I told myself it mattered not at all. She wasn't Irish, she wasn't Catholic and he loved her anyway-I had worried for nothing. It was an a delightful relief and a wonderful visit. He and I almost talked but there would be time for real conversation on other visits. When we said good bye at the airport, he was misty-eyed and I thought of my sister Jill and her 'it's very warm, my eyes are sweating' but I didn't say it aloud.

That moment at the departure lounge proved to be the last time I would have an opportunity face to face to ever not tell him something I could, and perhaps, should, have. I spent many years struggling with the burden of that moment and the memories not so much of all the things said but, rather of all the things left unsaid that now will stay that way for all time until memory ends. Happy Birthday, Dad.
-bill kenny

The Pretty Patter of a Seaboard Town

2011-12-19T00:01:00.000-05:00

This time next week, we'll be talking about Zweite Weinachten which, considering we speak English will be a neat trick auf deutsch and is a concept we really don't have. The Second Christmas is usually reserved for friends and acquaintances with family celebrations held on Christmas day itself.

Second Christmas would be a good day to celebrate with friends, perhaps at a local restaurant as the business of government will be off for the day but in between now and then, there's a lot going on as well there should be because there's a lot that needs to be done.

You'll need to lace up your track shoes starting today because it's a busy week. Before the first 'real' business meeting of the new City Council (which we elected over a month ago already) there will be a public hearing at seven in Council Chambers (Room 319) by the Community Advisory Board on how to repurpose Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) unexpended moneys. Two words: pony rides; three more: for my birthday. Fear I already know the final four: snowball's chance in hell.

At 7:30, it's a City Council meeting whose agenda suggests a full plate that includes formally hiring a new City Clerk through a lot of housekeeping and committee appointments work (and a really excellent summary on the various requests for use of the reclaimed CDBG money as it's the City Council that re-authorizes the re-use).

Tuesday evening at six, you have choices. There's a regular meeting of the Personnel and Pension Board in Room 319 of City Hall. You'll find their most recent meeting minutes, from October, here. Across town, specifically at 16 Golden Street at six in their training room (I always think wrestling mats, speed bags and the smell of rubbing liniment) it's a regular meeting of the Norwich Public Utilities Board of Commissioners, with a Sewer Board Authority meeting immediately afterwards. I had so much trouble getting their website to open to look for minutes from their November meetings, I thought the site was being powered by Connecticut Light & Power (a little 'crappy response' joke there).

At seven there's another meeting doubleheader, or meeting within a meeting if you prefer, at 23 Union Street as the Commission on the City Plan holds its regular meeting; here are their November meeting minutes. In the course of that meeting will be a meeting by those on the Plan of Conservation and Development Sub-Committee. You may find it helpful to have a copy of the current Plan, and that's right here. I can't get the link on the city's website to work but I just washed my hands and can't do a thing with my fingers.

Wednesday morning at nine in The Dime Bank Community Room on Salem Turnpike it's a regular meeting of the Norwich School Readiness Council (Children First) whose meeting minutes continue to take the hindmost. I so admire consistency.

At five, in Room 319 of City Hall, it's a regular meeting of the Emancipation Proclamation Commemorative Committee, whose minutes would be here, linked to the alphabetical listings of all the volunteer panels that help make the city run and that listing would include who is on it and when it was created and what it does. Dream on.

At five thirty, in the Norwich Arts Coop Gallery, it's a regular meeting of the Downtown Neighborhood Revitalization Zone, though not the meeting noticed on the website (that meeting was a while ago) and the most recent meeting minutes are from July.

Thursday morning at 8:30 and lasting until ten at Three Rivers Community College is a workshop sponsored by the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development with Commissioner Catherine Smith. If you're a small business, or would like to be a larger one, and you're searching for avenues of funding, this meeting is for you (and all the rest of us, too).

There's a special meeting of the Board of Education at four in the conference room of the Central Office of the Norwich Public Schools, 90 Town Street, and be grateful you don't have to attend as it's an expulsion hearing, which means it's an executive session.

And Friday morning at ten, in their offices in the Norwich Business Park, it's a regular meeting of the Southeastern Connecticut Council of Governments Route 11 Greenway Authority Commission. There are NO minutes posted for any commission meetings that may have been held in 2011 or to put it another way, there are as many words about the 2011 meetings as there are additional feet of Route 11 constructed in the last two decades. There is no truth that the logo for the committee is a self-licking ice cream cone. But thanks for playing.

By this time next week all the pretty paper and packaging is in the recycling bin and the magic is through. Back to business as usual. meh. Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas. See you at something?
-bill kenny

There Was a Time when Bacon Sandwiches Were Everyone's Favourite Snack.

2011-12-18T00:01:00.001-05:00

It seems funny in this age of instant proof thanks to Internet connectivity that I'd offer you a tale for which I can furnish no bonafides at all and have never attempted to, though I have been tempted to...

Feel free to think of it as a parable but more bread than fishes and don't cast it on the water though I did steal today's title from a tune by Robert Wyatt, former member of Soft Machine. It's sort of about history, so if you're old or if you're young, it's about you; nearly.

It's set in Princeton, New Jersey, in the time of the Revolutionary War. The Hessians in the service of King George along with the Redcoats, surprised by Washington's advance across the Delaware River, are fleeing for their lives in a disorderly and disorganized rout before the advancing ragged Yankees who are in the hottest of pursuits.

As one of the cannon the Redcoats are withdrawing traverses the field in front of Nassau Hall, the ground beneath it gives way and despite struggles that cost men and horses their lives, the Redcoats cannot dislodge the field piece and abandon it, mired practically to its barrel in the front yard of what is to become in time the first building of Princeton University, at one time time called the College of New Jersey.

The cannon remained a mute testimonial to the bravery and sacrifice of our forefathers (and foremothers) for centuries. Until the morning, the story I've heard says, in the 1960's when, as people passed Nassau Hall, they noticed a very deep hole and a very large pile of dirt. They also noticed the cannon was nowhere to be found.

A search of the entire city ensued, with no success. The search soon spread across all of Mercer County and then adjoining areas throughout the state of New Jersey. Measurements were made of the width and depth of the hole and calculations on the tonnages of dirt that had been removed were developed. Law enforcement tracked every whisper of a clue, trying to understand the degree of organization and discipline it would have taken to remove such a large object from public view in one night without leaving a clue.

Speculation ran riot as to what had become of the cannon and what and where a private collector (since no one could reasonably expect to sell or melt down such a famous artifact) might have placed the purloined object. Days became weeks, became months (in the story as I've heard it) and no trace of the cannon was found.

Then one day a note, addressed to the Princeton Chief of Police, arrived directing that all backs bend and all shovels dig into the pile of dirt beside the hole at Nassau Hall. There, all was revealed and the mysterious disappearance of the cannon became the work of pranksters not thieves, who, realizing the weight was so great the piece could never be extracted in the course of one quiet night, chose to hide it in plain sight knowing those used to seeing it everyday would forget the exact placement of its location. They were correct.

With the benefit of decades of hindsight, many think there's a great lesson to be learned about appreciating what you have, when you have it and perhaps you are of that persuasion. However, as a Scarlet Knight of Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, I can only shake my head and wonder how Princeton underclassmen can even find the campus without a compass.
-bill kenny

Other People's Rooms

2011-12-17T00:01:00.000-05:00

I have a meeting I'm attending today, actually this morning, and during the week the organizer thought it would be nice to make it slightly more festive than our usual efforts and asked each of us intending to come to bring a holiday treat of some sort.

I'm hoping no one brings eggnog because even though I've never had it, I already know I don't like it. And don't get me started about the kind "fortified" with alcohol. Not that big of a fan, truth to tell; you can have mine.

I decided to shop local and get some exercise and hike over to a bake shop I've boosted constantly without actually ever buying anything in there. It opened up not that many months ago and now that I'm in my full 'support small business' mode, I figured the time was right to put my money where my mouth is and to expend some show leather to help tone the avoirdupois. Mission accomplished on both counts.

Off, I set, for the Chocolate Rose Bake Shop which is a goodly piece from my house on Lincoln Avenue and isn't improved as walks go by the dearth of sidewalks for about half the distance (I also did a lot more Rockwell to Boswell (without Samuel Johnson)and came back via Mohegan Park Road, Wilderness Road (which is the first place I saw a trail in the park, btw) and then down Mohegan Road to Washington Street and home again. I'd estimate about five miles round trip and I have to estimate because along the way I lost my way cool super whammadyne Omron pedometer, not to be confused with L. Ron Hubbard. (unless you want Travolta or Cruise coming to your house. And staying.)

This is the second one of these things that I've lost or broken. But please believe when I tell you that I like them a great deal. I just don't know how to take care of them. The first one I drowned one morning because I forgot to take it off before showering (don't ask; move on to beyond the parenthesis) and this one I lost somewhere along the way, possibly in Mohegan Park. I'm trying to imagine a chipmunk hauling it around. Too much Disney and not enough Natgeo.

It's of small solace that the goodies I bought look delicious and I hope I get to have one by the time the meeting is over (I'm thinking the best way to guarantee that is to NOT go to the meeting but rather sit in the car and eat them all, but then I have to explain my Christmas cookie breath). I'll get over the loss of the pedometer but the most frustrating part is having no one else to blame but myself. I really hate that part.

When you walk the streets of a city, literally because, as I said, there's not a lot of sidewalks along the way (I guess we had a concrete shortage for much of the last 352 years) you see the city slower and from a different perspective than speeding by in a car. I saw far more abandoned houses than I realized were on the route because I was out during the workday and in daylight. It made me sad to see properties that people had invested so much of themselves into just left to sit unwanted and alone. Despite the still warm for this time of year temperatures, I felt cold as I hurried past them.

You can get a better appreciation of the time and skill devoted to decorating with Christmas lights when you walk past houses whose owners and tenants have felt the spirit. By the light of day, a pedestrian can see the machinery of inventive illumination without being blinded by the lights themselves as darkness falls.

During the day people have shutters open and blinds drawn back and you get a brief glimpse of the lives of the not so rich and famous with whom you share the city. I smiled at some of the placement of furnishings I could see in living rooms as I walked on by-realizing with a start that where we have shelves and couches in our house might well cause the same kind of furrowed brow I had while looking at someone else's living arrangements.

It's called pedestrian because it's a slower pace affording those moving at it an opportunity to share, if only for a moment, other people's lives lived in other people's rooms.
-bill kenny

The Kid Makes a Comeback

2011-12-16T00:01:00.001-05:00

I came to the Dad party kinda late-I wasn't the fastest person on earth to get married and was certainly in no hurry to to have children. I didn't mind practicing, but the whole 'small human being entirely dependent on me for everything' aspect didn't excite me at all. Then my wife pointed out she'd been putting up with it since she and I got married. Et tu, Sigrid?

I love being a father. I'm not much better at it than being a husband but our son, Patrick, and daughter, Michelle, are some of my favorite people and I can't be accused of favoritism since I was hardly involved in their growing up, except in my dreams.

I figured I'd spend the next couple of weeks off from work just Dixie Driftin' which I do well. I'm off because of illness, as I may have mentioned a few times. The people I work for are sick of me (and I of them for the most part), but as it happened it was a good thing yesterday I was off and home.

Our son wound up in the ER on one of those, 'the cure is worse than the disease' situations. He broke a wisdom tooth at some point Wednesday evening and took ibuprofen for the pain. He was in a lot of pain. You can do the math.

By the time he called us shortly after seven in the morning he'd taken a not inconsiderable amount of the stuff and knew he needed help. I, along with this sister as navigator, set off to Mystic to retrieve him and get him to the hospital.

This being Connecticut, and Eastern Connecticut at that, nothing is in a straight line so an on-paper twenty minute drive takes a lot more like 45 minutes to happen. I still think if I had a red flashing light and a siren I could shave a couple of minutes off the trip, and may wind up purchasing the necessary accoutrements but let's see what Santa brings....

We wound up in line at the ER behind someone named Patricia Kerry but she disappeared as if we had invented her and the staff of Backus Hospital worked on Patrick. Meanwhile, I had more ambulance deliveries in store as Michelle had to see her orthopedic surgeon for an ongoing foot situation that the doctors will now need to do an MRI to help make a determination. She was a little chagrined the blood tests didn't seem to have answers, but as I pointed out, they helped the physicians understand what the condition isn't.

From there, it was back to Backus (another great name for a rock band, even if not from Seattle) where Patrick was just about ready to be released with a combination of infection fighters and painkillers that should have him starry eyed and laughing through the weekend.I smiled thinking about a time, before we had Michelle, where he and I spent very nearly a whole day hanging with the Arbitersamariterbund, EMT's, but that was a long time ago, the day was anstrengend and the hour is late.-bill kenny

I Never Been Much Good at Keepin' a Secret

2011-12-15T00:01:00.003-05:00

It's a good thing I've taken off from work in the Blue Smoke and Mirrors Factory GmbH through next year because sitting up late last night, on a school night, to watch the woman who inflicted The View on all of us to get her annual prime time swerve on with "Barbara Walters Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2011."

It was nice to see the Lohan-Hilton stunt doubles, the Kardashian Kun-s, Kids, make Bab's list which I suspect always starts and ends with her. I must be getting hip in my dotage (tell me that's not a great name for a band!) as I sort of knew everyone on her list. I was disappointed since I had the impression #1 would be announced live and had an extra chair in the living room and made sure there was room at the curb for the Ku-van uplink truck. Y'know, just in case.

Turns out, of course, I didn't make the cut-I never do but if you're like me you look at who else doesn't make the list, like This Guy, or any of this bunch, and you wonder if the most fascinating thing about those so honored might be how they got chosen in the first place.

In the future, prophesied Andy Warhol, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes (though his fame lasted a lot longer than that) so maybe maybe it's just as well we get the fame game out of the way sooner rather than later. Though if you're Pippa Middleton, you can probably speed the clock up a bit and she won't mind all that much. Especially with this crap. The home of Chaucer, Drake and Shakespeare (and David Beckham) is reduced to this? A.maz.ing.

Maybe next year's list can be done alphabetically. By height. I'm looking forward to it (especially if I get those stilts for Christmas). Can't wait for the Three Wise Men to follow The Star and get here. I ordered cheesy bread-it should be just a couple of minutes more and worth the wait.

-bill kenny

Leave All Your Love and Your Longing Behind

2011-12-14T00:01:00.006-05:00

The distance between who we are and who we hope to become can vary from very great to very small depending on our plans, abilities, aptitudes and perhaps, most importantly, our desire and will to improve. You have to risk something of yourself to close the gap and the fear of making a mistake is, itself, a mistake. Just because we haven't yet succeeded, doesn't mean we won't.

No one ever says 'ready, set, stay!' at least no one who wants to be successful. Everything on Planet Earth must adapt in order to survive and succeed or it becomes history. Cheap gas and affordable automobiles helped change the landscape of post World War II America, with families moving out of cities as vast tracts were converted to housing developments and shops and merchants followed the population and exited downtowns across the country.

Half a century later, the tide of urban exodus has ebbed and escalating costs for services and infrastructure combined with less ready cash and diminished credit have helped spur a second look at cities whose best days were thought to be behind them. Turns out those who'd written off our urban centers may have another think coming. If you abandon a sinking ship that does not sink, you must be an excellent swimmer.

Having lived in Norwich for twenty years, I've been comfortable, if not benumbed, with the idea that as unfulfilled as the promise of this city may seem to many, we have spared ourselves the finality of despair and disappointment by never actually planning and then committing and executing our plan. If we never really try, we can never really fail-at least that's what we'd like to believe.

But in recent years, we've edged, albeit uneasily towards learning to work together towards goals larger than the next election cycle and beyond the next budget year. We've finally conceded when you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. I don't think we've agreed on the destination, but it's starting to take shape and the timeline is looking a lot more like sooner rather than later.

There's a "Vibrant Communities" public meeting at four this afternoon in the Artspace community room at 35 Chestnut Street to develop ideas and insights on how to use a $50,000 community development grant awarded by the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation earlier this fall to target one building and create a strategic plan for rehabilitation and reuse. Not a 'build it and they might come' but more of a pick a point of leverage to move a neighborhood forward.

It's okay to be skeptical that we can create a consensus and critical mass but check your attitude and then your watch because at 6:30 tonight, the formal dedication of the newly renovated Kelly Middle School, under budget and ahead of schedule, could cause you to rethink that 'no, we can't make this work' mindset, because it seems, yes we can.

Speaking of making things work, Saturday morning's One City Forum, starting at nine (I had the wrong time earlier and in a local newspaper today; just getting old, I guess) in the Occum Volunteer Fire Department reviews a year-old outline, the "Norwich Community-wide Economic Plan and Process." The intention is to extract as much manner and method from that proposal and include it in the Plan of Conservation and Development other city residents have volunteered to improve with the understanding that our political leaders have to fully and finally implement.

We can stop looking for lone developers on a grassy knoll. It's not about buildings anymore-it's about building long-term relationships that reflect everyone's interest in our community. I'm not going to pretend Norwich's dark days are over but I believe it's time that together we step closer towards the light on the horizon.

-bill kenny

Walking on the Moon

2011-12-13T00:01:00.000-05:00

As I pad about in the early morning hours readying myself for work (that fragment would bewilder my colleagues who truly believe I just stumble in), I have extended conversations with myself-sort of like pep talks, except I know the true nature of the knucklehead with whom I'm conversing. And, let's face it, it's pretty early and I'm not the sharpest spoon in the drawer even in the middle of the day so looking for intellectual sparks in the wee, small hours is a fool's errand. Probably why I'm up.

I've never really figured out what I did to my hands but on mornings when I shave, they've tried to kill me on more occasions than I can count (and not just because I don't want to get all mathy on you but really because it's been a lot of times). It happened yesterday again-I cut myself under my moustache on the left side. Technically my hands cut me, aided and abetted by my fingers while my eyes watched in the mirror and did nothing.

If you own stock in the Acme Stypic Pencil Company, you should be seeing big, fat bonus checks because I go through their product by the boxcar. My father used little dollops of toilet paper-looking like he had papier-mâché measles on some mornings. I'm a 21st Century Man. I always think I may have cut myself usually just under the Fu part of the Fu Manchu (I like to think it's more Sergeant Pepper but what do I know? I have hands trying to cut my own throat) and I'll start reaching for the styptic pencil. I've graduated to the liquid kind mainly because that's what's been in the stores the last two times I've bought it and it works fine. It staunches the flow and I don't surprise my wife by having drowned in a pool of my own blood in the bathroom (ask her about the apple corer).

Yesterday, the cap on the container was so tight I couldn't get it off. I struggled with the damn thing all the while watching in the mirror as the Red River trickled down my chin and headed south. I recited the 'lefty lucy, rightie tighty' mantra repeatedly (and with a growing sense of urgency) while wrapping the wash flannel around the cap to get traction. Only after I did the 'tap, tap' thing you do with jar lids on a kitchen counter to 'loosen 'em up' did I get the cap, to my utter amazement and bemusement.

Reaching work, I had an opportunity to experience moon gravity as I grabbed the massive glass door at my place of work's main entrance and opened it. Whoa! I practically pulled it off the frame! What I didn't know was the little hydraulic doohickey on the top of the door had broken and the door was hanging on by the three hinges. My first reaction was that my half hour regimen every morning at the gym had finally transformed me into Lou Ferrigno or his ancestor, Charles Atlas.

No such luck-I had a better chance of a sudden diminishing of gravity no matter how much spinach I ate or anchor tattoos I got on my biceps. I did get second chance with the door, however, as the facilities repairmen asked me to hold the 'Don't Use' sign as he searched for tape. I was going to ask if styptic sticks adhere to glass but he may have responded with Shylock's monologue, an exercise both of us would have regretted, but mostly me.
-bill kenny

When Winter's Shadowy Fingers First Pursue You Down the Street

2011-12-12T00:01:00.002-05:00

The days dwindle down, not helped by how early it seems to get dark. We're all a little distracted right now with Christmas and such and perhaps in these parts we've not yet fully realized we're not really having winter though it is the season for it. Not to worry-it'll get here soon enough, it always does. And all we can do despite and because of it is the best we can.

And the best we can do doesn't take a break for holiday shopping or working to get home for holidays, so spare a thought for the friends and neighbors where you live who work on committees and advisories, great and small, on a hundred different projects that make our cities and towns places we want to come home to.

Making things better gets off to a pretty early start in Norwich this morning at 8:30 in the Norwich Business Park with a regular meeting of the Southeastern Connecticut Council of Governments (SCCOG) Executive Committee. Here's their November meeting minutes and I find it interesting that it looks like an action item may be the creation of a regional Ethics Committee because at five this afternoon, in Room 210 of City Hall, our Ethics Commission holds a regular meeting. Judging from their November minutes, they have had a lot on their plates.

Also at five, next door in City Hall, in Room 209, it's a regular meeting of the Volunteer Firefighters' Relief Fund Committee. Judging from the city's website, there haven't been any meetings since May.

And what goes with fire better than water? I'm thinking grilled cheese and cream of tomato soup but pay me no mind. At 5:15 in their offices at 1649 Route 12 in Gales Ferry, it's a regular meeting of the Southeastern Connecticut Water Authority whose meeting minutes dried up seemingly after their session in August.

Tuesday afternoon at five in the offices of the Public Works Director at 50 Clinton Street, it's a regular meeting of the Public Works and Capital Improvements Committee. Their most recent meeting minutes (with their 'old' committee make-up) are from September, demonstrating again we know how to put the time in timely.

At five thirty in the Kelly Middle School, it's a regular meeting of the Norwich Public School's Board of Education. If you look here, you'll almost but not quite find the minutes of their November meeting which is where they are required to be, but sort of like that hands-free cell phone thing, it's often more of a suggestion than anything else.

And at six in their clubhouse on the New London Turnpike, the Norwich Golf Course Authority is having a special meeting to pursue hiring a new Head Professional/Manager.

Wednesday is a busy day starting at oh bright early, a quarter of nine in the morning as the Rehabilitation Review Committee meets in the Planning Department Conference Room at 23 Union Street. Their last meeting seems to have been in July so they have some catching up to do, I'm sure.

At four, in a community room at Artspace which is at 35 Chestnut Street it's a two hour investment of your time in the future, a project called Vibrant Communities and you should make every effort to be there. Here's part of the puzzle and a news report in September sparked a good discussion online that I'd hope to have carried further Wednesday afternoon.

At 4:30 the Housing Authority meets in its offices at 10 Westwood Park. Their most recent meeting minutes are from September and may be found here. One quibble (I know, 'only one?), members are present or absent; the charter doesn't care if you're 'excused,' kidnapped or serving under an assumed identity. Be there or be square.

At 5:00 in Room 335 in City Hall it's another meeting of the Emancipation Proclamation Committee who meet every Wednesday, but without the spaghetti that's so central to the North End of Boston and Anthony. Someday the municipal website will tell visitors who is on this committee and will have meeting minutes from all their other Wednesday meetings, but probably not by this Wednesday. Again.

Elsewhere in City Hall at six, the Baseball Stadium Authority meets in Room 210. The members' appointments look like they could do with a once-over and it seems their most recent meeting was in October as those are the most recent minutes posted on line.

Across town in the Wonder Bar, it's a regular meeting of the Greeneville Neighborhood Revitalization Committee. Reading their September meeting minutes, the key topic tonight may well be 'What would make Greeneville a desirable place to live in?' Reading those same minutes I was (sort of) surprised by who wasn't in attendance since the aims of the Greeneville NRC would appear to complement any and all other aspirations and dreams. It's not the singer, it's the song-an ongoing problem here in Norwich.

And at six thirty in ceremonies in the Jacqueline Owens Auditorium, the completed renovations of the Kelly Middle School will be formally, and, hopefully, very loudly, celebrated.

Thursday evening at six, at The Rink, it's a regular meeting of the Ice Arena Authority, whose members' appointment expired over four years ago and none of whose meeting minutes seem to be anywhere near the city's website.

Friday morning at nine, in Room 319 of City Hall, it's another regular meeting of the Chelsea Gardens Foundation. Feel free to search the city's website for any information on members, mission, purpose, creation date, achievements so far.... Talk about YGIAGAM, Your Guess Is As Good As Mine, the difference being neither of our guesses has gotten six figures in grant money from the Sachem Fund Board though when/if they meet again, I want to hear how the proposal outlined on the top of page three of the minutes gets answered.

Saturday morning at 9:30 in the Occum Volunteer Fire Department (if you need a map, let me know) is the next installment of the One City Forum with a review of the draft dated 11-22-10 on the Norwich Community-Wide Economic Development Process (and/or lack of same). You really need to start to come to these meetings, especially this one as we're having holiday treats which, while not pony rides for your birthday, are about as close as You Know Who is going to get to them, I suspect.

And Sunday afternoon starting at one, it's A Joyful Gathering at the Leffingwell House Museum at 348 Washington Street. Not sure how much joy is allowed in Norwich but Sunday's as good a day to find out as any other.

"When the wind is singing strangely, blowing music through your head and your rain-splattered windows make you decide to stay in bed. Do you spare a thought for the homeless tramp who wishes he was dead. Or do you pull your bed-clothes higher, dream of Summertime instead,

When Winter.... comes howling in." See you at something?

-bill kenny

Crap Like Clockwork

2011-12-11T00:01:00.002-05:00

I heard that line yesterday as two guys about my age who didn't think anyone was listening were discussing their medical maladies. More ominously, I completely understood it. I can remember as kids we talked about baseball cards, later it was girls and then later, bosses, followed by our kids and our lawns and now as the hour grows even later, internal plumbing and other torments.

Thirty years ago I didn't know anyone my current age. I don't think I wondered what happened to geezers, I just didn't care since I didn't know any. And now I'm a poster child for them. I've reached an age where for most others on the planet I am, for all intents and purposes, invisible. I'm just another shriveled sack of skin, graying and fraying at the temples, around whom life flows without stopping as I shuffle off to Buffalo and Points Yonder Somewhere..

I have a phone smarter than I am, and I'm dumber than a sack of hair so don't get a swelled head, Android. Now when things break around the house, from the computer to the car, not only do I not understand what broke, even after they are repaired I still don't get that, either. The Young Turk I fancied myself to be a lifetime ago has become an Old Fart. I still have my teeth and some of my hair but most of everything else is on permanent loan.

The quiet decline began at some point in my past I can no longer remember or (better phrased) I simply paid no attention to. When does a Second Chance become your last chance? Only in retrospect. You don't miss your water until your well runs dry at which time the boast I overheard yesterday takes on a plaintive and pitiful urgency, until it, too, no longer matters. Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Some ships have already sailed.

-bill kenny

Major Tom and Lieutenant Dan

2011-12-10T00:01:00.003-05:00

My heart beats in my chest on the left side. And truth to tell, as if you couldn't already, that's pretty much how I think. Actually, child of the Woodstock Novelty that I am, and witness to some excellent weird shit gone sideways I characterize myself as a Relentless Pragmatist (and don't forget the capitalization!). Neither a Yasgur Farmer nor an Altamont Angel, I was always more at ease as a Watkins Glen Summer Jam Barefoot Boy on the last (or lost) weekend in July of 1973 with The Dead, The Band and The Allmans travelling with Andy K and his roomie, Cosmo, but not Michael Richards' Cosmo.

Cosmo rented a U-Haul truck and filled it with dry ice and canned soda along with boxes of Dixie cups reasoning that if enough people showed up and were thirsty they'd buy soda and he'd make some money. Because this plan came together as he and Andy were heading out to the car from their apartment in Highland Park, some of it was slightly improvised. The only soda Cosmo could get in large quantities was Diet 7-Up. He couldn't begin to afford all the dry ice to keep the soda cold he would've needed and the Dixie cups were only available if you bought them by the pallet. Cosmo never hesitated. Hanged for a sheep, hanged for a lamb.

By the time Summer Jam ended Cosmo had no soda and no money from selling it because he couldn't figure out what to charge for it to cover costs, even though he was majoring in Business Administration at Rutgers. That in literature is what we call foreshadowing; in life it's just another day on the ant farm. Actually by the time Summer Jam started Cosmo had no soda left. That took genius. We'd gotten to the racetrack so much earlier than necessary we were ahead of the now legendary traffic jams that 600,000 PLUS people will cause. They were sure thirsty. And stoned.

But then again, quite possibly so were we. We forgot Cosmo had all those paper cups but people didn't mind drinking warm soda out of a can, so we were safe as houses. Less safe was the truck. We set up shop, so to speak, about 100 feet from dead center of the stage, figuring whoever was in charge would eventually make us move, except, and this is through the haze of 38 years ago (okay?), I don't think anyone was in charge.

As the sound checks for each of the bands became concerts in their own right., people discovered you could climb up the passenger side of the truck, using the window opening as a step to get to the roof of the cab and from there you could pull yourself up onto the flat roof of the box compartment in the course of the two days perhaps half of all those in attendance did just that. I could see the roof over the passenger compartment was horribly compressed; so much so that Cosmo started to figure out how late at night he'd have to return the truck to get any of his deposit back. The answer: no clock had enough hours in the night for that to ever work.

Which was just as well since the box roof, designed by the truck manufacturer to support nothing, had failed on an epic scale and as I think I remember it had holes the size of people in at least two places because that's how some folks ended up in the truck, suddenly, during the performances on stage.

Cosmo had long since sold out of soda and in an altered state, usually referred to as 'near the Adirondacks', about four hundred of us had a paper cup fight illuminated only by flashlights the night before the show that rather neatly used every single one of the six billion or so cups that Cosmo had stacked inside. It was, he offered cheerfully the next morning, one less thing to take home to Jersey.

I met Bill Graham, the concert promoter between acts on the side stage when I went to pick up my wallet which I had misplaced and two people had found and turned it all in, money and everything. They refused to take a monetary reward and were disappointed to learn my soda connection was out. Almost a decade later, I'd meet Graham again in an ante-chamber of the Frankfurt Flughafen for an interview and he not only remembered me, he asked about Cosmo.

I long since lost track of Cosmo though in recent weeks as I watched the Occupy movement ebb and flow-and I don't think we're done with that by a long shot, by the way-I flashed on the realization that all the Wall Street GB's, the greedy bastards, I so intensely dislike in the abstract are my age cohort. The indignities and indecencies we imagined our parents inflicting on us are nothing in comparison to the ethical and moral atrocities we committed against our children and their futures. And if we didn't commit them it wasn't for lack of trying or opportunities.

Why couldn't we make any money all those years ago selling a desired and desirable product at a good price in an environment willing to pay for it? Because we were practicing for the Fall of 2006, when the bottom fell out of the Ponzi Scheme our very bright classmates with MBAs helped create when the rest of us went mentally numb from the roots of our hair down as we became The Old Men Whom We Once Mocked. Looks like we passed the audition.
-bill kenny

Cause and Effect

2011-12-09T00:01:00.002-05:00

I love indoor fireworks and small wonders. Don't get me wrong, I'm not immune to the charms of the grand gesture and the big moment but both bombast and bullshit start and end with identical letters and (too) often the former becomes the latter in the twinkling of an eye.

I thought I was going to riff today about the next installment of the personal misfortunes of a true prince among us, Alec Baldwin, except he's not and whatever happens to him (and plenty often does) it's not nearly everything he deserves, in my opinion, especially since he seems to bruise so easily.

Actually I'm the troll. I can't tell you why I dislike him, just that I do. We've never met, nor can I imagine a scenario when we would (obviously it won't be on a certain airline). I was never that big a fan of Kim Bassinger so it didn't break my heart when they married or set it free again when they divorced. He's just broadcasting on FM while I'm tuned to the police calls-don't know how else to put it. Alec, it's not you, it's me and as the Good Book says, let he without sin cast the first stone. But you might want to hold that thought instead of acting on it.

Especially if you're in Linda Vista, California, and then maybe not so fast with the rocks. This is one of those funny but not funny for everyone stories. If you're a parent of this child, you're sick with worry except, if you are the parent of that child, what the hell was he doing throwing stones at cars in the first place? And a crossbow? A crossbow!

Who the heck rides around with a crossbow in her/his car? I will NOT explore the "why?" question at all. And what's the matter with that guy anyway? You call shotgun, nobody calls crossbow! I can appreciate the advantages a crossbow has over a longbow, though I suspect Robin Hood could compensate for the limitations and still acquit himself well, but let's face it, a crossbow says "oh yeah?!" like very little else on earth. Talk about a statement.

Because I lack the will power and attention to detail to continue to follow this story I will never find out how many other cars the kid threw rocks at before he was crossbowed (if google is used as a verb, why not?) or even if authorities ever apprehend the assailants. I hope the RAV4 has cloth seats, because cruising around all day in tights with a crossbow can give you a rash to rival Oblio's point.
-bill kenny

Show of Hands

2011-12-08T00:01:00.002-05:00

Both my mother and father are/were right handed. I, too, am right handed. I believe my brothers and sisters may all be left-handed. They tend to wear gloves and in some cases, mittens, which doesn't help my situation very much (I can't tell when Jill is flipping me off so I just assume always). My wife is left-handed. Our two children are right handed though our son, Patrick, an avid though more often now erstwhile, footballer, is left-footed.

One of his coaches used to suggest 'he only uses his right leg to help him stand up.' I think he more than made up for that perceived shortcoming with a booming left footed kick that could drive a soccer ball through a wall, though judging by the way defense men moved out of its path, why take that chance?

Our daughter, Michelle, plays a variety of musical instruments, strings and things, all of them in the conventional manner with no restringing required and no mirrors used, a la Paul McCartney and his bass playing, to reverse the finger patterns for placement on an instrument's frets.

I was thinking about all of this a bit more intently and intensely than is normal for me (especially the 'my sister with mittens' part) because I found an article on "The Health Risks of Being Left-Handed" in the Wall Street Journal, the Murdoch media outlet that still makes some sense, that without the Internet I doubt that I'd have ever seen.

I'm familiar with a reasonable amount of the popular literature on handedness, population divisions between left handers and right handers (did you know that 'sinister' comes from the Latin sinistra, meaning 'left'? Finally put those years of prep school dead language lessons to use) and brain lateralization. We are an amazingly complex life-form; pink and soft on the outside, crunchy in the middle, with a gooey filling. And as amazing as left and right handedness may be, it's always more impressive to me to see what we can get accomplished when we join them together.
-bill kenny

One World Ended as the Next Began

2011-12-07T00:01:00.004-05:00

It was a Sunday morning on the East Coast seventy years ago today when the world as we had known it changed, and became the world we know now. Our nation which had struggled for over a decade to recover its economic equilibrium after a world wide collapse on a now-distant Black Friday was still righting itself while half a world away, in the early morning hours, war came to America.

On this date, seventy years ago, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. Most of the rest of the world had long been engaged and engorged in what historians now call World War II as battles German tanks roared across Europe and through Northern Africa and the Japanese Co-Prosperity Hemisphere spread across Asia.

Elsewhere today on pages of newspapers large and small across this country and around the world, you can read recollections by those who fought and remembrances of those who died. But Pearl Harbor is more than history, it is our story. New England has a place of honor in America's maritime history and in shipyards from Bath and Portsmouth to Groton, we have long built the ships in which men (and now women) go down to the sea

This past Saturday, the region proudly welcomed the USS Mississippi to the U. S. Navy's submarine force. The ceremonies, solemn yet festive and steeped in centuries of tradition, took less than an hour and produced memories that will last a lifetime.

Shortly after eight o'clock in the morning, seventy years ago today, the USS Arizona, taking a direct hit, sank in nine minutes killing its entire crew of 1,177 Sailors. When the attack on Pearl Harbor ended, eight Navy battleships had been damaged and four had been sunk. Also sunk or damaged were three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and a mine layer. Almost 200 (188 to be exact) U.S. aircraft were destroyed and 2,459 Americans were killed and another 1,282 had been wounded.

Some sailors were trapped in ships that had sunk. Two days after the attacks, rescuers found thirty-two sailors alive inside the USS Oklahoma, but it was far too late for those aboard her sister, USS West Virginia. Shipyard workers rebuilding the raised battleship discovered marks on bulkheads below decks to indicate some sailors survived for seventeen days after the attack.

All of those stories are part of the larger story of the United States of America, which after its own War of Independence, strove and succeeded more often than not to be in Splendid Isolation in the world community. Our involvement in World War I, while intense and decisive had been brief in comparison to so many other nations. That was to not be repeated in World War II.

Seventy years ago today, how Americans viewed the world changed. And as a result of the efforts of our grandparents and parents, after World War II, how the world looked at the United States changed as well. We emerged in the aftermath as a super power and leader of what we called for decades the "Free World." What we are today is all part of a world that came to be as a result of Pearl Harbor.

And we learned again a lesson from throughout our history: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance or as Frank Loesser wrote in 1942, "Down went the gunner-a bullet was his fate. Down went the gunner, then the gunner's mate. Up jumped the sky pilot, gave the boys a look and manned the gun as he laid aside The Book, Shouting Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!"

-bill kenny

East until Your Hat Floats

2011-12-06T00:01:00.001-05:00

Today is the feast of Saint Nicholas or Nikolaustag. That probably means nothing to you but in my house it's a means of measuring how far we've come and not just the distance traveled. The first time we celebrated this day on this side of the Atlantic, my wife and children had been residents of Das Land der Runde Turgriffe for less than month. Something familiar from home, or what was to be come their 'old home' was very important and as Sigrid has set aside some small chocolates for both Patrick and Michelle for today, it still is (though I wonder if not more for us than for our now adult children).

I confess to still seeing them as small. I remember hours of hollering "nur Patrick!" and his echo answer of "nur Daddy!" as if it were yesterday. Holding Michelle in one arm as Patrick and I sang "How Much is that Baby in the Mirror" to her reflection every night as part of the going to bed ritual. The bedtime story book with a story for every night-a different subject and a different adventure and how the two of them would sit up in their beds as my terrible German rendered any form of narrative nearly unintelligible for the two of them. And then afterwards we'd all sing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and it was lights out.

Es war alles sehr gemutlich and so long ago. Coming out of the grocery yesterday, the shopper in front of me was mumbling about the youngsters, definitely NOT from here, playing under the overhang as their mother struggled to get their baby sister out of the car and into a cart. It's funny when little ones stiffen their arms and legs and refuse to make it easy for an adult to seat them in a shopping cart. Of course it's only funny when you watch; when you're the adult struggling with the child, the humor is quickly lost.

Some people reach an age when you cannot tell how old they are-maybe I already have. Wouldn't want to try to guess his age but I think he needed glasses. I say that because he saw in me, as I walked past him, a kindred spirit who'd appreciate his caustic characterization of where he imagined these children were from and where he wished they'd return. Except, jeder ist ein Ausländer, irgendwo. My response was he attempt something anatomically impossible, and not quite as much a suggestion as a directive. I could have been more polite and gotten the same effect.

-bill kenny

A Big Bowl of Cherries

2011-12-05T00:01:00.007-05:00

With the amount going on in most households this time of the year, perhaps it's not so coincidental that Congress readies itself for a holiday break (like any of us would notice they stopped meeting and not getting anything done?) while statehouses across the country empty out so folks can back 'to the district' and the lights in the local City Hall seem to burn a notch or two lower as the wheels of government squeak a little more quietly.

Here in Connecticut's Christmas City (we claimed the title about a hundred years ago and so far nobody else in the Nutmeg State has noticed), you can keep your lamps trimmed and burning as we pare meetings down to some essentials this week, which leaves us plenty of time for sleigh rides and snow angels or jaunts to the local casino to plump up those Christmas Club savings acounts.

This morning, at/about 9:30 (it's complicated, if you want to attend and don't want to be late be there at this time; otherwise show up at 10 and hope they didn't start without you), it's a regular meeting of the Southeast Connecticut Council of Government (SCCOG) Regional Water Committee who meet once a month except when they don't, like last month. And I'd compliment them on their compliance with the public law on the timely posting of meeting minutes, but they're doing a terrible job, so here's to striving for improvement. Good luck with that.

Tuesday evening at 7:30 in City Council Chambers, the new City Council is sworn into office in Council chambers and some basic housekeeping, in terms of appointments and committee assignments are finalized, and then there's a reception in Room 335, so bring your appetite.

Wednesday afternoon at five, in Room 319 of City Hall it's a regular meeting of the Emancipation Proclamation Commemorative Committee, whose membership, purpose, meetings agenda or minutes of any of their previous meetings, remains completely absent from the city's website.

Speaking of which, good news! If you'd put off taking the website survey on the city's website (think: barber shop infinity of mirrors trick), no worries. It's over. You can view the feedback from the less than one hundred people total who took the survey right here. And later you can tell me with a straight face again about why 'nothing ever gets better around here.'

At 5:30 in the Kelly Middle School Library (and you missed a great concert Friday night in the auditorium, by the way), it's a regular (and possibly the very last) meeting of the (Kelly Middle) School Building Committee (dedication is a week from this Wednesday, the 14th, in the same auditorium you didn't go to for the music concert).

Reading their November meeting minutes is a bit like revisiting a Bronte sisters' novel. There's a mention of forwarding "information to the Norwich Police Department in order to seek retribution" that is so American Gothic, we should considering renaming the school for Hester Prynne.

Thursday morning at 7:30 in their offices at 77 Main Street, it's a regular meeting of the Norwich Community Development Corporation, who've had themselves a busy year and will hopefully have an even more productive one in 2012, as they reinvent their own board of directors and expand their focus. Not sure why the municipal website tells when/where the meeting is but doesn't serve as a repository (careful with that prefix, Eugene) for the minutes of previous meetings. You can always get them by dropping a note here, but we can do better and should.

At two, in the Planning Department conference room (in the basement at 23 Union Street), it's a special meeting of the Community Development Advisory Committee, hearing presentations into what projects to reinvest recovered CDBG funds. You can't review the minutes of previous meetings to gain some insight into the decisions to this point because there are no meeting minutes posted. I know what you're thinking and you're welcome.

At four, in the Central Office of the Norwich Public Schools, it's a regular meeting of the Budget Expenditure Committee says the city's website. Here's what it says on the Board's website. I doubt the year is a typo. Seriously. In light of how heavy this committee's workload is about to get as we head through winter to budget formulation season, wouldn't it be nice to not look so goobered up in cyberspace?

And at seven, in Room 335 of City Hall, it's a regular meeting of the Democratic Town Committee. There's a rumor about a rental of a three hundred foot slip and slide and a tanker truck of Jell-O shots. It's taken me all week to get that circulated and I can only hope someone on the committee thinks it's a good idea before Thursday (you might want to wear old clothes and stay thirsty, my friends).

Saturday at noon, consider heading to the Sacred Heart Cemetery if you're in Norwich for Wreaths Across America. It's a national observance, with thousands of sites and lots of people participating. You can find out about it here.

This is the time of the year we linger a moment longer when thinking of absent friends and family members, hold the door more often for one another and generally behave with a bit more of the spirit of the season than we do at, say, Labor Day. Maybe we can start to work harder to be nicer to one another longer. Otherwise, what's a heaven for? I'd hope to see you at something but can well understand if you don't share my enthusiasm.

-bill kenny

I Wish Monkeys Could Skype

2011-12-04T00:01:00.004-05:00

That shuddering you thought you felt yesterday afternoon was as real as you wanted it to be as Herman Cain stepped off the stage in Georgia live at the ADD Theatre, a leisure time activity of the Republican National Committee. From the same people who brought you a half dozen or so folks whose existence you've already forgotten, but who wanted to be President, we can add another name to the wall ('the rent is too damn high'? Seriously? Caveat emptor).

It's said Will Rogers never met a man he didn't like and in recent weeks it appeared Cain had never met a woman he didn't grope but I must have it wrong, since no less an expert on the Cain campaign, Herm Himself, sees the real victim in all the media murmuring and if it just so happens to look a lot like the former CEO of Godfather's Pizza, well, isn't that amazing?

You might think “(b)ecause of the continued distractions, the continued hurt caused on me and my family, not because we are not fighters. Not because I’m not a fighter” smells like bovine excrement, but I think Herm's a cad who saw no reason to apologize to anyone least of all to his own wife who now becomes a punchline in ways her husband the headline, could have never imagined.

How'd you like to be these folks today? Sure hope they were renting that server by the month though they probably wish it were by the week and, in light of Herm's behavior, it would have been more appropriate had it been by the hour. Talk about adding new meaning to Rock You Like Herman Cain. Bet The Scorpions are heaving a sigh of relief today. (When I say "übertreiben" you say 'over the top', sorta like Herm.)

Yeah, I'm being catty and caustic but make no mistake-people's lives were damaged and perhaps permanently ruined and the precipitant in the whole misadventure is more likely than not to not have a mark on him when this is all over. Cain will pout like petulant child and play the martyr card while the woman he pledged his love to forty-three years ago is left to stand on the stage as the curtain comes down around her and the world shrugs. Nachos and hogwash, indeed.

-bill kenny

Schöne Grüße aus Lippstadt!

2011-12-03T00:01:00.008-05:00

At some point Tuesday night past, the distinguished members of the U.S. Senate managed to put an * on the Bill of Rights and should you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the Constitution to see what that bugger means, we'll put your ass in jail as a terrorist and let you out when we damn well feel like it.

Welcome to the New Age America. Or is that New Age, America? No matter. Here's what has happened, most of which you know but the details get drowned out by Kim's divorce and who's ahead on The X Factor. If news takes more than a minute to read, listen to or watch, we won't and we don't. Anyway, while you were out....

The legislative and executive branches of the federal government refuse to play together which is at the root of why we're so dysfunctional, fiscally, philosophically, ethically and morally but wait, there's more. The Federal Government's fiscal year should have started 1 October, and it did, but there's no federal budget, just stop gap funding (that's what all that Super Committee hullabaloo was all about) especially for the big ticket departments like the Department of Defense.

This time of year, people of all faiths are familiar with Christmas Trees. In our nation's capital, that's the term when you take one piece of legislation, let's say NASA's budget, and add to it a rider making this National Peach Month, and another mandating the use of the imported air in balloon animal creation stations and perhaps one granting pony rides to those with birthdays. A little something for everyone under the motto of 'you get along by going along.'

Right now, the pinata, so to speak, is the Department of Defense funding authorization bill and lots of different sticks are needed to whack it. But it's not a clean bill-there's all kinds of stuff (nothing about peaches or pony rides but much many in between) but read this, and you'll see immediately where my concern is and why. I'll wait right here unless or until I get arrested.

Allow a former nearly altar boy to give you a quick lesson in Latin, habeus corpus. The most fundamental of a right each of us has under the Bill of Rights that, without putting too fine a point on this, makes every other right in our Constitution work. During the Civil War, a misnomer of epic proportions, Abraham Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus arguing exigent circumstances. The result was nearly as tragic as the war that precipitated its invoking. It seems only the current President can remember history.

So alarmed by what the Senate of the United States hath wrought, I wrote to both my Senators, assuming someone on their respective staffs could and would read the letters. From Dick "Ready for My Close-Up" Blumenthal I heard nothing. From Joseph "How Can We Miss You when You Never Go Away?" Lieberman I got a bristling, self-righteous defense of his vote that added new meaning to 'a guilty conscience needs no accuser.'

And since I cited Lincoln, let me be a bit more contemporary in a country where history is a dirty seven letter word. What we are hurtling towards we've already had-at least our grandparents did, in another time and place, Germany in the Dark Years of Nazism. The Third Reich called the process our Senate has created 'nacht und nebel' (night and fog) because it was the legal justification into which dissenters disappeared often to end up in a KZ and then dead.

Once you're arrested, that 'fact' is proof of your guilt. Instead of operating under a presumption of innocence as we have since our beginnings, we will be a nation of suspects. And, says Senator Lieberman and other like-minded thugs, we have no choice. We must do this in the name of homeland security.The line between homeland and Fatherland gets more blurred with each goose step.

Before this country was founded (while we were losted?), Benjamin Franklin offered “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” I'd conclude with that before the Thought Police show up and I start asking my cellmates 'does this orange jumpsuit make my ass look big?' but when I begin thinking about nacht und nebel I always end up at Martin Niemoller. I just hope it's not where WE end.

"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist; then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me."
-bill kenny

If Al Capone Could See This....

2011-12-02T00:01:00.002-05:00

Al Capone was famous for a number of things and probably wildly successful at even more than is generally believed but I've always enjoyed his theory on transactional persuasion, "you get much further with kind words and a gun, than you can with a kind word alone."

I do not own a gun, so I'll assume he has the research to back it up. After all we're not talking global warming (which involves a different Al) so I'm comfortable taking his word. I think Jessie Dimmick might be best advised to read the Book of Al and memorize chapter and verse (and not get hung up on a literal interpretation of 'gun' but think 'weapon'). It's not like he has a lot else he's doing right now aside from knuckle-head stuff like this.

No later than now, his cellmate has asked to be transferred because no one wants to be locked up with a guy who watched Patch Adams (not even Robin Williams' newest nanny) with his hostages until he fell asleep and was awakened by the police slapping the cuffs on him. And if there's NO endorsement deal from either Dr. Pepper or Cheetos, there is no God (not sure of what happens to swearing on the Bible in court).

I admire the chutzpah it takes to sue the people you held hostage for "breech (sic) of promise." My brother, the attorney, has a somewhat jaundiced eye on how some of his colleagues practice his vocation-I cannot imagine how little he enjoys a rank amateur entering the arena, though I suspect he appreciates the self-control to maintain a straight face while filing this suit actually takes.

It's not that I don't understand Jessie's plight. Someone is paying for that surgery (suspect the taxpayers and Jessie is gonna be on laundry detail for the 1,429 years getting that money back), so there's a certain amount of need mixed in with the greed. Of course it's all smothered in stupid sauce so it's hard to see in any light. How's that other expression go, never bring a knife to a gunfight. Unless, like cheesy snacks and effervescent beverages, you have enough for everyone. And never trust anybody named Rowley; pants on fire.
-bill kenny

Manuscripts of Unpublished Rhyme

2011-12-01T00:01:00.005-05:00

I guess it's official now, 2011 is in full "Hello, I Must Be Going" mode as this is the first day of the final month of the year. Today is the birthday of my sister, Evan-now you come up with something good about it, too. Yeah, I know, tough going ,right? I just finished counting days and subtracting them from the year and what we have left is all there is. Yipes.

In January, I'd have stuck an ! on the end of that pes but no more. Why waste it now? All the poems, prayers and promises we hoped to enjoy are nearly all past tense and unlike Banquo's ghost, they didn't stick around long enough for us to savor or regret them. Hell, I don't know about you but I can't remember more than a handful of them without digging back through my daily journal and a lot of that reads like a travelogue from Bedlam.

I do know the three people I knew in the 'somebody has to be there' musical playing as far off Broadway as is possible this time last year are all home and dry now. We haven't closed auditions, which would be great news, but I'll take what I can get, when I can get it. If you've got someone in that stew right now, I'll keep them in my thoughts (and wish there were more I could do) as you hold them in your heart.

We're into Advent which means Christmas will be here in a moment and the New Year, which we'll embrace with the same enthusiasm we did its predecessor, will follow in short order. We're so busy struggling to live we don't seem to be enjoying life and that's a tight trick because whatever comes next is more a matter of faith than a statement of fact and that part of the carnival ride seems to be dark and quiet. I hope it's not closed for repairs.
-bill kenny

Paying the Piper

2011-11-30T00:01:00.001-05:00

As delightful as Saturday's Winterfest Parade (capped with the lighting of City Hall) was, I did manage to find a (small) grey cloud surrounding the silver lining. There was more than enough holiday cheerfulness to go around, and who can complain about the weather, and we had all the music we need, in my opinion, with the performance of the Norwich Free Academy Wildcat Marching Band, but did you notice how small it was this year?

It's not a sudden occurrence-take it from a parent who had a child in the band not that long ago. When our daughter, Michelle, attended NFA and marched in the band, it was a logical place for her to be because she had been challenged, like so many of her classmates, by the programs offered in the Norwich Public Schools.

As I recall, she started violin in fourth grade at Buckingham School back when we had music and arts programs in our schools (and Buckingham, come to think of it). Both are long gone-when public money for schools started to get tight a few years back, music and arts became unaffordable luxuries.

To keep the bottom line near the bottom, we taxpayers insisted the Board of Education and its superintendent stick to the fundamentals and lose the frills. Because of that our kids lost a lot of the fun and more than a few of the thrills as we expected City Council members to choose between police and paving streets, emergency response personnel and infrastructure upgrades. In the end, there is no end as the battle of the budget starts a new in a few short weeks and unless we've hit oil under City Hall, dollars will be in short supply and high demand.

Which brings me back to the Wildcat Band and how well those who marched on Saturday played. I have trouble chewing gum and walking so I applaud the talent and skill it takes to master a complicated step routine in a line of march while performing flawlessly on a musical instrument. I wish (and hope you do, too), there were a way to encourage the children in our schools now to paint outside the lines and support those teachers and programs struggling to re-establish themselves after years of silence.

We can literally put our money where our ears (and hearts) are this Friday night at 6:30 for the Norwich Community Concert in the Jacqueline Owens Auditorium of the almost-ready-to-be-dedicated Kelly Middle School. A donation of five dollars per adult will get you you an evening of music from the Norwich Free Academy Concert Band, the Norwich Arts Center Concert Band, Kelly Middle School and Teachers Middle School students and the University of Connecticut Brass Ensemble.

Proceeds from the concert will help maintain and expand an initiative of the NPS Education Foundation, after-school middle school music lessons through next year and hopefully beyond. The Foundation was started late last spring and has already helped fund small projects in individual classrooms in every Norwich public school. You can learn more about them right here.

Public education doesn't only educate a public, it helps create one and support those enrolled in it and help make them productive and caring adults, like their parents, who, in turn, will share their time and talents with the city that nurtured them with a commitment to learning, laughter and life.

-bill kenny