All That Is Left...

Tomorrow is the thirteenth anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, something many of us couldn't grasp when it happened, and I confess, I still don't "get." 

I'm not any smarter now than I was then, except to acknowledge that I'm not any smarter. and am no closer to understanding. That I will never be is of very small solace.

I cannot imagine how long tomorrow will be for someone who suffered the loss of a child, a husband or a wife, a son or daughter, but I do know that in Newtown, Connecticut, everyone trying to heal will hurt again.

For a small town whose residents will always have broken hearts, tomorrow will just be the next day in the unending tragedy which will only end when all memory of what happened has gone. And that will never happen.

Those murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School weren't 'victims,' they were people, mostly incredibly tiny and very young people. 

The Innocents included: Charlotte Bacon, 6; Daniel Barden, 7; Rachel Davino, 29; Olivia Engel, 6; Josephine Gay, 7; Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6; Dylan Hockley, 6; Dawn Hochsprung, 47; Madeleine F. Hsu, 6; Catherine V. Hubbard, 6; Chase Kowalski, 7; Jesse Lewis, 6; James Mattioli, 6; Grace McDonnell, 7; Anne Marie Murphy, 52; Emilie Parker, 6; Jack Pinto, 6; Noah Pozner, 6; Caroline Previdi, 6; Jessica Rekos, 6; Avielle Richman, 6; Lauren Rousseau, 30; Mary Sherlach, 56; Victoria Soto, 27; Benjamin Wheeler, 6 and Allison N. Wyatt, 6.

Even if you have a problem with God, maybe a truce is in order so you can remember the twenty-six angels who entered heaven thirteen years ago tomorrow.

"This is a prayer for the souls of the departed." Sadly, we should know it by heart.
-bill kenny

Did They Beat the Drum Slowly?

Holidays are when we gather our family closer, no matter where they are. For many families, there's an empty place at an otherwise festive table for one who is serving or one who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country and never came home.

Tomorrow, please consider joining those who will pause to Remember, Honor, and Teach at annual Wreaths Across America observances across our nation.
 

There's a better than good chance that there's a ceremony not too far from where you live, but should you be in my neck of the woods, Norwich, Connecticut, on what will undoubtedly be a cold day, you're welcome to join the American Legion Post 104 Taftville, and friends, tomorrow at eleven o'clock at the Sacred Heart Cemetery in Taftville. 

And while the nationwide annual observance is tomorrow, the Wreaths Across America mission to Remember, Honor and Teach lasts all year long, far beyond the single day in December and wreath-laying ceremonies. All throughout the year, Wreaths Across America works in many ways to show veterans and their families that we will not forget.
-bill kenny

Ice (Not in My Drink)

The last week or so here in Southern New England, the mornings have been brisk (Tuesday it was about fifteen degrees (F) shortly before noon when I took the photo, below, of the Lower Falls at the Yantic River, a short walk from our house). I'm starting to think our children inherited their love for warm temps from me. Where they got their taste for Rastafarian Country & Western music from is a puzzlement to us all. 

The weather's been crisp but with no snow. As I'm not asking for a sled this year, again, I'm not terribly upset about the lack of white stuff. I'm proud of how well I can control my emotions when every morning I look out the window, don't see snow, and don't break down and cry. Inside, our house went from the day after the first Saturday in December to CHRISTMAS in null comma nichts. 

My German wife is the world's most organized person-she has transformed a lazy dullard into, okay, a bad example; let's use the kids, or the house, or the neighborhood. She is a wizard at organization, and our house is now festive with a capital F (and a neutral pH).

Lower Falls of the Yantic River in Norwich, Connecticut

The letter "F" is also the beginning of a word, and part of a phrase, I use a lot from around Thanksgiving through the end of the year (and not fa-la-la-la). I was never good at making or having friends when I was a kid, a lifelong habit as it happens, so when I watch people the other eleven months of the year cross the street rather than talk to me, as they now wish me 'all the best', I know better. I'm more polite now and don't tell them where they can stick their well-wishes, mainly because they'd walk funny, but I figured you out, so don't think you fooled me.

Sigrid addresses cards, organizes the holiday shopping, shops for gifts for all our neighbors, and decorates our small evergreen tree in the front yard with some kind of bulbs and decorations. I help. I stay out of her way. 

In recent years, our family has returned to its 'original size', as our children, Patrick and Michelle, are themselves adults and lead their own lives with their partners. On Christmas Eve, we'll have gift opening complete with oohing and ahhing and lots of 'you shouldn't have' (mostly from her as I shower her with all kinds of stuff I think she'll like, festively wrapped, very nearly). 

And in the spirit of the season, there will be a time as the afternoon surrenders the last of its light and the darkness rushes in where I stand in our yard and strain to hear, if only in my mind, the melody of my most favorite of all seasonal songs whose words I cannot understand but whose sentiment is wonderfully clear.
-bill kenny

Hello, I Must Be Going

I've become the THIRD cranky old guy in the balcony of the Muppet Show, along with Statler and Waldorf, yelling at the whippersnappers who walk on my lawn or lean on the hood of my Ford Gran Torino. And from what I can decipher, I'm not the only one in a bad mood.

I'm less than enthused with the current leadership (or what passes for it) in our nation's capital, but I am too feeble and old to do anything more than complain about it. And if you voted for the Grifter and Grafters, put your hand up. Now put it over your mouth. That's how much of your complaint that I'm zinging Trumpelstiltskin I'm interested in hearing (= none). 

HOWEVER, if you're a gig-economy person or a creative type who chooses to not be bound by corporate chains, you might want to check out this link for an easy-breezy (relatively) way to get a long-term visa in a generous number of European countries, where in most of them, Trump isn't spoken.

If you're someone whom people tell where to go, now you have some destinations.
-bill kenny     

Don't Forget Your Books

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." 

Norwich takes great pride in its schools and in the achievement of its students and, as measured by the Connecticut Mastery Tests (CMT)even as the costs to achieve that success continue to escalate. 

We have learned well the lesson that public education doesn't merely educate a public, but also creates one, as our schools have become the centerpiece of their neighborhoods, regarded the same way the fingers of the hand look to the thumb. We may have thirty-plus languages in our community, but we all only have one school.

In the Industrial Age, mill operators looked for rivers to power their factories. In the Age of Technology, companies sought rail, air, and highway connections to ship raw materials and finished products to and from markets. 

Today, in the Knowledge Age, with the convergence of technologies and applications, business, be it government, art, commerce, or science, can be conducted from anywhere, and a successful education becomes essential in creating agile, life-long learners who can constantly and consistently adapt and adopt.

If this doesn't sound like the schoolhouse we attended as children, that's because it isn't. In our day, schools and the communities they served were separate worlds, but today, everything, in many ways, has become everything else. 

Our children enter schools designed for a different world and a different time, where events happened sequentially and not simultaneously; where rote learning was group learning and progress could be precisely mapped and measured.

Today's students bring different learning styles that require flexibility of instruction and classroom interaction as a minimum. What else is needed will be discovered as all of us across the community sit together, and with educators and other key members of our city, to build the next school system, not just from bricks and mortar, but from skills, tools, techniques, and opportunities that both reflect and simultaneously shape the world in which our children and theirs will live.

We have both a new City Council and Board of Education, whose members will grow into their roles and responsibilities. There will be discussions, dialogue, and probably no small amount of acrimony in developing the budgets both for the city and for our school system. Happens all the time. 

There will be a lot of hard work because tomorrow cannot be built in a day, but rather, will be lived one day at a time for the rest of our lives. We all want it to be tomorrow today, but none of us wants it to start at this moment.

-bill kenny

"Think about Me Every Now and Then...

I offer this every year, so if you've been here before on this date, please indulge me. Thank you. 

If I need more than a dozen words to explain the importance of John Lennon and the music he helped create, and the other music he made possible, I'm too old, and you're too young to be having this conversation. And since I got here first, you'll have to leave. 

I was born the year Dwight David Eisenhower took the oath as President. Rock and roll was either very rhythm and blues-oriented (and called 'race music') or was so white it glowed in the dark with melodies from the Brill Building professionals as sung by any fresh face who showed up at the auditions. 

Little Richard's originals, such as Good Golly, Miss Molly were covered and eclipsed by a variety of white artists and never enjoyed the success on pop radio station airwaves they should have, but UK rockers had no way of knowing that. 

People like Sam Phillips and Sun Records helped change all that with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and (of course) Elvis Presley. The seismic shock Elvis set off echoed halfway across the world, where tub thumpers were part of something the British called skiffle, who attempted to emulate the American records they were hearing in the coffee bars and teen clubs.

The perspiring and aspiring musicians who spent hours trying to copy every chord change of every R&B song they heard had no idea that in the USA, the music to which they were so devoted had been co-opted to a large extent, castrated by safe-as-houses imitators. Their world then was so different from our world now that words fail, which is why (perhaps) so many of us who came of age in The Sixties turned to music in the first place as a replacement for language.

If all you know of John Lennon is what you've read, you cannot imagine the electricity late-night American Top 40 radio had when The Beatles were on. They built a bridge from the UK for every disaffected rocker to cross, and it mattered not if they could sing; Noel Harrison certainly couldn't, as long as they looked the part.

The Liverpool lads stuck and stayed when so many others had faded away because they had the talent and the ear of a generation who sought a voice while they, themselves, searched for the sound they had heard years earlier. They may have never realized they had become the object for which they searched. We, on the other hand, never cared and embraced them as the Soundtrack of the World to Be. 

The Beatles 'broke big in America' in the aftermath of the murder of John F. Kennedy and I've never believed that was a coincidence. They were the standard by which all other pop music was measured. It felt, for someone in his teens for much of their public career, that The Beatles had been around forever, but when they went dark in 1970, they had been a chart presence for far less than a decade.

Where there were four, only two are alive today. All of them spent, and continue to spend, their solo careers battling unreal expectations, measured by critics and fans alike against an impossible standard no one could match. With Lennon's murder, the death of the public John overshadowed the personal tragedy his two sons, Julian and Sean, as well as the pain and grief his wife, Yoko Ono, and his first spouse, now deceased, Cynthia, felt and feel every day of their lives, but most especially today. 

It's tempting when revisiting history to forget it can just as easily be written as his story because, in this case, the bandmate, the father, and the husband were all walk-ons in the Beatlemania movie that bastard, Mark David Chapman, so abruptly and completely ended all those years ago. 

For many who never knew the man, except through his music, today is a long day. There's little we can do except enjoy what he gave us while watching the wheels go round and wonder what might have been.
-bill kenny

Long Hairs. No Hairs. Everybody. Everywhere.

A memory of the season, and the Second Sunday of Advent for me at least.

Somewhere on the way to here and now, I lost my way. Not as in shuffled off the beaten path and got lost, but defiantly chose to not do as those who came before me had so chosen for generations. Too stiff-necked to this day to acknowledge my failings and weaknesses, I'm often in doubt but never in error. At least in my own mind.

Advent is a season of preparation; for the devout, it is for the coming of the Savior. The annual path to the birth of Christ began last Sunday, and I know the calendar and the ritual. But I've never been quite sure what it is people like me are doing or supposed to do as we flail about seeking land and trying to keep our heads above water theologically.

I envy those who bundle up and head out for early Mass, with confession beforehand, and who can then leave the church fortified for their week ahead. I miss the comfort of the ritual and the sense of shared belonging. I fill up my hollow days with noise to distract me from hearing the approaching roar. 

I've never been clear if I should look to the future with anticipation or fear. However, I do understand I'll find out soon enough and far sooner than planned.

-bill kenny