"Bayonne Vs. The World..."

Major League Baseball is only ankle deep in determining who gets to the playoffs and World Series, but It all comes to a head this afternoon at three for the 2026 Little League World Series and I'm sorry that it ever has to end because I, for one, need to witness and experience the joy of just living and loving what you're doing which is what the Little League World Series is all about.

In a world where we pay adult athletes wages that approximate the gross national product of some Third-World nations to participate professionally in a sport our children play for free, there is something about the exhilaration and exuberance of the competition in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, that I still find a tonic for the soul. 

The animation and engagement of the television announcers, some of whom as youngsters played on these same fields in pursuit of a championship, is contagious and inspiring. If you can listen to the Little League Pledge, almost as old as I am, or even just read it, and not get goosebumps, don't bother checking your pulse; call your coroner as you're no longer among the living. 

All you can be is reminded and refreshed about why you choose to follow baseball. Why, in an era of a dozen other sports all grabbing more headlines and worldwide attention, the simple beauty of a contest that, at its most basic, involves striking a small leather-bound, round spheroid with a stick, be it wood, metal, or some kind of composite, and doing it better than a like number of others attempting to do the same on the other team. 

For a few days, eleven-year-olds serve as role models for adults and an entire team of players, who've just been white-washed and whose run to the Series has ended prematurely and with a drubbing no one would wish on anyone else stand one behind the other along the first and third baselines after the final out and shake the hands of the team sending them home prematurely and tell them 'good game' and really mean it, because the Little League World Series isn't just about baseball, it's about life, as it should be lived. 

"... I will play fair.

And strive to win.

But win or lose, 

I will always do my best." 

-bill kenny

The Sadness of Silence

It was Shakespeare's Macbeth, who may have been the first literary figure to offer an argument on the virtue of planning your work and then working your plan, when he offered, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day..."

In addition to its eloquence, it's memorable for both its utility and applicability-though in an era of diminished expectations and shortened attention spans it's easy to understand how quickly we can seem to get lost as individuals and as political units from cities to our national government.

There's always more than one way to get from here to tomorrow. The more successful paths seem to often involve inspiration and perspiration in nearly equal amounts, that is, a brilliant insight or an original idea combined with hard work. And don't forget, some good luck. 

Our Mayor earlier this week held the first meeting of his Community Interest Panel to accelerate the process. The comments on the newspaper article are hilarious, to me, as they prove that it takes more power to be a light than a horn (and we have plenty of horns in Norwich)

My father was fond of invoking the Pennsylvania Dutch as the source of one of his favorite expressions, "the harder I work, the luckier I get," but I defer to wherever your mom or dad say they heard it, too. 

Luck, like hope, is a four-letter word and both of them have that in common with a plan. But critical to any plan are having definite, precise, and clearly defined goals with a strategy of how to use the tools at your disposal to achieve those goals.

Without all of that, a plan is just a wish you make with your heart. And while that worked out very well for Jiminy Cricket, we're having a critical shortage of wishing stars right now, so we'll have to make do the old-fashioned way. For what it's worth, don't take Pinocchio to any of the seafood nights at local restaurants, at least not for the next few weeks.

There have been enough words written on "how to get our city back on track" where we each insert the name of where we live, step two paces back and admire our handiwork, seldom realizing that a good beginning is only that, a beginning.

Articulating a plan means making sure that everyone who needs to be on board with it, and that usually means everyone where you live, understands what you're sharing, the reasons for what you're proposing, the impact of the sacrifices they will need to make for a common good, and then to get on board with the program and own the plan for themselves. All or nothing at all.

Top down, bottom up, there's no one path because there's no one destination-only a journey that has a beginning each day and never ends. The only constant in our world has always been change and the need for change. 

There's never an end to progress-only pauses along the way, and no matter what happened yesterday, tomorrow will be here in a moment and care not about those successes and failures. We can learn from them, and we can build on them, but we can't live forever on their memory or their meaning. 

As Banquo admonishes, "if you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak." Far too often, all that remains is silence."

-bill kenny

Remembering the Dream

Today, August 28, 1963, The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on a hastily constructed platform in front of the Lincoln Memorial at The National Mall in Washington, D. C.. For a moment on that day, America stopped to listen. Today we can be forgiven if some wonder how much any of us have heard. 

Dr. King was the final speaker at what was, at the time, the largest day-long civil rights rally in American history, a rally that demanded, not asked for, "jobs and freedom." It attracted a quarter of a million people who heard a powerful declaration of purpose that King himself had titled "Normalcy-Never Again." 

The normalcy of the United States as our nation's capital simmered in the late summer heat that summer was very much a separate and even more different nation than the one in which we awoke this morning. And yet it is very much the same. 

While for some of us, the events of 1963 could just as well be those of 1863, because they seem so long ago or, for some, before we were born, it is for many just the turning of a page, a look back both in sorrow and in anger at broken and battered lives as well as at missed and misspent opportunities. 

The United States of 2026 struggles with so many of the same challenges. What we have learned (or should have) is that poverty, of the soul or of a bank balance, has little interest in or use for race, creed, or color. Money doesn't talk; it swears. 

Thanks to our politics of division and divisiveness, many of us have become harder people, less willing to give, to share, and even less interested in caring about the rights of those like, and often unlike, us who are our neighbors and fellow-citizens. In some ways, the snapshot has yellowed but hasn't changed all that much in all those years.

Dr. King's America on that August day in 1963 had, as it did every day, despite fine-sounding and high-minded efforts in ten decades since the Civil War's end, black people who were still systematically disenfranchised with more than two-thirds denied the right to vote; where 'separate but equal' was still more prevalent throughout our country than the right of access to integrated schools, public washrooms, drinking fountains or buses and trains. 

We were then, as difficult as it seems to those looking at recent Supreme Court rulings on voter rights, two nations who rarely spoke with one another about our shared goals or common ideals. 

Instead, too often fueled by fear and ignorance, we were two tribes who scrupulously avoided dialogue and discussion on an ever-growing divide of desires and aspirations. 

For those of us whose children are just starting/returning to our schools as another academic year begins, Dr. King's speech and the society and nation in which he spoke are a distant half-remembered historical dream of a long ago that disappears in the harsh daylight of Hard Times in the Land of Plenty with which so many of us must contend every day. 

It was only after Dr. King chose to speak from his heart and less from his notes at the podium that afternoon that the power, the longing, and the joyfulness for which "I Have a Dream" became famous became apparent. 

His oratory soared, carrying everyone to new heights, those present in The National Mall and the millions more who watched on televisions across the country because while TV didn't know exactly what was happening, they did know it was important. 

All these years later, Dr. King's dream is our dream. We are, at our best, a nation whose struggle in pursuit of our dreams lights the souls of those around the world and for whom we are a last, best hope. 

King never said our journey would be easy, and it isn't; nor is it over. Far from it. 

We have come a long way and yet we have a long way yet to come. We cannot get there by ourselves but only by taking the hand of the person to our left while offering ours to the person on our right-and stepping forward, together. And always. 
-bill kenny

Found A Scapegoat

Tariffs and trade wars.

The not-quite-a-war-with-Iran.

Abduction of the President of Venezuela.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) improving the performance of the Federal government.

A TV weekend anchor as Secretary of  Defense War.

Self-dealing in government contracts, stock market manipulations, and nepotistic business arrangements.

And what seems like literally hundreds of other foolish, ill-thought-out, gratuitously evil policies and actions ranging from immigration and customs enforcement through environmental protection to public education policy.   

All at the feet of Donald J. Trump. But how did he happen? 

Submitted for your consideration:

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

-bill kenny

"I Would Grow Tomatoes as Big as Beach Balls....."

I took advantage of blue skies and low humidity on Monday to visit Mohegan Park. After a rainy weekend kept most visitors away, the chipmunks and squirrels were stopping passersby on the trail around Spaulding Pond looking for handouts. I forgot to take peanuts with me. 

The looks of disappointment, disdain, and dismay were plainly visible on their faces as I tried to explain that my decision to come to the park was pretty much spontaneous after visiting the post office. They weren't interested in my alibis.

Many of us are knee-if not hip-deep in back-to-school preparation(Norwich Public Schools students don't go back until 3 September, but Norwich Free Academy gets started later this week), so, aside from moms and dads with small children, I had Spaulding Pond to myself.

Late August summer sunshine is bittersweet. It has much of the warmth of its July cousin, but also a foreboding undercurrent warning of the season's change. You can still enjoy August sunshine, just not as much as you could when summer began. 

I love Mohegan Park and used to clock four or more laps around Spaulding Pond back in my salad days. Now I struggle with my trusty Rollator to get two laps under my belt, but it's still better than none, right? 

Otis Library has set up pathway placards, ala Burma Shave roadside ads, as Story Time stations around about half the pond. I hadn't been there in a while, so I don't know how many I missed, but the current one was perfect for the weather, about a little girl deciding what to grow in her garden (I won't spoil the ending; go up to Mohegan and read it for yourself).

From what I did read as I walked from placard to placard, she is a very wise little girl with just the right combination of practicality and whimsy (not a lot of people would plant seashells, but she did), with excellent taste when it came to vegetables. 

Today's title was part of her garden but the kicker was the second line, as you made it around the bend on the far side of the pond where the egrets like to fish (there were none today, not sure why), and her thought to help me on my way was, "And the carrots would be invisible, because I do not like carrots."

Ah, if it were only that easy to handle the unpleasantness that awaits all of us once the story time ends. (And I think she meant kale instead of carrots.)
-bill kenny

Early Days

It's a fine line between childlike and childish, and I ride on it balanced like Duna on a bike in a John Irving novel. 

I was born months before Eisenhower was elected president and remember (without fully understanding) how sad everyone was when John F. Kennedy was murdered.  

My family used to watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on Sunday evenings, but we made an exception the night of  February 9, 1964. I didn't know I was waiting for The Beatles. Hell, I wasn't yet twelve years old and was unaware of puberty. 

And they changed it all, not just for me but for all of us who saw/heard them and (pardon my 'OK, Boomer' attitude) for everyone who was to follow us. They didn't invent rock and roll, but for me they might well have, as I never listened to music the same way again. 

Klaus Voormann's Revolver album cover 

Pick your current favorite performer and remember how you felt when you first experienced them. Multiply it by a thousand, and then that number by a million, and then that number by a trillion, and you're still not within shouting distance of the impact of the Fab Four. 

My generation always says 'you had to be there,' when describing almost anything. In the case of The Beatles, it's a vast understatement. Even if you were there, this video can help deepen your appreciation of the four men who wrote so much of the soundtrack of the movie of my growing up. 

Yes, it's a long video, but then again, so is life. 
-bill kenny

When All Is Said and (John) Don(n)e

For a large number of reasons too boring and maudlin to get into here today, I've developed a more than healthy respect for the passage of time and its effects on me as a traveller here on the Big Blue Marble. 

I rediscovered a video over a rainy Sunday afternoon that I find both soothing AND disquieting (sort of like the Doublemint Twins). Hope you enjoy.

That it's called "Existence" is surely coincidental. Don't you agree?
-bill kenny