Random Axe

I ran into a former work colleague a couple of days ago. She retired some years before I did, and we'd lost sight of one another. It was fun to catch up, and it probably happened like your reminiscence sessions go, where you skip ahead and jump back, then race on and stay behind. 

Sometimes the hardest part is remembering where the shared reference ends, so then you have to add details. If you were to transcribe that conversation, I doubt there were more than five complete sentences uttered in the half hour-lots of quick references and brief glimpses and then moving on.

Later, on the same walk, I encountered a man with a Mohawk haircut, but the part that wasn't in the Mohawk was shaved to the naked scalp. He was wearing a three- piece suit that probably cost twice what my car is worth. He wasn't a young guy, either. I'm not real good at guessing ages, or weight for that matter, so that career as a Carney is out.

Actually, he was closer to being my age, and he looked as goofy as the guys with whom I didn't go to Woodstock together all look. You've seen 'em, too. They have long hair, gray, frayed, and wispy, in a ponytail. And nothing sticks it to 'the man' like a Volvo station wagon, Teva sandals, and the green 'we recycle' bumper sticker that seems to be holding the back end of the car together.

Here's somebody I'd like the 'man' to stick it to. The auto-American cretin who compensates for his car's driver's side headlamp being burned out by driving with his high beams on and not dimming them as you and he approach one another. Yeah, I remember what Driver Ed said: don't retaliate and turn yours on-it makes two blinded drivers, but still...

I also don't know what to do about the driver who goes up a one-way street the wrong way, slowly because he certainly doesn't want to cause an accident, for a short distance, to pull into somebody's driveway, rather than go around the block. 

I love when he comes nose to nose with a car coming down the street the correct way, and they glare at each other like Mr Upstream Salmon has any comeback at all. Or that guy's cousin, the driver who backs up a one-way street the wrong way with the car flashers on, so I guess it doesn't count as much.

How many crumbs from the toaster tray do you suppose it takes to assemble an entire new piece of bread, and can you toast that slice when you're done? And for folks with paywalls on websites that have a screen that says, "you must log in to see this page"? Isn't it more accurate to say "you must log in to see the NEXT page" since I can see the log-in page just fine?

These are the kinds of imponderables that keep me awake at two in the morning when I already have a headful of terror supplied from the machine alongside my bed. I'm hoping no one's ever died from imagination (and I don't plan to be the first). 
-bill kenny

Some Women Wait for Jesus

We're at that point in the summer when we keep an eye on hurricane forecasts, as they will be coming thick and fast. Mostly here in the Land of Steady Habits, we get a lot of rain from them; low-lying areas see some flooding (not in my part of Norwich), and we get scared watching the damage elsewhere in the country on the Weather Channel.  

I'm not really concerned so much about the rain as I am about what Dylan Thomas referred to as the dying of the light (and I'm not talking about the darkening of the skies). 

Almost everyone my age I know, and there's not nearly as many of us left as I'd have thought should have survived to this point, is, like me, bone weary all the time. We get up tired, slog through our days semi-comatose, and crash on couches in middle-class fever dreams we never envisioned ourselves as ever living in to go to bed and fail to dream to get up and do it all again..

Don't get me wrong-I'm disappointed in myself and in my life, so far, but I'm not unhappy. I met and married someone who loved and who still loves me, though I haven't done anything remotely lovable in a ridiculous number of years. We have two children who are now happily married adults themselves and getting on with their own lives rather nicely without us (and making us grandparents as well), which is the whole plan, as I remember from the orientation briefing at Dad School back in the day.

I, and by that I mean my peers and me, didn't crash or go down in flames; we surrendered a little bit every day until we really ran out of things to give away. We traded our blue skies and beliefs for BMWs and shipped good-paying jobs to low-wage third- and fourth-world nations so that their people could have an opportunity to earn forty cents a day making sneakers that I buy at a three hundred bucks plus a pop and never even think twice about.

In another fifty years, some of those places will have indoor plumbing and potable drinking water, and those people, or maybe only the ones who survive until then, will want to put up a statue to folks like me. Don't worry about it. You're welcome, and keep the cholera blankets-hell may freeze over and you could use the warmth.

At some point, we turned into our parents, who are laughing their asses off now as they really didn't do as terrible a job as we kept insisting they had. And considering how we could fuqq up a one-car funeral procession (and don't ask me about the wet dream in the desert), it might not have been a bad idea to quit while we were only slightly behind instead of pressing on and losing sight of the entire caravan.

We thought the future was Twenty Questions but, instead, it proved to be Hide 'n Seek in a dark room. And I take the one who finds me back to where it all began, when Jesus was the honeymoon, and Cain was just the man. Same as it ever was, and I knew coming in that going out would be the same.
-bill kenny

Don't Do This and Don't Do That

"I've never let school get in the way of my education."-Mark Twain.

Back in June, today seemed to be so far away; no one gave it any serious thought. The weeks of summer rushed by, and those ads for back-to-school clothing and supplies started showing up more often in recent weeks in the papers, online, and on TV, and became increasingly hard to ignore.

The march of the calendar is inevitable and unstoppable. All of that led to all of this-later this week, school opens in earnest for children in Norwich. It began a few days earlier for those in Norwich Free Academy and in some parts of the state and perhaps a few days later in other places, but for us and now, it's here.

Thousands of children from every neighborhood across the city, and in some instances from beyond the city limits, will be heading for classrooms, language labs, music lessons and all of the other pieces and parts of what we think of when we say "education."

You'll see them waiting for school buses, partners to walk home with or pals to hang out with afterwards. The enthusiastic beginners heading to kindergarten (do you remember the last time you felt about anything the way those five-year-olds do today?), through those starting their final year at Norwich Free Academy and for whom the whole world waits.

When all is weighed and measured our success as adults, as parents, neighbors and residents isn't measured so much by the size of the Grand List (though a larger one is infinitely preferable to a smaller one), the number of businesses opening in Chelsea or expanding elsewhere or the number of bricks piled one upon the other we can concentrate in one area of the city, but rather, it is how well we can make where we live someplace our children and their children want to come home to and call their own.

With all due respect to the public works and public safety professionals, not just here but across our nation, we spend the bulk of our taxes on education-it's the largest investment we make as citizens, and we should expect the greatest of returns.

Our neighbors who serve on the Board of Education have a huge, nearly overwhelming responsibility to both we, the people who chose them as our representatives, and to the children whose education they must help oversee.

In recent years, times have not been easy around here-tightening budgets helped drive cost efficiencies that radically altered our children's educations, and not always for the better. We, the adults who could and should have known better but decided we could wait another day or created rationalizations for why we didn't do something, have to admit now, we have no greater obligation than to help every child succeed.

"The purpose of an education, said Dr. Edward "Fast Eddie" Bloustein, President of Rutgers College, to the Class of '74 when we were freshmen, "is to learn the rules of the game better than anyone else. And then change the rules."  
It's time to start to put that into practice. Ready, set, learn!
-bill kenny  

"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