Thoroughly Thoreau

Health issues have hobbled me for a little over a year, forcing me to be nearly homebound, to the polite dismay of my wife, who married me for better or worse nearly forty-nine years ago, but not necessarily three meals a day, every day.

Until about a month ago, I could walk without resting for a little less than one hundred yards and navigated from one perch to another whenever I had a reason or need to walk any distance. I purchased a Rollater and regained my appetite for walking.  

Late last week, with a cerulean blue sky and abundant sunshine, as my local TV meteorologists are fond of saying, I visited one of my favorite places in The Rose of New England, Mohegan Park. It's been a while since I've been there (close to two years or so), but it didn't disappoint. Let me show you.

All we are saying is Give Bees a Chance

1963 Spaulding Pond Dam Flood Memorial

My favorite place

Have a great Sunday!
-bill kenny

Happy Birthday, Kiddo!

Today is our daughter's birthday.

At two days old

As not seen from a drone

   

Who doesn't love a Happy Ending?

Hope it's amazing!
-Love, Dad. 

Lawn Ornaments Riding Carousel Ponies

Tomorrow is the 152nd running of the "Fastest Two Minutes in the Whole Dam World or Something Like It." Yes. It's Kentucky Derby Day, the Race for the Roses, and a hundred cliches that those who follow the Sport of Kings (and I wasn't sure what they meant for quite some time about that growing up) take as seriously as those who follow the World Series, the Super Bowl, or the Stanley Cup take their sports.

The difference being you don't get to ride a teammate around a track in a counter-clockwise direction (I think; and do they change directions in Australia for the obvious reason), which is too bad because I imagine a placekicker riding around on a linebacker would be quite striking visually.

All I know about the event tomorrow is what Dr. Hunter S. Thompson wrote in 1970 when I was barely eighteen years old. It tore my mind in two; your turn. And, you're welcome.
-bill kenny

Shovel Down Six Feet

I was born the same year Dwight Eisenhower was elected President. I mention that not to impress you with how old I am ('and look, he can still dress himself!' Well, sort of) but, rather, to help you understand what the dog-eared snapshot of America in my wallet looks like.

We lived in Suburbia. Dad and all the other neighborhood fathers got up early to get to the train station for important jobs in The City. Mom made Dad breakfast and drove him to the station, then came back and got all of us up, fed, and dressed for school. She waited for the school bus with us and was there at the stop when we came home in the afternoon.

In Eisenhower's America, you had air raid siren testing with under-your-desk and look-away-from-the-flash-at-the-window drills, and no one found any of this odd or unusual because we had always done it and assumed we always would.

All the boys after school played war, and all of us were brave soldiers with guns keeping the suburban sprawl backyards safe from all the enemies we saw on nighttime TV shows.

Cold War kid that I was, I lived as a member, small and young, of one of the tribes of America, the middle-class white American tribe. My circle of friends and playmates was so white we glowed in the dark. If I had any after-school playmates of another color, any color, I don't recall them.

I do remember Mrs. Henderson, my third-grade teacher, a tall, black woman who was a dynamo in the classroom, though I had no idea at the time why she worked so hard to prove herself. I figured it out many years later, long after being her student, proving (I guess) that not all learning happens in the classroom.

Growing up, I watched the civil rights movement on television newscasts and in the headlines of our daily newspapers (one in the morning and one that came out in the afternoon), on street corners in downtown and across our playgrounds.

As teenagers, we watched grainy film footage of The War (always capital letters) in Vietnam directly into our living rooms every night at dinner, where it sat on our trays along with dessert. The universe was getting more dangerous, the pace was getting faster, and we were growing to assume our place in a world we were creating as we went along.

We were the children of the Greatest Generation and often had the same sense of history a cat does. It's been decades since I thought about the "Huntley-Brinkley Report" or Wide-Wale bell-bottoms, just two artifacts of a long ago age of arrogant innocence (or ignorant arrogance if you want to be kind), when we took for granted everything we had, never wondering where it came from or how long it might last.

And now, our children impatiently wait for us to relinquish the leadership roles we inherited from their grandparents. It's our turn to wonder what it is we're leaving for them and what they will make of it and where they will go with whatever we have given them.
-bill kenny

The Moon's a Harsh Mistress

My current obsession is learning everything there could ever be to know about Artemis II and its mission to the dark side of the Moon. 

The kid who wanted to grow up to be a baseball player, and the President, and an astronaut cannot get enough information about the effort and accomplishments of  Artemis II. 

The romantic optimist in me wonders, 'If we can do this, what can we not do if we only try?' It's why I have a tough time with taking no for an answer on topics ranging from immigration (from space we all look the same), universal affordable healthcare, living wages for everyone who wants to work, shoes, clothing, and shelter for everyone in need to why can't the Yankees win the World Series (I know, it's early; I fret and like to avoid the rush). Perhaps even get some answers to.....

  

I fell out of her eyes
I fell out of her heart
I fell down on my face
Yes, I did, and I -- I tripped, and I missed my star

I fell and fell alone, I fell alone
The moon's a harsh mistress
And the sky is made of stone
The moon's a harsh mistress
She's hard to call your own.

-bill kenny

Where the Rubber Meets the Road, or Something

Everywhere I turn, the costs of goods and services are escalating, with some (looking at you, gasoline) accelerating (didja see what I did there?). 

I have a defective desk calendar since a certain someone assured all of us that prices would go down on "Day One" of his administration, and here it is, the twenty-eighth day of the fourth month of 2026, and damn, if it still hasn't happened.

I feel for the gas station operators, the grocery store employees, and all those in wholesale and retail. They're being held hostage and can do little about it except to pass along the additional costs to me and mine here in the Land of the Round Doorknobs

Yes, I suppose eggs have come down from their dizzying price heights, but milk, bread, and butter are up, so that breakfast of French Toast is a little more pricey than it used to be. Tell you where else inflation has hit, because of the very-nearly-but-not- quite-a-war-with-Iran, condoms.

Did you think I was making that up? Now you know better. Hit the drugstore and see for yourself. Tell the pharmacist you've been hired as a clown for a child's birthday party and you're looking to save some money on balloon animals. "Thank you for your attention to this matter."
-bill kenny

No Need for Carriage Return

Last week, my computer zigged where it normally zagged. The keyboard stopped responding. I should confess that I'm not a very good typist. Or liar, since the preceding sentence was an understatement. 

I am a terrible, terrible typist (one terrible will simply not do) who has no concept of touch typing at all and who punishes every keyboard, hitting them with a unrelenting and frightening ferocity. It is very possible (and practically inevitable) that if you're very quiet right now, wherever you are, you can hear me typing.

Much like breakers against a jetty on a beach, my unceasing pounding of the keys has resulted in the letter "A", the one below the "Q" and above the "Z", an anchor of the home row, to have worn away to nothing. The key is there, but the letter on top is gone.

Not only am I not a touch typist, I'm a simpleton who has to look at the keyboard all the time I'm typing and also say the word aloud as I type it. Pathetic, I know. Perhaps the sound card in the computer chose to work in reverse, and the keyboard was finally able to hear what I was doing with it all this time. Perhaps not. 

My screen saver, John Lennon in National Health glasses, stared as unhelpfully and blankly at me as I did, a lifetime earlier, at his Yoko sideboard watching Get Back, both to the same end and to no avail. 

I have no idea how to repair a computer keyboard, but here in the Brave New World, I don't need to. The solution was so 21st-century — pitch it and get another. They don't grow on trees, admittedly, but it's not like mining gold, and it's actually cheaper than repair.

So here I am, with a brand new keyboard whose letters gleam as they are bathed in the late April New England sunshine of sorts streaming through my window, still surprised to look down and see ALL the letters in all their glory and majesty. The "P" may be silent in pneumonia, but the "A" in Aardvark is visible from space.
-bill kenny