Art or Something Like it

The internet is so often a grim place. War, pestilence, disease, crooked politicians, and far too many unhappy endings. 

And then you find something like this. 

Actually, another Bill Kenny, a Facebook friend I will in all likelihood never meet, found it and shared it.   

Angina Pectoris, indeed.
-bill kenny

Hoping Something Better Comes Tomorrow

This is from a very long time ago, when times were tough for just about everyone. I had more or less forgotten about it as the years rushed on. I called it: 

The Stick Stays

I'm smiling today partially from the controlled substance pain-killers I'm taking to manage the knee noise, and fear (if you've ever had limb replacement surgery, the adjective you NEVER want to hear is 'spoiled'). 

The pills make my sense of whimsy towards the foibles of others a little deeper, so the clown princess in the oversized SUV who looked me straight in the eye as she backed out across two lanes of traffic on Washington by the bank, and kept coming anyway, gets no more than a shake of the head from me because it's all I can muster. I'm feeling sorry for myself, and I do it well.

In the fast-food place, standing behind a dad and his young daughter, based on the time of day and their clothes, possibly on their way home from Mass (Holy Communion and a McGriddle, who could ask for anything more), I realize from the way he's speaking to the counter person about employment that he doesn't have a job. 

There's a discussion of shift availabilities (all of them) and pay differentials (doesn't sound like many), and he's nodding as she talks while scribbling names and numbers on a Napkin.

It's funny, I think, as we age, it takes us longer to bounce back from the knocks and bruises of everyday life. I remember a coarse witticism about enduring a specific activity for the course of a night, and how you know you're getting old, and how I laughed when I first heard it. 

Same with the rest of our lives, too. In our twenties, we went from position to position with nary a thought--as the decades advanced, each job started to look more like a career until the economic tsunami threatening us at the moment sweeps away savings, self-respect, and maybe home.

The child at his feet was no more than five, with a tiara and a pink fairy-dress that parents think every daughter at that age loves. He's making sure he understands the sequence in which to call the numbers, because 'if you call region before district, they'll tell you there aren't any vacancies,' when the child squeals in delight and holds up her prize.

She's found a dime on the floor-perhaps someone dropped their change from a purchase, or, more likely, it didn't quite make it through the slot in the counter collection box for the supportive housing of parents of children with cancer, the franchise has helped construct across the USA and around the world.

I'm not alone in this latter supposition as the father bends to pick his daughter up and explains to her where the dime really came from and, by inference, where it really belongs. Without hesitation, safe in his arms, the child leans across her father and drops the dime through the slot in the top of the box. 

He smiles as his order is given to him, and both dad and daughter head for the parking lot and home with breakfast and, perhaps, a new hope. 

-bill kenny

Spring, By George

Spring 2026, says my desk calendar, begins/began at 10:46 this morning. I should point out that yesterday, Spring's Eve (did I just make that up?), the temperature climbed all the way to 34 degree Farenheit and predictions are for more of the same today. 

Despite that, my heart is surely not alone in shouting "welcome!" as it's been a long, cold, lonely winter.

But here comes the sun. 

An early morning long ago in Norwich at Chelsea Parade

Here comes the sun, doo da doo doo doo.

Here comes the sun, and I say, It's all right.
-bill kenny

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you. You've read the following before; actually, this time a year ago. No, I'm not apologizing for that. As our President says, 'thank you for your attention to this matter.' 

This has been a busy week for anyone who's ever picked up, owned, or been named for anyone in Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints. The main event, of course, was Tuesday, Saint Patrick's Day. I'm not sure everyplace on earth paints the median strips on Main Street green as part of the parade or adds food coloring to the beer, but let's face it, Saint Patrick is the 800-pound gorilla in the room for March.

Which is too bad, because today is the Feast of Saint Joseph, husband of Mary (Mother of God) and (sort of) Jesus' step-dad. I'm envisioning an at-the-dinner-table exchange between the Son of Man (when small) and Joseph, with Joseph offering a rejoinder such as, "Then go right ahead and ask your 'real dad' for a new bike and let's see what happens." And then the Curia or the Legion of Decency shows up at my house and slaps the cuffs on.

As a grade-school child, I missed the subtlety that went into the talk-around as the Sisters of Charity explained 'the Annunciation' and when I got older, and it smacked me right between the eyes, I admired even more the cool, collected response Joseph seemed to have had to all of that. 

Today, the Feast of Saint Joseph, is when the swallows come back to Capistrano. I wonder if the village fathers paint the center stripe on their main street a shade of bird droppings white and grey, or if they even have a parade (I think I'd steer clear of the beer, but that's just me). 

As urbane and world-wise as I like to think of myself, I love the story as much now as a doddering fool as I did hearing it as a child. I find it reassuring and, while my belief in a Divine Being fluctuates wildly (and how screwed am I if Her/His belief in me reflects my faith in Her/Him?), I hope (in a faint-hearted, wimpy sort of way) that Paley is right about the Great Watchmaker.

I have known two very dear people who shared the Feast of Saint Joseph as their birthday. They are both from long ago, at the time when I knew everything (and everything better) when I worked for the American Forces (Europe) Network. Bob was my first (and very best) boss in Radio Command Information (together with Sara, Marge, Norm, and Brian). At the same time, Gisela was the record librarian of the most amazing (and amazingly organized) collection of vinyl in the world.

Bob was married to 'local color' as I was to be as well (GIs who married citizens from the country in which they were stationed; usually guys marrying women, but NOT always). He and his wife, Erika, had no children but loved as if she were one, a stray dog they took in and kept all its life, Sandy. 

Erika and Sandy passed away pretty close to one another, leaving a hole in Bob's heart that never healed, filled with a pain of which he never spoke. Bob himself passed many years ago, and I see him at this very moment in my mind's eye in a beaten beige long coat with a beret he wore in every kind of weather.

Gisela was my translator when the letter of permission from the Standesamt of Offenbach am Main (where Sigrid and I hoped to marry) arrived, and I raced frantically from office to office trying to find someone to be my eyes (I was illiterate auf deutsch and vowed to never be that guy again). 

Gisela put her glasses on near the edge of her nose, and would read a line and then look over the tops to give me the English translation. I still recall the shine in her eyes and her warm smile as she reached the conclusion, granting us permission, and she clasped both of my shoulders and hugged me in congratulations.

I remember both of them today, maybe more so than Saint Joseph, perhaps because I don't know how many others remember them, and I'm sad and more than a little frightened when I think about what happens to you when the last person on earth to know you dies. 

So today, I tell a little of the story of their lives, as I knew them, to remind me to celebrate their lives and hope the day comes when we can laugh together about all of that and so much more.
Happy Birthday, Bob, und Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Gisela.
-bill kenny

Closing In...

The older I get, the longer it takes for winter to end.

We're almost there.
-bill kenny 

Celebrating Unattractive Choices

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

History is often the same movie with a different cast. Watching and reading news reports over the weekend that President Trump may not be cracking down on immigrant communities as hard as some of his supporters would like  (yeah, I had to read the headline twice myself) is a variation on a theme that has been the American tune from before the beginning of our nation. I am a verse of that song.

The Irish's arrival in America was, for its time, the largest and most prolonged migration of one ethnic group since the nations of the world began keeping track of such things. Those fleeing Ireland for America were not only family members, but extended families, whole neighborhoods, and, in many instances, entire villages and townships. All were half a step ahead of starvation and destitution.

To remain in Ireland was to die, but fleeing to America was often death of another kind, only more slowly. Having already been made into outcasts in our own country, immigrants hardly noticed how our treatment in the New World often resembled our handling in the old.

And still, we came, by the thousands every month, by the tens of thousands, and into the millions. At one point, very nearly twenty percent of all Americans were of Irish ancestry, which is a statistic offered today, Saint Patrick's Day, to help not just those of us who are and were part of the Irish Diaspora to remember where we came from but to remind all of us how far we have yet to go.

-bill kenny

Be an Exclamation

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. 

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?'
Actually, who are you not to be? 

You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world. 

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you." -Marianne Williamson
-bill kenny