Endorsed by Jimmy Webb and the Fifth Dimension

You know the words and the tune. 

This is still from the music video. 

Bigly.
-bill kenny

See You in My Dreams

I've seen Bruce Springsteen more times than I can count, though once the Greedies took over concert ticket sales, I chose to make mortgage payments rather than buy nosebleed seats. By all accounts, he and the E Street Band are just as brilliant on their current tour as they are in my memory.

Maybe it's because we went to different high schools together or have grown up and/or old in tandem, but if I were to pick one "rocker" (not sure of the definition) I'd use to musically describe The Seasons of Man, it'd be Springsteen.

From the heroine of Blinded by the Light, 'she got down, but she never got tight-but she'll make it alright' to the near-prayer that closes Surprise, Surprise, "In the hollow of the evening, as you lay your head to rest. May the evening stars scatter a shining crown upon your breast. In the darkness of the morning, as the sky struggles to light, may the rising sun caress and bless your soul for all your life."

That I don't need to ever look up the lyrics, because they've been written into my soul, says maybe more about his ability to capture and convey an emotion than it does about me as a listener.

The brash kid on Greetings, 'when they said "Come Down, I threw up' to the world-weary adult, the husband, the father, the brother, and son of Working on a Dream, who penned a Eulogy to Danny to close out his words on that album, has been beaten in this life, but has never been broken.

He might shake his head at the wild-eyed optimist who 'pushed B-52, and bombed 'em with the blues' but knows, too, when he speaks to his father to come to bed on Independence Day, it is with our voice and is as much to ourselves as for ourselves.

We've gotten lost in a country Germans used to admiringly call "The Land of Unlimited Opportunities". Instead of seeing the promise of the sunrise, we see the inconvenience of the heat and worry about the loss of shade. What we once gave freely to one another, now some of us resent the taking, while others feel a sense of entitlement in the asking.

And if we don't want whatever edition of the American Dream each of us is working on to abruptly end, 'With a love so hard and filled with defeat; running for our lives at night on those backstreets,' we're going to have to redefine who we are, to ourselves and to one another.

Otherwise, "And in the quick of the night, they reach for their moment. And try to make an honest stand, but they wind up wounded, not even dead--Tonight in Jungleland."
bill kenny

Not Quite the Good Old Days

Don't know how your year is going, but the first five months of mine have been more than a bit unforgiving. Between long-ago friends shuffling off their mortal coils and straining to hang on to my own threads, it's been harder to be both in the moment and to savor it.

Hoping to hold the moments until they become memories, mine or someone else's.
-bill kenny

Cogito, Ergo Sum

Channeling Rene Descartes.

"I'm not your friend Or anything, damn. You think that you're the man. I think, therefore, I am. I'm not your friend Or anything, damn. You think that you're the man. I think, therefore, I am."
-bill kenny

Mother's Day

I figure everyone with a pulse, or an approximation, is waxing poetic today in honor of Mother's Day, as well we should. My mom wrangled six of us to adulthood, the last three for a significant distance without her partner of (at that time) nearly thirty years.

She, Franz, and Anni Schubert, Sigrid's parents, got along wonderfully well the only time they ever met long ago, even though they shared not a single syllable of a common language. Sigrid's mom was a Rubble Woman upon whose back the Federal Republic of Germany became the economic engine of Europe in the decade after World War II. Anni's husband passed decades before she did. The two women took no shit from anybody and raised children who are the same way.

My sisters, Evan, Kara, and Jill, are accomplished, masterful, and successful. They take care of their own families with the same devotion and the same discipline (no feet on tables, no glasses without coasters) as their mother did. Glenn, Russ (both now deceased), and Joe were fortunate to have them in their lives and smart enough to know it.

My two brothers, Kelly and Adam, and I are married to women, Linda, Margaret, and Sigrid, whose Moms raised them to give their husbands the confidence to go out into the world and try to reinvent it in our own image. When we come home at the end of each day, sometimes defeated but always undaunted, they convince us we can begin again on the morrow because of their love and support. 

This year has special significance in our house, as Michelle, our daughter, and her husband, Kyle, are awaiting the birth of their first child later this summer (Oma and Opa are pretty psyched about all this, as you can imagine). 

Enough syrupy sweet sentiments, before you think I've gone soft, I'm invoking the deathless words of Ray Wylie Hubbard to close. Love ya, Mom(s), all of you.

-bill kenny

Make the World Better Today

With FedEx, UPS, DHL, and dozens of gig-worker-driven delivery systems, we forget sometimes about the service Benjamin Franklin established, the United States Postal Service, or, as most of us call it, the Post Office.

Postal workers have long been the butt of jokes, subject to derision, suspicion, and all manner of indignities as they make their rounds, but today they are doing more than delivering mail; they need all of our help.

Stamp Out Hunger, going on today, is a nationwide outreach in support of local food pantries that are under more stress from more patrons than at any time in their existence.  

You will not only make a difference, but you'll be the difference.
Please, help stamp out hunger.
-bill kenny
 

Two Is Too Few

If you're like me, you have a pretty high threshold for pain. Sounds like a good thing until I concede (in my case), I'm talking about other people's pain. I can be surprisingly stoic when we talk about how 'somebody needs to take one for the team' right up until I get in the batter's box and beanballs start whizzing around my head.  Then my ardor and interest in jungle rules whiffleball cools noticeably.

We have the same aversion to pain when the calendar rolls around, as it has again, to municipal budget time, since it is our wallets absorbing the pain. Our motto  becomes 'what's mine is mine, but what's yours is negotiable.'

You remember the City Manager's proposal, department hearings, and public hearings? All opportunities to deploy pronouns like "us" and "we." Instead, and as always, 'them' and 'they' wound up as culprits for everything in that document no one likes, including the type font. ("A little too Bodoni Bold for my taste," I heard no one at all say.)

Our language reflects our perspective. Even though the farther out in space you go, the more alike we look, down here on terra firma, we can elevate differences and distinctions to an art form when it suits our purposes. 

"Those people" in City Hall have no idea what "we" are going through. Maybe you didn't say that, ever, but I know I have. It's not important who says or thinks it, but rather, how it colors how we act after we do.

Every year, we have the same tug of war for finite public dollars among those of us who want more for education, public safety, employee recruiting and retention, infrastructure, capital improvements, and economic development. When "we" wonder what "they" were thinking of, something close to the reason we formed government is getting badly lost in the noise and language.

Someone tells me s/he is 'for education.' Of course you are, what's the alternative, ignorance? Don't forget that all of "us" support enhanced public safety, but do you seriously believe there is anyone who doesn't? When we define which ones are inside, we are also creating an outside. 

What we mean by what we say is where we tend to disagree. Maslow's hierarchy of needs helps us articulate and prioritize our desires and wants as well as our abilities and capabilities of satisfying them. Here's the Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious (BGO): 'they' are 'us.' It is only together, me and you that can become 'we' and 'we' need all of 'us' all the time.
-bill kenny