The Place Where I Make No Mistakes

There are six phases to most human interaction, be it between people in a family or residents of a city. Those phases are, in order: Enthusiasm, Disillusionment, Fear, Search for the Guilty, Punishment of the Innocent, and Rewards and Honors for the Non-Participants. 

I'm not sure you'd call it a Natural Law or a Force of Nature-I suspect like a lot of the fables, failings, and foibles of the human race, it's just evolved over a long period of time, and now it is what it is.

I've lived in Norwich, Connecticut for over three and a half decades (for some, I know it feels a lot longer and your objections are noted) and watched as the Wauregan Hotel, Dodd Stadium, the Mercantile Exchange, the Intermodal Transportation Center, and the Occum Industrial Park, just to name a handful of 'game changers,' were, each in their own way, the magic potion, the miracle ingredient, the silver bullet that would undo decades of decay and indifference and return life and people to Norwich.

And every one of those projects has had, at some point, that six-step cycle with special emphasis, it seems to me, on Search for the Guilty. We're just not able to move past setbacks or course corrections unless and until we have someone to blame. 

And we all know who we mean even if we never say anyone's name. Most people refer to the culprit as 'them,' which is deliciously duplicitous because every 'them' is also an 'us' to somebody else, somewhere else. The current flavor of the month is an Amazon warehouse slated, perhaps, for the Occum Industrial Park. I say current flavor because it's following the same Six Step Solution of so many other projects.

The trouble with any Six Step Solution is, of course, it solves nothing. We get stuck on stupid and stay there. Anytime we try to revisit a situation and explore an alternative resolution, one of us is always reminded of a time back in the day when someone else had that very idea and 'they' (those mysterious sinister forces again) made sure 'we' couldn't make things right. It would almost be funny if it weren't true.

We have trouble remembering that the fear of making a mistake is, itself, a mistake. And walking away from the notion that it's a good thing if we make no decisions because that way we can't have made a bad decision. 

I'd hate to have us fear failing so much we're unwilling to try. Norwich has over 350 years of history, and none of it happened by accident. On innumerable occasions in all those years, someone, somewhere, stopped when others ran, and stood while others cowered and were the new starting point for whatever was to happen next.

We didn't always get it right the first time, but ideally we learn from our mistakes and stop worrying about who is to blame and who is to bless and start over again, when necessary, and keep starting over again until we get it right. 

It doesn't make any difference how you got here-it's where you go now that you are here that's important. And where are you? Next to me. And I'm in the place where I have what it takes. And you do, too. If you choose to.

-bill kenny

No Kings Day

  "I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

"And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.

Donmandias

"The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

"Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

-Percy Shelley

No Kings!
-bill kenny

Thanks to All the Literacy Volunteers

Like you, I own a boatload (more like a catamaran, or close to it) of self-help, be-the-best-you-you'll-ever-be books, and I've read enough of them to realize that the deeper you dive, the more likely the one you're currently reading is contradicting something you've read before.

I've actually had self-improvement books from the same writer that, from one offering to the next, walk back insights they previously offered without even acknowledging that they ever held a different position and/or point of view. Talk about putting the 'eat' in caveat emptor...

Here's what I think it all comes down to:

 And you, as always, may be whomever you wish to be

So if you're out tonight and you're on your bike, wear white.
-bill kenny  

J, P, G, & R

"And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make."

The rest of the story.
-bill kenny

From the Beginning

I first started writing this blog on 14 October 2007. I have no idea how many thousands of posts I've created or when/if I'll have nothing left to say, but I'm not there yet (sorry).

Strange how little and yet how much circumstances and times have changed, but somehow also remained the same. It's like the same movie with a different set of characters.

Here's what I wrote about. I called it: 

And to Think that I Saw It on Norwich's Streets

Driving past Washington Street this morning, it looks like a growth industry is the hardware business-selling neighbors large plywood sheets and paint so they can erect signs to yell at one another on the issue of spot zoning.

New signs insisting on the right to do with their property what they wish, possibly from those who've sold options to developers, angry at 'the select few' (as their sign says) who insist this commercial endeavor be turned away.

Another sign boasts about the increase in tax revenues and the additional (service) jobs a new mini-sprawl, I meant mini-mall, will bring to Norwich (even though the pharmacy hailed as 'new' will be the existing one from across town).

Jobs, much like Einstein's matter, can neither be created nor destroyed, at least in development models. If we take six inches from the front of the blanket and put it on the back, the blanket is NOT a foot longer. Let's hope we do NOT need a thirty-seven-minute PowerPoint slide show Monday night at Norwich City Hall for that to be understood.

Everyone's signs ignore, or seem to, our inability to look ahead and plan accordingly.

When you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.
Right now, most of us think any movement, even the circles in which we are turning, is the same thing as direction. 

Most don't know the difference between smart growth and economic development (all ducks ARE birds but not all birds are ducks) and until we learn that, we're fated to waste a lot of time thinking we're having a contest between 'property rights' and 'NIMBY'. It's not really what it's about.

Meanwhile, those whose agenda is not and will NEVER be that of advancement and enhancement of Norwich's economic basis will prosper while residents remain reactive instead of proactive.
-bill kenny

Crisp and Crunchy

We had glorious weather for much of this holiday weekend in my part of the world-not too hot, breezy, no humidity, glorious skies a deeper blue than the ocean, tempered by the realization that Autumn, as wonderful as it is, will not last until the Spring this year.

I had little use for winter even as a kid. I remember living in Belford, New Jersey, with snow in our backyard so deep, it was over my head. I was also a runt, which had something to do with that, I realized (years later). We had a dog, Sandy, a cocker spaniel who absolutely hated me. 

It was a present from Grandma and Grampy, my Mom's parents, and we always pretended how much we loved the dog when they came to see us (neither of my parents liked the dog; I stayed away from it to the point that it was months after we stopped having it that I noticed it was gone).

The house we live in now has a front lawn and a backyard. They were both great to have when our two children were young, as it gave them and their friends someplace else to play. Our kids are adults now, so we spend a lot of time alone, watching the grass grow and cursing the lawn. This time of year we watch the leaves pile up as the season changes, but there are no trees to speak of on our property.

Do you remember those propeller pods from when we were kids? Another great invention by nature to better assure the perpetuation of all the various species of trees-not that we ever saw it that way when we were smaller. There are so many this time of year, and so many of them land on the walk leading to the house that every footfall sounds like you're walking in Rice Krispies.

The squirrels in the neighborhood love the helicopter pods and can tear through them in a blink to get to the seed in the center. The pods are so numerous that the squirrels have actually been leaving the peanuts we throw to them for later while they gorge themselves on the pods. Unfortunately for them, the blue jays are quite happy to eat their share of the peanuts.

It was cold yesterday morning-crisp is a word my father would use, and so do I, in his honor, and that's the signal the next phase of the journey has started. The darkness comes earlier now, and the shadows lengthen sooner as the afternoons move on. 

Soon the winds will shift and more often come out of the north, pick up in speed and intensity, and the simple joy of crunchy sidewalks while out walking will be gone as the animals and birds spend more time gathering and storing food with one eye fixed on the fall skies as a hazy shade of winter creeps inexorably closer.

-bill kenny

Happy Indigenous Peoples Day

When we were kids, Columbus Day was a big deal. In New York City, the Department of Public Works used to paint the white line on Fifth Avenue purple for the annual parade that was always held on the real date of the holiday, October 12. 

In light of so much, I, as a man of seventy-four years plus now, know that as a boy of twelve I didn't know about the Rape of Paradise which ensued after Columbus' arrival; perhaps blood red might have been a better choice of colors. 

All I ever cared about was the day off, just like kids across the country. We all recited the rhyme because that's how we knew what (little) we did know about Columbus and since there wasn't a snappy couplet about genocide, we didn't hear anything about that aspect of discovering the New World (I also don't remember the Arawak natives part, but some of the little gray cells have had some rough days). 

Looking at the world as it is and how all settlement and civilization have developed, I'm not sure it's just Old Chris we should be putting in the defendant's docket and charging. I'm thinking a look in the mirror as well as a glance out a window might increase our catch significantly.

And to compound the cacophony of facts clashing with opinions is the realization that not only did Columbus not discover the New  World, but he wasn't the first. We've spent hundreds of years observing a historical event that is neither historic nor an actual event. Sort of like being the second skinniest Kardashian at a family reunion.

And now, as it's the dot on the "i" in today's holiday, we have another excuse (and sale opportunity) to buy bedding, or is that just me in the last couple of days? I'm not sure there's any more of a connection between one and the other than there was to India from Bermuda back in the day. .        
-bill kenny