Horton Hears an Economic Development

There's a story that anyone who's ever graduated from third grade has heard about the three blind men who each touch an elephant at a different part of the animal's body. 

The first touches the trunk and announces the elephant is wiry and agile. The second touches its flank and concludes the elephant is massive and sturdy, while the third one grabs the elephant by its tail and pronounces it to be skinny and weak.

All three are absolutely correct but also completely wrong, both in equal measure. Good news, at least for them, as all three could have lucrative careers as economic development consultants. Because economic development relies on amortization rates, projections of rates of quarterly and annual growth, costs per square foot, return on investment, and a dozen or so other definable variables and variants, it's tempting to see it as a science.

But a strong argument can be made that it's probably closer to being an art and sometimes, fairly or not, it's more luck than skill. One man's ceiling is literally another one's floor (especially in an urban environment), and very often what you see is (exactly) what you get, WYSIWYG, but just as often is dependent upon not only on where you stand but on what you wanted to see when you chose to look.

In a sense, economic development in Norwich is that aforementioned elephant, and in The Rose of New England we spend almost as much time arguing over what is, and isn't, beneficial economic development as we do over whether we are actually experiencing any. And, as is the case with that pesky pachyderm, once you pick a perspective, it colors and shapes everything you see.

Many of us are unhappy at the status of our Grand List, in terms of the ratio of commercial to residential properties. Others are vocal about the nature of commercial development, and for any one person happy about another small business opening in Down City, there are two or more annoyed at the lack of success in marketing our vacant storefronts and Brownfields.

We don't have throngs of shoppers crowding the sidewalks in Franklin Square or small start-ups sprouting from Hamilton Street on the East Side all the way to where Church and Water Streets intersect with Chelsea Harbor Drive or a wave of small retailers lining both sides of Main Street and activity in professional offices and apartments above the ground floor. Yet.

Whether a resident of Laurel, Bean, or Cherry Hill, we benefit from every effort to increase in the grand list, and be it Greeneville, Taftville, or Thamesville, any enhancement in our community's quality of life is always an advantage.

Sometimes it depends on which part of the elephant you touch and how closely behind it you are walking. If you got some on your shoes, I may be able to help you. Step Right Up.
-bill kenny 

Revisiting the Second Amendment

You see it surface in conversations and on bumper stickers, all the time. The Second Amendment has sparked decades of discussion and debate about what the Founders intended and what it should mean in our current American society. I'm not going within ten feet of a position on any of that, believe me. Wouldn't touch it with a barge pole (Mom raised crazy children but not stupid ones).  

I had to fire an M-16 for familiarization in the USAF and have less-than-pleasant memories of marching at least halfway across San Antonio, Texas' Lackland Air Force Base (fun fact: Lackland is the largest USAF installation in the world WITHOUT a standalone runway) in the late spring of 1975 for the opportunity to so do. They didn't even let us keep the paper targets (mine looked brand-new).

The Second Amendment is, for many, the third rail of American politics  But what if we're getting it wrong all these years on and it's not 'the right to bear arms,' but rather the 'right to arm bears?' It would have made this story much more interesting, I think.

And I hope you'll join me in a moment of silence for Ferdinand.
-bill kenny

Maybe I'm Amazed

The first time I saw my wife, Sigrid, in a club in the Sachsenhausen district of Frankfurt am Main, she was wearing a Buffalo Sabers hockey jersey—a souvenir and remembrance of an earlier relationship. 

I never met 'him' and, not surprisingly, we've never talked about him, which is sort of funny since I wouldn't be here, in these circumstances, without him.

She was, and remains, the most beautiful woman I have ever known. Then, her hair was dark and fell to the small of her back, which has been one of my favorite places for a very long time. Now, she wears it much shorter and frets when she finds a grey hair (I'm one of the reasons why she has them), and I say nothing but smile at the wonder of it all.

I was tongue-tied for months after first seeing her, and when I finally did speak, I told her I loved her because that's the way I am, and the way it was. We were engaged at Easter 1977, before about fifty percent of the people currently on earth were even born, and were married forty-nine years ago, today, in the Offenbach Rathaus shortly after ten in the morning.

Chris, who became Moni's husband and then 'becca and David's dad, then a widower, and who now lives in Texas, was my best man. He was the person who discovered my 'translator' (I spoke little to no German at that time) had memorized the ceremony's language in English, and that was the extent of her knowledge of my language. Zwei hundredt deutschmark im arsch, wie Ich mich erinnere...

Evelyn, at the time Rick's wife and still Kevin's mom, was maid/matron of honor, and afterward we all went to a small restaurant not that far from the Rathaus for a celebratory meal that Franz, who passed some years ago, Sigrid's dad, and Anni, her mom, organized. 

Some time later, we visited, as a married couple, one of her aunts who doubted we would ever marry, noting, 'after I have triplets!' (I looked at her husband and thought, 'It must be magic married to this one'). I asked as best I could, 'wie gehts den die drillenge? how are the triplets?' (which earned me neither language skills nor style points; two trends that continue to this day).

Sigrid is the last person I think about before I close my eyes and the first after I open them. She is very much 'like breathing out and breathing in' for me, and I can only wish you, at some time in your life, will find and have someone who makes everything you do, good and bad, worth the waking. 

We have two children, themselves now adults, but always our children-Patrick and Michelle-who have enriched our lives more than words of any language can ever capture.

I have little recollection of my life before our marriage. Admittedly, I'm better off that way. I do recall being mostly unlovable except when I was unbearable. It matters not to the woman who married me. Even after all the years, when she looks at me, I can do anything--a feeling no one else has ever inspired in me. That I have nothing I need to do for her to love me is amazing in ways I cannot explain. 

I'm pretty sure, especially in the years since arriving in the New World, that (at times) this isn't the life she signed up for under 'for better or for worse' and I, too, keep waiting for better days even as they grow shorter.

It still seems to me like we married last week, though. I suspect she feels it's longer than it actually is (because the Germans use the metric system, at least that's why I hope so), and I'm grateful for every day we've had and every memory we've made. 

I hope the years we are yet to have together are even more than the ones we've shared. You are an angel of snow-too lovely to hold but too beautiful not to try.
-bill kenny

Beep!

There's a difference between a city and a community. The former is more of a geopolitical entity, while the latter is, ideally, a state of mind. Sometimes one can be the other, and sometimes not so much. 

I would suggest the latter empowers the former more than vice versa, but we may not agree on that as much as I'd like. We're two weeks away from Election Day (I've already voted by mail and strongly encourage you to register and do the same if you haven't already), whose results will indicate to some extent just how much of a community we actually are. 

Norwich, like so many of the places we each call home, remains a work in progress and can only be better when you get involved. For those who confine themselves to drive-by commentary on social media sites, remember it takes more energy to be a light than a horn. You know who you are.

-bill kenny

Channeling Walt

The unsexy Autumn, the one of grey skies, biting winds, and near-freezing morning temperatures, arrived this weekend in the part of New England where we live. Our oil furnace, which had a quiet summer (and at almost six bucks a gallon for oil, thanks, Mr. Art of the Deal, for which I'm grateful), was working away when I awoke Sunday morning to what appeared to be our first frost of the season. 

We have a persnickety radiator in the bathroom that works when it feels like it and has no relationship to the temperature of the house or the output of the furnace, but it was hot to the touch as my morning began, and I smiled because it doesn't happen that often. 

I also smiled because I'm hoping it saves me an extra visit from the folks who provide our oil and service our furnace, who have, on occasion in the past, had to send out the radiator whisperer to tweak the balky device and get it to work (until the next cold spell).

Sunday's skies were clear and so deeply blue you could get lost staring into them. It made the colors of the leaves still on the trees seem even more vibrant when serving as a background. I've never been a fan of leaf-peeping, mainly because of what happens after all the leaves are peeped, but it was still lovely enough even for a curmudgeon like me to appreciate.   

We had middle sixty-degree temperatures last week, but this weekend we were in the high forty and low fifty area, which the meteorologists tell me is where we should be. I think I should be where the weather suits my clothes and doesn't hurt my face when I'm out walking in it.

Still, grateful for all four seasons and the opportunity to enjoy them.
-bill kenny

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