Got Your Weekend Covered

So many people complain that there's nothing to do in Norwich, Connecticut. I no longer waste my breath or time arguing with them, but simply smile smugly because I know they're wrong, and that means all the cool stuff you can do around here will have smaller crowds.  

Except for this weekend. You really need to make a plan to come and join us.

The Rose Arts Festival is a perfect reflection of all the good things and great folks optimists like me see when they look at Norwich. You should really try it as well. See you there?
-bill kenny

The Difference Between Justice and Just Us

Life in Twenty-first Century Amerika can get confusing. 

Subject to your questions, this concludes my briefing.

-bill kenny 

We've Worn Out that Song We Used to Sing

I'm not doing political agit-prop (at least not today). Looking at my country right now, and the shape it's in,  I don't care which party is to bless, or who is to blame. A pox on both their houses (of Representatives and the Senate) if that helps move us forward, and to hell with all of them if it doesn't. I'm starting to wonder as we near the 4th of July if one revolution really was enough.

Remember how our folks told us 'to get a good job, get a good education,' so we did. And that's what we told our kids and watched as they borrowed boxcars of money for college degrees that have qualified them to do what, exactly? 

Fill out crossword puzzles in Esperanto while waiting for a callback on that dental technician job that 145 other folks applied for, or be a gig worker for Uber? Time to downsize those big dreams, sweet-cheeks. Money doesn't talk; it swears, and empty pockets say nothing.

In the last two weeks, our newspapers were saturated with photos of young people just starting out, leaving high schools and colleges to take on the big, bad world. It's a little slow right now; we're telling one another, what with summer and all, things will pick up by the fall. 

Unless they don't, and then what? Don't even start on the why, because all that will do is make you sad and your children mad. Maybe it's always been this way, or maybe I just never noticed how much closer to hopeless we've been sailing for well over a  decade now. 

We're going faster and getting nowhere-burning through our lives and resources so quickly the debt each of us owes is crushing us before we were even born. And still, we get up and go running up the mountain to see what we can see and stay plugged into a game that's long since played out.
-bill kenny  

Leave the Driving to Someone Else

According to some, 'this is the age of miracles and wonders.' And maybe it is, but one of the more amazing things to me, child of the library card since the late 1950's, is how the synergy between convergence and connectivity brings the world to a screen near me 24/7 and 365.

I don't even need to know what I'm looking for, and a search bot will find me something, anything (animal, vegetable, mineral) bring it back to the screen and after I've cast it aside, review other sites it has retrieved for me, and via one or another algorithm,  start to guess what I might like/want or need and finds that. Eventually, an Ethernet happy ending of sorts.

We live in a state well-known for its perceived wealth, Connecticut, one of the Original Thirteen Colonies with astounding affluence along what we call The Gold Coast (though not all that glitters is gold; in some instances it's bling) and crushing poverty and squalor in places such as our capital, Hartford.

Our infrastructure, from interstates to fiber optic networks, is aging (and near failure) as it is across the Northeast, with little investment in any of it since the Korean War. And if you think our bridges are old, you should see our population. 

Actually, you're reading one of them now. I've lived here with my family since the fall of '91 when I was in my late thirties. I was 74 in April and get the senior discount at the local coffee shop. No one was more surprised than I to wake up this morning to find that I'm old. Except, it's been happening for years and not just to me.

But that's why I was mentioning search engines and items of interest at the top. Humor a geezer, willya? It takes us all night to do what we used to do all night, and if I need an extra paragraph or participle to get to my point, what's your rush? I will, in all certainty, probably end up dying in a place I had never heard of until I lived here. There are worse things of course, so don't wish too hard.

It's nice enough-some improvements would be appreciated. A few more pony rides for birthdays wouldn't kill anyone, and while there's always room for Jell-O, there's not a whole heckuva lot of pie from what I've seen. 

Tell you what else we don't have a lot of-and not just us, but almost everyone east of the Connecticut River: mass transportation. If you don't have a car (or a truck) you are so screwed in terms of shopping, working, socializing, living in general.

Never regarded mass transit as mythical or mystical, to say nothing of magical. But we're going to have to start to change how we manage it and how willing we are to use it and make it pay for itself, especially before the kids put us in the home; otherwise, how else are we ever gonna see the grands?
-bill kenny

I've Been Mick Jaggered and Silver Daggered

It's graduation season all across the nation and I'm always impressed reading in the newspapers about guest orators and those receiving honorary degrees and who offer, in retun, some words of wisdom for graduates contining their journeys into the Brave New World.  

Again this year, despite all the high schools and colleges in our immediate area, no one reaached out to me with an invitation to speak. No hard feelings, there's always next year (fingers crossed), but in case there isn't, here's what I would have offered.

Always have pens with black ink-blue ink sucks and if you have to make a copy of something you've signed in blue ink, it looks goofy and is barely visible. 

If you have to smell food in your refrigerator to see it's still edible, it's not and throw it away. 

Get the gas money up front, NOT at the end of the trip or you won't get it at all. And no, claiming 'I got the snacks in Butte, remember?' isn't the same as kicking in for a fair share of the gasoline purchases. And if that screws up your friendship, you didn't have one.

Be what you want to be-I've spent most of my life being what others have told me. Look at what it's gotten me and proceed with caution. I'm fine and you will be, too.

But don't let people whose lives have foundered sink you and your dream no matter how stupid your dream is (sarcasm as humor). Oh yeah, no dream is stupid if it's yours and if you find someone who shares it, sees it or gets it, marry them, regardless of your sex or theirs and you'll be ahead of the game and definitely ahead of most of the rest of us here on the ant farm.

Return the gowns to the graduation coordinator immediately after the ceremony to make sure you get your deposit back. 

When you choose to use the word "truth," always use it with the indefinite article, "a" rather than the definite one, "the." 

Something about sunscreen but I'll be damned if I remember what. 

Be an exclamation, not an explanation.
-bill kenny

Two Ships

Happy Father's Day 2026 to those who observe. 

William P. Kenny, Sr. 1923-1981

Here's some advice I wish I had when my own journey was beginning. Enjoy.
-Bill Kenny 

"Ninety Percent of Being a Dad..."

Tomorrow is Father's Day, and of course I have a memory. When I was in the US Air Force, after I was married but before we had children, shortly after Easter in 1980, I happened upon a tremendous card that was pitch-perfect for my dad for Father's Day.

I was in the Rhein Main Base Exchange, and the thing you have to know about US military overseas shopping opportunities, be they exchanges (like department stores) or commissaries (like groceries) is when you see it on the shelf, buy it. There's no 'look in the back room for more,' no 'we're expecting another order in a week.' It really is a case of 'he who hesitates is lunch.'

When I saw the card, I knew it was ideal for two people who had long ago come to the realization they had nothing to say to one another but neither wanted to be the first to admit that because an admission such as that would be giving up, and these two Thick Micks never gave up, ever.

Our relationship, and as I discovered, that of my brothers and sisters as well, to varying degrees, frequently had more turbulence than tranquility. I used to say my father was the angriest man I ever knew until I caught a glimpse of myself one morning in the mirror. I then stopped saying that.

The card captured all of that, and when I got home I signed it, wrote a note whose every word I still remember, addressed the envelope, put a stamp on it and put it in the hand-tooled leather carrying bag Sigrid had gotten me for our first wedding anniversary and into which I dropped any number and manner of objects as I went about my life.

I next saw the card some six months later, when Sigrid, Frau Ordnung Muss Sein, was cleaning out my bag and held it out to me in soft, silent reproach as we sat in our living room. She pursed her lips and waited for her spaetzen-hirnn husband to grasp what the object was and then, realizing he did, slowly shook her head.

For my part, chagrined as I was, I insisted it wasn't that big a deal, as I could save the card for next Father's Day and thought no more of it. Sadly, the universe did. My father was to die in his sleep of an attacking heart the following May. The words I'd always meant to say but needed thousands of miles of ocean to actually write were never shared.

I became an adult when I bought my first beer legally. I became a man when I took a wife (or more exactly, when she married me). I became a father with the birth of our son, Patrick, and of our daughter, Michelle. When I looked at my dad 'back in the day,' I saw him differently than I do now, shaped and formed by the crucible of events controlled and beyond our control each of our lives has contained.

I've learned not very much in seven plus decades here on the ant farm except, tell the people you love that you love them when they and you are here so they know it and don't be surprised that they already did and that in their own way they love you too. Tomorrow, to my brothers and my brothers-in-law, fathers all, and to you as well and always, Happy Father's Day.
-bill kenny