Wondering Where the Lions Are

Every day, my health hill to climb gets a little steeper and a little longer. As a kid who rooted for the Yankees, I remember a quote from The Mick (Mickey Mantle) when he received a liver transplant after a sports career of hard living: "If I'd known I was going ot live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself." I know that feeling and never wore pinstripes. 

Was seventy-four in April, and as a kid don't remember knowing anyone who was that age, to include my grandparents, though I'll admit I didn't spend a lot of time wondering about their ages. And now, I'm their senior, I suspect. 

Have spent decades not being especially religious, but in my defense, also not being egregiously sacrilegious. For many years, The Lord and I have had an informal agreement to see other people, though exactly whom was never made clear, at least to me. Here's what passes as some thoughts on immortality from a very long time ago. At the time, I called it:

What if God Were One of Us.....

Every organized religion, and a couple of the somewhat disorganized ones, have sacred writings, scriptures if you will. No matter the region, or the religion, it's part of our human genome, the need to be a part of something bigger. 

Be it the Koran, the Old Testament, the New Testament, or the latest roman à clef by Danielle Steel, there's a narrative-a place to go look for details. When you argue a matter of theology and someone says, 'you can look it up!' the texts are what they're referring to.

There's the blood of the Lamb, the descent of the dove, the tongues of fire, the burning bush, and an almost unending number of symbols and signs that The Lord (however you perceive Them to be) uses to get our attention and pass along the Word.

What if we were the first generation of people on this planet who had a Deity? I don't pretend to know what all of those before us had; I'm just saying we're the first, and Our God uses the tools we have today in much the same way as in the days of old we've read about. 

Someone I encountered recently speculated God would communicate the Ten Commandments in text. Sounds reasonable.

Perhaps:
1. no1 b4 me. srsly.
2. dnt wrshp pix/idols
3. no omg's
4. no wrk on w/end (sat 4 now; sun l8r)
5. pos ok - ur m&d r cool
6. dnt kill ppl
7. :-X only w/ m8
8. dnt steal
9. dnt lie re: bf
10. dnt ogle ur bf's m8. or ox. or dnkey. myob.

M, pls rite on tabs & giv 2 ppl. ttyl, JHWH. ps. wwjd?

What would you ask if you had just one question?
-bill kenny

Only Two Words Needed

The greatest sporting event on earth starts tomorrow.

Let's Go!
-bill kenny

Saw a Deadhead Sticker on a Cadillac

I had a cut on my finger the other day and (perhaps senility has already arrived?), thought it would be a good idea to put some Bactine on it before applying a BAND-AID (I never knew legally it was all capital letters).

My bride, who maintains the medicine cabinet, assured me we do not have Bactine. And, point in fact, for the length of our marriage (forty-nine years this October, though she says it feels a lot longer (because the Germans use the metric system)), we have never had any. Misty-water colored memories, or so it seems.

That led me to think about all kinds of products that I grew up with, and in many instances, old, that have disappeared, and not just from my medicine cabinet. And I suspect that after you watch this; I will not be alone.    

Sears, K-Mart, Blockbuster, and a million or so pieces of the past.
We thought they'd last forever, but they are long gone.
-bill kenny

Into Every Life, a Little Rain Must Fall

In less than a month, we celebrate our Semiquincentennial, but it doesn't feel much like a party atmosphere, does it?  We have so many daunting challenges facing us here in the Land of the Round Doorknobs that we're in danger of being overwhelmed.

Who knew life would get so hard after the fall of the Evil Empire? Seriously. 

I grew up a Cold War kid taught to duck under his wooden desk in Mrs. Hilge's 3rd grade classroom on the top floor of St Peter's (sic) School in New Brunswick, NJ, and to turn my face away from the window (like that would help in the event of a nuclear attack). Of course, my classmates and I came of age in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and if you want to read quaint, it would certainly qualify.

The world was so much easier when all we thought in was black and white. Now we're not only in color, but we're also in high definition. But if we are, how come so much is so fuzzy so often?

We used to celebrate our ability to disagree and not be disagreeable, e pluribus unum; out of many, one. Those days are over. And the horse you rode in on. Now we're all about Shut the F-well, you know what you can shut, and we have operators standing by to make you do it, so don't you make us, okay? 

Every time I think we're too shrill or strident, I count to ten, and we double down and turn it up to eleven again. Can you even imagine how totally screwed up our political discourse will be by the time we get to the Presidential election in 2028? Not me. 

Talk about spooky-we'll be in downtown Creep City by then. Everyone will be supporting a candidate who sets a neighbor's teeth on edge, makes a family member's skin crawl, and who elevates our own blood pressure so much we'll have folks croaking from Apoplexy Now.

I'm afraid we've lost sight of how important we are, especially to those who aren't us-but who have striven and streamed to arrive on our shores, by any means possible, in historic numbers since the Founding of the Republic. 

I hope we've only momentarily lost our way and not permanently lost our minds. If I could, I'd pray that more reasonable voices from all sides of the political spectrum could regain not only the middle ground but also our middle ear, so we might have a return to balance. We don't need to wave a million bloodied banners if we can follow the flag together. 
-bill kenny

Donmandias

 "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,

"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

Short Thoughts on the Longest Day

The farther out in space we go, the more alike we look. It’s only when we re-enter our atmosphere that the effects of gravity and tribalism become more pronounced.

Residing as I do in Global City Norwich, I smile as we punctuate our lives with a variety of celebrations of many of the different stories we are as the people who all happen to call this place our home. And yes, I'm always saddened by the often ignorant and arrogant online observations of so many on social media platforms and their reactions to those stories.

I wanted to emphasize the importance of stories because when we speak of History, which is really the story we tell ourselves of who we are and how we came to be, we usually think in terms of capital letters and monumental events, forgetting that all of us are the authors of our own tales of our time here on earth.

In deference to, and respect for, Edward Shepherd Creasy, who authored “The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World,” almost a century before the beaches were stormed at Normandy on this date on June 6, 1944, D-Day wasn’t just a battle historians concluded ultimately won World War II and saved Western Europe, but may also have been the milestone in our country’s journey of political, social, military, and economic ascendance in a world landscape littered with sometimes petty parochial and ideological loyalties.

We think of larger than life men and monumental moments when we study D-Day, and there are many to choose from, but we risk losing sight of the human element of our own humanity in the details that the day involved, which is what we should remember.

The survivor stories, so many people in the same device, fighting not only for something grand and noble like a Free Europe and, by extension, the free world but also for one another. 

They sought out a protected position where the sea met the shore while being raked by weapons fire without rest or respite. Waves of troops waded onto the beaches and wrote with their blood and sacrifice the first chapters of what was to become our modern, Post-War World where we hoped cooperation would replace confrontation.

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to walk the beaches of Normandy and struggled to imagine the carnage and brutality of the conditions on that day and the courage it would have taken to overcome them. It’s a way of learning history that books and classrooms, while important, can’t really touch, but for many of us the stories, more so than the lessons, are all we have.  

And many of those D-Day stories are deservedly well-known, while others less so, but I’m always struck in reading and remembering June 6, 1944, by what we, the inheritors of the world who never saw the dawn on June 7, have done with it. And by how much harder we should still work.  

-bill kenny 

A Petard Would've Been Cheaper

The master of the Art of the Deal, Mr. Three-Dimensional Chess Grand Master, the Teflon Don, has gotten himself caught in a trap of his own creation. 

Unfortunately, most of the rest of us worldwide have also been ensnared.

And meanwhile, those Epstein Files won't release themselves.

Jail to the Chief (and all his anblers).
-bill kenny