Lawn Ornaments Riding Carousel Ponies

Tomorrow is the 152nd running of the "Fastest Two Minutes in the Whole Dam World or Something Like It." Yes. It's Kentucky Derby Day, the Race for the Roses, and a hundred cliches that those who follow the Sport of Kings (and I wasn't sure what they meant for quite some time about that growing up) take as seriously as those who follow the World Series, the Super Bowl, or the Stanley Cup take their sports.

The difference being you don't get to ride a teammate around a track in a counter-clockwise direction (I think; and do they change directions in Australia for the obvious reason), which is too bad because I imagine a placekicker riding around on a linebacker would be quite striking visually.

All I know about the event tomorrow is what Dr. Hunter S. Thompson wrote in 1970 when I was barely eighteen years old. It tore my mind in two; your turn. And, you're welcome.
-bill kenny

Shovel Down Six Feet

I was born the same year Dwight Eisenhower was elected President. I mention that not to impress you with how old I am ('and look, he can still dress himself!' Well, sort of) but, rather, to help you understand what the dog-eared snapshot of America in my wallet looks like.

We lived in Suburbia. Dad and all the other neighborhood fathers got up early to get to the train station for important jobs in The City. Mom made Dad breakfast and drove him to the station, then came back and got all of us up, fed, and dressed for school. She waited for the school bus with us and was there at the stop when we came home in the afternoon.

In Eisenhower's America, you had air raid siren testing with under-your-desk and look-away-from-the-flash-at-the-window drills, and no one found any of this odd or unusual because we had always done it and assumed we always would.

All the boys after school played war, and all of us were brave soldiers with guns keeping the suburban sprawl backyards safe from all the enemies we saw on nighttime TV shows.

Cold War kid that I was, I lived as a member, small and young, of one of the tribes of America, the middle-class white American tribe. My circle of friends and playmates was so white we glowed in the dark. If I had any after-school playmates of another color, any color, I don't recall them.

I do remember Mrs. Henderson, my third-grade teacher, a tall, black woman who was a dynamo in the classroom, though I had no idea at the time why she worked so hard to prove herself. I figured it out many years later, long after being her student, proving (I guess) that not all learning happens in the classroom.

Growing up, I watched the civil rights movement on television newscasts and in the headlines of our daily newspapers (one in the morning and one that came out in the afternoon), on street corners in downtown and across our playgrounds.

As teenagers, we watched grainy film footage of The War (always capital letters) in Vietnam directly into our living rooms every night at dinner, where it sat on our trays along with dessert. The universe was getting more dangerous, the pace was getting faster, and we were growing to assume our place in a world we were creating as we went along.

We were the children of the Greatest Generation and often had the same sense of history a cat does. It's been decades since I thought about the "Huntley-Brinkley Report" or Wide-Wale bell-bottoms, just two artifacts of a long ago age of arrogant innocence (or ignorant arrogance if you want to be kind), when we took for granted everything we had, never wondering where it came from or how long it might last.

And now, our children impatiently wait for us to relinquish the leadership roles we inherited from their grandparents. It's our turn to wonder what it is we're leaving for them and what they will make of it and where they will go with whatever we have given them.
-bill kenny

The Moon's a Harsh Mistress

My current obsession is learning everything there could ever be to know about Artemis II and its mission to the dark side of the Moon. 

The kid who wanted to grow up to be a baseball player, and the President, and an astronaut cannot get enough information about the effort and accomplishments of  Artemis II. 

The romantic optimist in me wonders, 'If we can do this, what can we not do if we only try?' It's why I have a tough time with taking no for an answer on topics ranging from immigration (from space we all look the same), universal affordable healthcare, living wages for everyone who wants to work, shoes, clothing, and shelter for everyone in need to why can't the Yankees win the World Series (I know, it's early; I fret and like to avoid the rush). Perhaps even get some answers to.....

  

I fell out of her eyes
I fell out of her heart
I fell down on my face
Yes, I did, and I -- I tripped, and I missed my star

I fell and fell alone, I fell alone
The moon's a harsh mistress
And the sky is made of stone
The moon's a harsh mistress
She's hard to call your own.

-bill kenny

Where the Rubber Meets the Road, or Something

Everywhere I turn, the costs of goods and services are escalating, with some (looking at you, gasoline) accelerating (didja see what I did there?). 

I have a defective desk calendar since a certain someone assured all of us that prices would go down on "Day One" of his administration, and here it is, the twenty-eighth day of the fourth month of 2026, and damn, if it still hasn't happened.

I feel for the gas station operators, the grocery store employees, and all those in wholesale and retail. They're being held hostage and can do little about it except to pass along the additional costs to me and mine here in the Land of the Round Doorknobs

Yes, I suppose eggs have come down from their dizzying price heights, but milk, bread, and butter are up, so that breakfast of French Toast is a little more pricey than it used to be. Tell you where else inflation has hit, because of the very-nearly-but-not- quite-a-war-with-Iran, condoms.

Did you think I was making that up? Now you know better. Hit the drugstore and see for yourself. Tell the pharmacist you've been hired as a clown for a child's birthday party and you're looking to save some money on balloon animals. "Thank you for your attention to this matter."
-bill kenny

No Need for Carriage Return

Last week, my computer zigged where it normally zagged. The keyboard stopped responding. I should confess that I'm not a very good typist. Or liar, since the preceding sentence was an understatement. 

I am a terrible, terrible typist (one terrible will simply not do) who has no concept of touch typing at all and who punishes every keyboard, hitting them with a unrelenting and frightening ferocity. It is very possible (and practically inevitable) that if you're very quiet right now, wherever you are, you can hear me typing.

Much like breakers against a jetty on a beach, my unceasing pounding of the keys has resulted in the letter "A", the one below the "Q" and above the "Z", an anchor of the home row, to have worn away to nothing. The key is there, but the letter on top is gone.

Not only am I not a touch typist, I'm a simpleton who has to look at the keyboard all the time I'm typing and also say the word aloud as I type it. Pathetic, I know. Perhaps the sound card in the computer chose to work in reverse, and the keyboard was finally able to hear what I was doing with it all this time. Perhaps not. 

My screen saver, John Lennon in National Health glasses, stared as unhelpfully and blankly at me as I did, a lifetime earlier, at his Yoko sideboard watching Get Back, both to the same end and to no avail. 

I have no idea how to repair a computer keyboard, but here in the Brave New World, I don't need to. The solution was so 21st-century — pitch it and get another. They don't grow on trees, admittedly, but it's not like mining gold, and it's actually cheaper than repair.

So here I am, with a brand new keyboard whose letters gleam as they are bathed in the late April New England sunshine of sorts streaming through my window, still surprised to look down and see ALL the letters in all their glory and majesty. The "P" may be silent in pneumonia, but the "A" in Aardvark is visible from space.
-bill kenny

Eighteen Years On

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Crossroads

Sitting at the intersection of Lafayette and Washington in Norwich, CT, this morning, as my light turned green. Because my mother raised crazy, but not stupid, children, I've practiced for years the art of 'three Mississippis' after the light changes before rolling ahead. This morning, again, counting to three (Mississippi) stood me in good stead.

An Obliviot in a mid-nineties model of a four-door Toyota rolled through the red light, at two Mississippi, all the while chatting away on the cell phone clamped to his right ear. At that moment, he was only physically in the car, but was really wherever he and the person on the cell phone were having their moment. 

Piloting a mobile device weighing a ton or more (I have NO idea how much cars weigh but a ton reads pretty well. Does this SUV make my butt big?) with an internal combustion engine, and casual disregard for traffic signals and rules of the road (and common sense) to the contrary, this fellow is another Obliviot with whom we all share the planet.

When we reorder the universe and place ourselves at the center, when instead of realizing life goes on within you AND without you, we see ourselves as the stars of a worldwide movie where everyone else is a walk-on, we've become an Obliviot. 

It's not a constant process or a one-time deal, but the more often we live without thinking, the harder thinking in our lives becomes, and the easier the path to oblivion seems. As kids, our moms taught us to take turns, but as grown-ups, we practice that as 'me first'. Close, but different enough that the rest of us have to cope.

In a perfect world, this morning, this driver could and should have had a misfortune befall him, but the Larger World compensated for him, and the worst thing that happened was I mentioned him in this rant. Probability suggests he'll never read these words, and even if he did, he'll never recognize himself, and in my own way, I've become an Obliviot.

I'm 56 74 today and continue to grow old without growing wiser in any way. I keep bumping into the people I used to be without fully appreciating that, at many levels, I am still those guys, and that a part of me will always be those people. 

If we are truly the sum of our life experiences and of everyone we've ever met, I should have paid more attention to arithmetic in St. Peter Grammar School because I'm terrible at addition.
-bill kenny

Volunteers of America

Welcome to a 'when I was growing up' tangent. I'd like to think at the end, there will be a lesson in all of this, but if you've stopped by before at any time in the over six thousand and seven hundred of these I've posted, you suspect that might not be true. Fair point. 

I grew up in what we would call the sticks-we didn't at the time, because we didn't know-but it was, sort of. It was housing developments, hundreds of houses into the thousands, built, in this case, in Central New Jersey, in the decade after the end of World War II, when the tri-state area (CT, NY & NJ) looked to "The City" the way the fingers on the hand look to the thumb. 

As more houses brought more people, more amenities and services were added, soon overburdening the original governing infrastructure that had hosted the initial growth. Eventually, the new settlements became their own autonomous government entities. I went from growing up in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to growing up in Franklin Township, and now I think it's Somerset, as opposed to Somerset County, without ever moving.

I now live in New England, where everything is a LOT older, and pride in the past can contribute to less agility in coping with the present, never mind the future. Norwich, my hometown for the last thirty-four plus years (I've lived here longer than anywhere else in my life and feel less at ease today than I did when I arrived), celebrated its 365th anniversary last year (yep, a century and more older than the USA). 

As an NFH (not from here), I sometimes get the impression far too many of us still have fond memories of bygone days, which is where we'd like to stay, even though that's not possible (nor should it be).

New England gave the United States of America the Minutemen. Last Saturday was the anniversary of Paul Revere's Midnight Ride. In social studies, because we don't call it history anymore, the other rider, William Dawes, is probably NOT even mentioned. These days, they'd take a page out of Pete Hegseth's book and use Signal, dude. 

We still have Minutemen and women, in that same tradition, pitching in across the country who lend a hand on the Parks and Rec Committee, the Getting Bill a Pony Ride for his Birthday Commission, the Zoning Board, and a hundred other small steps that comprise the journey from where we are to where we want to go.

I spend a lot of words writing about the Rose of New England. If you don't live here (and don't want to move), that's fine if you skip ahead, but you should look around where you live and at all that stuff that's not quite right, and could be done better, because maybe it just needs you offering to help out. We are so much better together than we are each alone; it shouldn't need to be stated, but sometimes we get too busy to remember. 
-bill kenny