Child is Father to.....

I often wonder whether we're not the best humans we can be when we first arrive on the planet, rather than who we are in the here and now (in my case, nearly 74+ years of hanging around the water cooler). Maybe we're best in every way when we're born. I study every photo of my grandson looking for clues and will report my findings at a later date.

I got to thinking about this reverse smart-stuff again when I rediscovered an amazing article I first encountered in the Huffington Post a decade and a half ago (I throw close to nothing away, electrons included).

Amazing article and Huffington Post is not a turn of phrase I use lightly or often, so this is quite impressive stuff. I was and have always been mostly neutral on the HufPo, except for this, "18 Things Children Can Teach Us About Happiness."

How are you coming on getting the backing off that Band-Aid anyway? Look at that Owie, will ya? Maybe I'm gonna have an amputation or something. Don't you have anything besides those Powder Puff Girls? All power to the Band-Aids!
-bill kenny

Making the Colors Bright

Sunday afternoon while searching (in vain) for the Germany-Greece UEFA Nations League Soccer Football Match, I came across the Pillow Fight Championship on some variation of ESPN that doesn't seem to have as many gambling odds and over/under point spreads crawling across the bottom of the screen as all the other ESPN channels.

I was mesmerized, especially when one of the announcers referred to the two people in the ring clutching what looked like overstuffed pillowcases as 'warriors.' Yes, sir, buddy. I'm sure they are. I'm just not sure in what universe.

I used to watch a lot (more) ESPN, but ever since they decided to go all in on gambling and fantasy sports and hitched their ratings wagons to Pat McAfee and Stephen A. Smith, my ardor has cooled noticeably. I think I figured out what the "A" as his middle initial in Smith's name stands for, but, then again, McAfee would also need one.  

Sorry, but I don't get them at all. I grew up with Howard Cosell and 'Speaking of Everything' which he did. He was well-read, well-spoken, and very well versed in whatever he chose to speak about. Whether I was interested in it or not meant little to nothing to Howie. He loved to hear himself talk, as do both McAfee and Smith. The difference, to me, was that he actually had something to say.

The nicest thing about the Professional Pillow Fight Championship is that neither McAfee nor Smith were involved in it. Making the tragedy of the other twenty-three hours a day, seven days a week programming on ESPN almost unbearable. 
-bill kenny

Emptying the Ocean with a Teaspoon

Given the summer we had in these parts, we should see a reasonably sedate autumn, with local voters paying close attention to the issues at hand and on hand, listening carefully to neighbors seeking office, and making choices that benefit us all. 

Ha, ha! 

I just crack myself up sometimes. Forget what you've heard: peyote buttons aren't found on southwest sweaters. 

But seriously. 

The higher up the governmental food chain you go, the less functional everything seems to be. Helps explain the chaos emanating from the UN and let's not spend a lot of time talking about the goings-on in Dodge City, okay? We're going to elect 435 congressional representatives, about thirty Senators, and close to the same number of Governors come November. 

What still works does so best when we're closest to home. Stands to reason that while I may not be able to see the White House from my house, I can still see yours, and while I'm happy you're waving, I'd be happier, still, if you used more than one finger. Just sayin'. 

Here's my point. People prefer problems that are familiar to solutions that are not. I arrived in Norwich, Connecticut, 35 years ago and fell in love with the possibilities here, albeit for the most part, still unrealized.

We need doers and dreamers and people to encourage both, who can have patience when the path forward is arduous and show some grace when a project doesn't work as planned. 

We are all we can count on to improve our city; it's time we start treating one another as partners in our progress in building the Norwich we want to come home to. Something (I hope) to think about as Election Day 2026 approaches.
-bill kenny

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

In Case You Skipped this Space on Saturday

Many of us refer to the World Series as the Fall Classic, while for others, autumn is a time to watch professional football on television every Sunday, Monday, and occasional Thursday, while high school football happens under the lights on Fridays, and college football is reserved for Saturday afternoons, evenings, and seemingly random weekday nights.

None of those, in my opinion, is what Autumn in New England is all about. 

What defines the season here is gassing up the old leaf blower, slapping on the Mickey Mouse earphones so the roar of the engine doesn't deafen you like those Iron Maiden shows of the early Eighties used to do (still have the T-shirt, do you? Run for the Hills indeed!) and then gathering up the falling and fallen leaves, getting them together in large piles and placing them into your composter (I have two of them I got from Norwich Public Works in the corner of the backyard). 

Or not.

Many people with leaf blowers have the gasoline-powered versions because they're just a lot louder than the electric ones and you can go anywhere with those bad boys, and they can blow any and all leaves they find on their property out into the street or onto a neighbor's property, because somewhere in an obscure codicil of the Bill of Rights or an addendum to the Articles of Confederation grandfathered into the Constitution is a provision about your right to arm bears and to be obnoxiously loud, befoul the air with gasoline fumes and poison your relationships with those living next to you.

Leaf blowers are uniquely American. To my knowledge, no one else on earth has them, and most people in whose countries I've lived or visited cannot comprehend having a device as irritating and harmful to the atmosphere as a leaf blower. In many ways, it's a better symbol of the United States than the bald eagle, in my opinion, and maybe the closest thing any appliance could come to representing most of our recent Presidential election campaigns.

Except that it wouldn't work, because all successful sports have television contracts; I can see a new national sport with people in golf carts driving around (blindfolded? why not!), talking on a cell phone while their partner in the shotgun seat operates a leaf blower, trying to coerce a small animal into a shoebox that closes down with a satisfying snap on the little furry fugitive.  

Ideally, everyone would be so busy trying out for a place on one of our local teams that the leaves might fall unnoticed for decades, renewing the earth and returning to it some of the nutrients and minerals we have thoughtlessly plundered from it as we evolved from the primordial ooze to the clad-head-to-toe-in-officially-licensed-team-paraphernalia we wear that differentiates us from the lower primates and others on this orb. Thankfully, like snowflakes (and leaves), no two of us are the same.
-bill kenny

A Legendary Rumor

Let's face it, there are a lot of things we don't do well, for the most part, and while this isn't a complete list, it's a pretty good start:

push the chair back in under the table when we get up;

put the seat down on the toilet;

come to a full stop at the red light before making a right turn;

not talking on a cellphone while driving

and definitely not voting in municipal elections.  

We complain about a lack of freedom of choice, but I think we actually prefer having freedom from choice. By insisting that 'there's nothing I can do' or that 'no one cares what I think,' we absolve ourselves of all responsibility and blame when things fail.

And as we all know, things fail frequently. It's all part of life and why life is a contact sport. You can continue to claim you're a victim or you can listen when a candidate for office stops by and tell them what you'd like them to do for all of us. What are they gonna do? Tell you to shut up? They started it!

We can keep telling each other that 'it doesn't make any difference' and 'one vote doesn't count,' and guess what? Eventually, we're right. We become our very own self-fulfilling prophecy-aside from maybe winning a T-shirt, I don't see what the benefit is to that kind of behavior.

Did you ever hear about that city in Connecticut whose residents became more passive in each successive election until they barely reached double digits in voter turnout? You haven't? Neither has anyone else.
-bill kenny

One or the Other

Leaf peeping isn't the only thing we do in New England in Autumn. 

Upper Yantic Falls, Norwich, Connecticut

Not everyone has the time to admire the foliage.

One or the other. Choose wisely.
-bill kenny

Democracy Is Coming to the USA

Election season is like Trick or Treat for adults, except we registered voters seem to end up with a lot of Mary Janes and saltwater taffy and way too few Dove Bars and Reese's Cups. 

Thirty-two days from now, unless you've availed yourself of early voiting or an absentee ballot, we'll be knee-deep in big muddy hitting levers, blackening circles, chopping chads (and jeremys in Florida) as the will of some of the people (at party nominating conventions this summer) is transformed into the will of all the people. The miracle of democracy, coming to a ballot box near you.

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard ." Sing it, H. L. I'll hold the hymnal while you turn the page. Of course, in this country for the most part, hardly anyone has an opinion on how well democracy works since we rarely get above thirty percent turnout by registered voters in an 'off-year' (= non-Presidential) election.

Living in one of the thirteen original colonies (I still think we should get silk jackets, have colonial colors and maybe a secret handshake), I'm watching the wheels as I'll have the opportunity to vote for a state representative, a state Senator, a United States Senator, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a parsnip in a bear tree, to say nothing of a slew of State Constitutional officers, culminating in a new Governor. Plus, in my town we'll have a local referendum question, though the pygmy pony initiative failed to make the ballot. Again.

You'll have about the same range and scope of choices where you live-but only if you choose to vote. The same folks who'll sit on hold for twenty minutes for a call-in radio talk show can't take ten minutes to go vote on Election Day. Maybe they think you have to pay a fee to cast a ballot, or lack a calendar that tells them when Election Day is. 

The same people who call Dancing with the Stars or America's Got Talent hundreds of times to get their favorite advanced to the next round don't think it's appropriate to have an opinion on the direction their state or nation should take.

If you don't choose, you lose. And don't tell me you don't have enough information. In this country at this time in our history, if there's one thing we have TOO much of, it's information. The trick is to turn it into knowledge you can use to make informed decisions. Because that's what we're lacking....
-bill kenny