And One to Grow On

We were a loud and large family when I was a child. My parents had heeded the Biblical injunction at least in part-my dad always had a garden though how fruitful it was, it's hard to say now-but we were many so they were good at math, at least at multiplication.

Birthdays usually involved grandparents, Mom's, who were much closer geographically, living in Elechester out in Flushing, Queens, than were Dad's, someplace out in Illinois (I learned years later, Taylorsville (maybe without the 's'). Sightings of Grandma Kenny were rarer than Elvis, the live Elvis, who's not nearly as successful as the dead one, so we always called Grandma Kelly, Grandma.

It was of her I thought yesterday morning when reading the saga of Nicholas Trabakoulos versus Sue Handy, actually Judge Susan B. Handy, in a courtroom in New London, Connecticut, Thursday. Grandma had, when her children were our ages, she told us, started a birthday tradition of gently smacking the birthday child on the bottom once for every natal anniversary topped at the conclusion by a pinch, 'to grow an inch' by your next birthday. In the ensuing decades, the notion gentle was lost. Reading that now helps explain why, usually for our tenth birthday, most of us received a set of Esso road maps as a gift so we wouldn't get lost when we ran away from home.

Anyway, Nicholas wasn't ever at those gatherings which is just as well as Nicholas comes across as a bad man when you read the news report. I couldn't help but wonder if he'd built up his stamina, if Lance Armstrong couldn't have used him on his Tour de France Astana team. But that was not to be. Nicholas had other ideas and when a boy and his bike (and his sawed-off shotgun hidden under a pink blanket) have their mind set on something, that's all there is to it.

Nicholas, says the news story, was in Groton visiting from New York when he robbed someone of $140, making his getaway by bicycle. The idea of a bike race where you commit armed robbery along the way probably hasn't yet been broached to anyone in the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, (I envision swarms of competitors, stretching to the horizon with satellite TV uplink vans and bloggers, twitters and facebookers as far as the eye can see. Tourist Ka-Ching!). I just hope when they go with it that we don't owe Nicholas royalties on the intellectual property rights.

Back to Grandma. Nicholas the Biker had not been Mr. Congeniality during his incarceration says the story, from the time of his arrest, through his trial to his sentencing Thursday, where he was awarded fourteen years for both robbery and weapons possession (I wonder what became of the bike?). As they say in the infomercials, wait-there's more. Apparently not appreciating the right to remain silent might be for his own good, Nicolas "unleashed a stream of obscenities... when Handy asked Trabakoulos if he had anything to say. His responses are unprintable." Johnny, why don't you tell us what Mr. Trabakoulos has won?

The judge ordered Nicholas removed from the courtroom, gave him two hours to mull over his actions and then brought him back to ask if he wished to apologize. Nicholas had a number of wishes, but apologizing didn't make the list. Judge Handy, like Grandma, then gave him six additional months on top of the fourteen years, for contempt of court. It would have been too much, I suppose, had Nicholas also been sentenced to be transported to the pokey on the handlebars of a bicycle pedalled by a corrections officer, though I'm unsure the officer could have reached the bell.
-bill kenny