The Distance Traveled

We are on our way to The Big E today. That rhymes; sometimes I impress myself-just not this time. If you're from someplace that hasn't had a healthy vowel movement for awhile just think of a state fair but bigger by necessity. New England is geographically a relatively small space with politically too many governmental units, so we all get together and have Maine lobster and potatoes and Vermont ice cream and New Hampshire maple syrup and I have no idea what Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut bring to the party. Maybe Connecticut does insurance. Maybe.

Last year we went on Connecticut Day and discovered some basic truths we should have already known. Nutmeggers drive like idiots not just in our own state but everywhere. Massholes drive like well, you get the picture. Put 'em together and it gets grim early and stays there. I have NO idea what the point of Connecticut Day was. There were no buttons, no tee-shirts or hats, no 'Kiss Me I'm from Norwich' photo ops or oops, not even a break on parking. We were just another consensus on the street and I wasn't even driving a Ford.

Anyway. We're all keyed up about this today and I hope we have so much fun it fills up all the pockets in the pants I'm wearing. That's how I define large fun. But while I was thinking about that, I flashed on a date older than this time last year. Twenty years ago today, plus five hours, I was picking "Grow-ton" as where we would be living as my unit disappeared in Germany and with it my lifestyle and that of my wife and children.

It had looked like we were going to Winchester, Virginia, somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley to do who knows what with who knows who but that fell through. Up popped a job in Grow-ton as I was told it was pronounced. In Connecticut. Only a few hours from where my brothers and sisters and others related to one or the other or both all lived. Not that I was keen about telling them I was coming nor would they have been especially overjoyed to learn of their pending good fortune.

We each have lived lives of quiet desperation, and, more often, perspiration. My arrival with two children under double digits who spoke no English would have been interesting but not earth-shattering for any of us. It seems in the last two decades the person who has failed to immerse and then emerge has been me, more often than not. Today may be a perfect day for bananafish; it's also a pretty good day for blending in. Today, we're not so far from the madding crowd.

Careful where you step; you don't want to get any of that fried dough on you. Is that really what the kids are calling it these days? "There's safety in numbers when you learn to divide. How can we be in, if there is no outside?" We'll find out soon enough.

-bill kenny