Thursday, August 20, 2015

People Take Pictures of Each Other

My wife, Sigrid, is a firm believer in 'ordnung muss sein.' It's not a nervous tic or a preference so much as both a character trait and perhaps a national compulsion as well.

She is by birth and blood a German and is the embodiment everything has a place in which it belongs and it is her mission if not calling to make sure whatever the item is that it ends up there and stays there.

She was reorganizing the other day and found an envelope my mom had shared with me a long time ago (I'm guessing as I have no idea how long ago it might have been). Inside was a photo from a life I'd long ago forgotten. And here it is, just in time for Throwback Thursday.


That is, I believe, all the way in the lower right side of the picture The Honorable Peter Frelinghuysen (Sr.) whose son or perhaps grandson is now in Congress from the same district. He always found time for constituents and was always happy to have a staffer snap a photo or two.

This is a trip my father, who was also a Senior, in this case, William Kenny, would have organized for a school at which he was the headmaster (of the lower school) and would have had to have been in the very early Seventies.

Every year my father took a group of students to Washington D. C. to get up close with their government from the FBI to the Capitol Dome through the tour of the White House to Arlington Cemetery and three dozen points in between.

If there are Forty-Something Captains of Industry and Finance in the New York City area who know anything about the history of this nation, they owe their knowledge to my father.

That's Dad all the way on the top with the white hair and the broad smile in the center of all the humanity on the stairs at the Capitol. And me, his sometimes reluctant son, to his right, on the near end of the top row of smiling faces. Proving yet again people often change, but memories of people stay the same.
-bill kenny

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