The Windows Are Cracked

I thought I'd try for something cunningly clever today, what with it being the last day of 2017 and all. Then I saw the 'precocity' warning light flashing on my forehead in the mirror and that was the end of that bright idea.

I hope 2017 was good, and if not good, then kind, to you and yours and I welcome the arrival of 2018 and the hope and promise of what it may bring for us all. I realize a year from now some of us will not be here to read the update to this entry (or write it, for that matter) but while the actors and actresses are changed and exchanged on a daily basis (in every aspect of our everyday lives), the play goes on. We change partners but continue in the dance. 

2017 was the best of years and the worst of years and 2018 will be the same. 

It's not really a matter of the number of days and hours in a year or a lifetime, but what we do with the space between the beginning and the end. I hope you have all the space you need for that which you need to do and look forward to talking to you next year.
-bill kenny

Dirty Laundry Looks Good on You

If you're cramming for 2018 New Year's Resolution Finals, this may help you focus.   

It's always helped me.
-bill kenny 

As the Days Dwindle Down

Working on a list of areas to improve for 2018? 

I admire you; it's too daunting a task for me but I like this idea: 

It's easy to believe but way harder to live by.
-bill kenny

Life in a Northern Town

I went for a walk around my block yesterday (Wednesday) morning--we live in a section of Norwich across from the Chelsea Parade which is, in turn, across from Norwich Free Academy. It's a quiet residential area with houses of all sizes, neatly-trimmed lawns in the summer and mostly shoveled sidewalks in the winter. 

Last Sunday into Monday, just in time for Christmas, as happened across most of the Eastern Seaboard, we got smacked with snow. I've heard for years that size doesn't matter so I'm not sure how much snow we had, and while 'it needs to be shoveled' isn't technically a measurement, it's what I used. 

Our Public Works Department logged many hours plowing and sanding major and minor roadways to eventually subdue the white stuff, though not without (I'm sure) unhappy murmurings from residents in some areas on the manner and method. 

Happens every year--the foot of my driveway, which I've just cleared by pushing the snow into the street is reburied by the city's driver as he plows the street and returns the favor. 

It's nice when everything can be reduced to 'us vs. them' and become a part of that 'You Can't Fight City Hall' mantra. Imagine my unhappy chagrin when I hiked around the block to buy a newspaper I don't get delivered to the house, from a vending box. I wasn't dismayed because of the walk--it's not much of a walk. Did I mention we have an ordinance, as do many towns, which mandates clearing sidewalks of snowfall X number of hours, NOT days after the snow has stopped falling? Bet you know where this is going, right? 

Do I believe that some portion of those complaining about the city's snow removal efforts are among the houses within one square block of my house whose sidewalks haven't been cleared at all? You betcha. Many of us are the same people who don't even bother to vote anymore, because 'it doesn't make a difference.- We are not so coincidentally the same people whose World of Them is vast and dark, and against which we feel ourselves to be nearly powerless because we choose to believe we are. 

But given an opportunity to do something for ourselves and our neighbors we see every day, clear our walks and paths, we choose inaction over action. I'm not talking about feeding the hungry or housing the homeless--this is the baby stuff that no one ever talks about in a civics class because it's a given. 

Except when it's not, or just not convenient. But if this were to become the responsibility of the city or state, we'd be howling to, instead of barking at, the moon when it was done as poorly as we do it for, and to, ourselves.
-bill kenny

Gonna Make It Through this Year

This time next week it will be next year. I’m looking at my calendar wondering where all the pages went. 2017 was the year I was going to lose twenty pounds and I still have thirty to go. If history holds true, soon this, too, will be part of the 'Good Old Days.' What follows is part of mine and I think worth repeating.

Mom used to say when you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. Instead of arguing over who’s holding the map, who’s steering and who called shotgun, perhaps we should keep our eyes on the road and both hands on the wheel.

Let's promise one another to work to assure our elected officials maintain their focus on the "Big Picture" while devoting attention to the finer details as well. In recent weeks, we’ve chosen the women and men who are our City Council and Mayor and they're working hard to define their vision of Norwich and refine the ways to achieve it.

It's not easy being an elected official anywhere in these United States and I've often thought sometimes, it's a little more challenging than it needs to be around here. As I’ve noted incessantly, I’m not from here, but I live here now, and I don't understand why sometimes it seems, we expect the worst.

Perhaps we’ve adopted a pessimistic mindset because that way we can only be surprised and never disappointed. We strike me as somehow being related to Eeyore, Winnie the Pooh's homefry, of sorts, who elevates pessimism to Olympian heights. But waiting for the other shoe to drop means it's much harder to dance in celebration, and perhaps 2018 is the year we dust off our dancing shoes.

Our City Council has some big shoes to fill not just of their immediate predecessors, but of all those who’ve sat at those desks in Council chambers and made decisions, large and small through the years that have in sum created the city counting the days to 2018.

Just as no single drop of rain is responsible by itself for the flood which follows, change is always incremental. And we should look back at where we were as our city leaders keep looking ahead.

Defining and making progress is never easy but despite the dogs' barking, the caravan has started moving. Small steps are how we start on long journeys and great adventures.

Some of us will argue into the new year, and beyond, on the merits and impact of every City Council action, but we it’s (past) time we learn to own the consequences of our decisions. Maybe, just maybe, we'll realize the only way we can get to where we want to go is by going there together. We have a new year to learn. 

This much I know: it's never eaten as hot as it's served and that’s as true for where you live as it is for where I live. Grab a napkin and tuck in.

-bill kenny

Not a Literal Chestnut Roasting

It takes forever to get here, Christmas I mean, and then in one swift night,  it's gone. Heute ist Zweite Weihnachten, today is Second Christmas, unless you work in a mall anywhere in this great nation of ours in which case, you should wish you were in Great Britain or Canada where this is Boxing Day which could cause any MMA fans in your house to become  excited except those who follow MMA get excited about everything. That, too, shall pass. 

Speaking of which, nearly, one of the nice things about Christmas Passed, at least in my area, is newspapers return to regular size and heft. From shortly after Halloween through last Sunday our newspapers were crammed with all manner of fliers and advertising.

I've never appreciated all the filling. I'm willing (in theory), to pay more money for a newspaper, especially the Sunday paper, that doesn't have all of that hullaballoo caneck caneck (sorry Rik) but I'm not sure if confronted with that actual proposition I'd be willing to dig a little deeper into my pocket.

And if we're doing Truth or Dare I should admit that aside for dinosaurs like me, the Sunday newspaper isn't especially relevant to anyone. Too bad. Not everything new is better and not everything old can be tossed aside (said the man whose 65th birthday is in the mirror). 

I can recall Sunday mornings on the way home in Dad's Chrysler station wagon from Mass with a stop at the bakery for fresh rolls and at the corner shop (that always had all of the out of town newspapers decades before the connectivity of the Internet). Even then, I put all the advertising to one side.

And now, I have some peace from those full-page ads from my 'fragrance destination' and from my 'sports headquarters' (I have prosthetic knees, you Dick, what would I play aside from checkers until I pass away?) as I spread the paper out on the kitchen table and work my way through every section (except real estate; I have no use for that part of the paper).

Every media outlet does year-end summaries-the biggest news stories, the most outrageous Hollywood Whatevers, the Year in photos, Greatest Pantomimes, Sports Achievements So Monumental They Eclipse Last Year's Achievements, complete with listings and notes on famous people who died (and there are two or more names where you go 'oh, I forgot about her/him'; and more than that for me where I go 'who?').

I suppose we could spend some time this week, learning songs to celebrate the arrival of the New Year, but that's not really who we are as we prefer complaining about the year as it ends. Besides, why would we want to be The Holiday Hipsters anyway?    
-bill kenny 

And You Thought I'd Forgotten

I tell this story every Christmas. I don't care if you have grown tired of it. I never shall. Roll your eyes, do a really big sigh and double-click. I don't care. My space, my rules. 

I first spoke to the woman I was to marry forty-one years ago tonight. I had seen her but hadn't worked up the nerve to speak to her a few weeks earlier but I already knew I would marry her (to this day, I have no idea how I was so smart. But I was). 

I had been in (West) Germany only about two months, arriving shortly before Halloween, which, back in the day, wasn't a holiday of any kind in Germany at all. It was strictly a Yank Prank like Thanksgiving only harder to explain to people who weren't American. 

Chris and I had started out drinking and feeling sorry for ourselves, me in the lead, (for being stuck in Germany for the holidays) earlier in the day in the Frankfurt am Main party district, Sachsenhausen, where millions of people, swarming like flies, made the passage from anywhere to anywhere else almost impossible.

Eventually, though I have no recollection how, we were to be more in mid-town, down the street from CBS Germany (though we didn't know that at the time) near Eschenheimer Tor. Because I'm relentlessly competitive, I got much drunker much faster than everyone around us and Chris had his hands full and a good job looking out for me since once I get my drunk on I'm never confused with Mr. Congeniality. Amazing I lived long enough to discover sobriety in light of the armies of people around the world I antagonized. Anyway. 

In the decades since all of this happened, I've tried to calculate the number of actions and activities that had to take place in order for her and me to meet. Since I chose to be a liberal arts major to avoid ever using math in my life, I cannot possibly execute the calculations.

I've long since given up trying to make sense of the world as it was or as it is. I will tell you I believe because that's how I was raised and habit is often more lasting than logic, that there is a reason for everything we do and everything we fail to do. As attractive as I find the 'we're all hostages from Hades/We're all bozos on this bus' approach to questions about divinity, humanity and the universe at large, I can't really leave it there.

If Christmas is a time of love, and this is the night when I found mine, how can I not encourage you to be of good cheer and renew your faith even if you've yet to meet the person who completes you? A more luckless, lunchless, loser than I could you not have imagined, but a miracle was still mine. Keep your eyes wide and your heart open, there's magic in the air if you want it. Happy Christmas.

-bill kenny

Because We Need a Little Christmas

In much the same manner as a rabbit who distributes chocolate eggs has replaced the original meaning of Easter, we've grown old in a culture that has a Jolly Old Elf flying around the world in one night handing out presents that look just like the stuff you can buy for the kids in the store with the giraffe. Funny how art imitates life and then again when it doesn't.

I'm a fossil who grew up in the Fifties where we had air raid warnings that involved hiding under our school desks and facing away from the windows (to avoid the flash of atomic incineration), three (if we had a good antenna) TV stations, all black and white all the time, fathers that got up early and went far away to work and moms who made sure we got to school, came home, put on play clothes before we went outside (every time I see either droopy drawers or tattered-knee jeans, I try to imagine the reaction of my mother or, more especially, my father, and smile as I shake my head), had dinner, did our homework and got ready for bed where we'd get up and do it all again. 

Mine was a nuclear family--now most of us live in an unclear society-anything goes and nobody knows. Back in the day, we had Sister Rose, Sister Thomas Anne and Sister Mary Jean and this time of year, our heads were not filled with thoughts of sugar plum fairies (never did get that line or what they were supposed to be. Fruitcake, I've had; sugar plums, not quite), but we were experts on The Nativity Scene (I felt compelled to backspace and capitalize the "T", because I was taught NO other way to write it). 

We learned all the hymns, often in what Sister Mary Jean called 'the original Latin' which I realized years later was a private joke she and my father shared and while there's a certain happiness in Jingle Bell Rock, for hard-core jollies, try Adeste Fideles (sung by someone who thought the Wise Men had given The Child the gift of Frankenstein, since I had no idea what frankincense could possibly be).

We've become people who are more familiar with the returns policy at The Mall than the hours during which confessions are heard at the local church, or as I heard it called the other day by someone too young to be facetious, "The God Store." Many of us are exhausted from the search to find that special present for that certain someone and I wish those of us in that situation a rapid recovery. 

I've been told a friend is a present you give to yourself and there's no such things as strangers, only friends we haven't met. If that is true, and it is, after all, Christmas, when miracles can and do happen, resolve to start today to be the miracle in someone else's' life. And, although it's been said many times, many ways, Merry Christmas.
-bill kenny

Cold Is the Wind of Grief

This is the fourth Sunday of Advent, and for many (more importantly) the 'so many days until Christmas' countdown has dwindled down to less than one! (exclamatory marks sold separately at fine stores everywhere)

Maybe today is a good day to see someone in a corner of our lives we normally see through on our way to the many important things we each do and never really acknowledge. We're a pretty crowded ant farm with beepers and briefcases and sometimes the person next to us falls through a crack and we never notice.

Anglicans (Church of England in the UK) call this Stir-up Sunday, not as in get agitated or become more forcefully engaged in the world around us, but for more quiet and comfortable reasons, but I do like that name and the possibilities and connotations.

For some of us, this is the best of the Season of Joy and for others, it's really nothing more than the next to last Sunday in 2017. We are the sum total of all the choices we make and the lives and love we share. We are the reason for this season.
-bill kenny

You Dreamed of Heroes Riding Across the Sea

There was a lot of dust on this one, so I'm not sure how secure the cloud where all of these get stored actually is but this one is pretty old and stuff... On the other hand so am I.

This World Wide Web and global village connectivity are paying off for me, big-time, this Christmas as I have all my shopping done (I think). I don't have to brawl at the mall or feel like a salmon going upstream to fulfill a biologic destiny--I can smile, at least until the statements come in the mail, thanks to the online merchants who've built a better virtual mousetrap and have delivered on their promises of a new world in the morning, or within two days if I choose priority shipping. Oh, come all ye Commerce, Epay and by PayPal...

I'm still handicapped by my lack of ability to visualize items. Unless I've seen it on a store shelf or caught an advert in a newspaper or on television, simply reading a description online with or without specifications on size and weight, I'm clueless as to the item's actual size. 

I live in fear this will be the Christmas where that Stonehenge scene in Spinal Tap comes to life under the tree in the living room of my house (a tree that looks spectacular and which I can admire without ego since my wife made all the Christmas magic happen. Again).

I'm glad I'm done, more or less, because I caught a TV spot for Jenny McCarthy, in my opinion, this generation's Lucille Ball, but, without the red hair or comedic gift, is hawking a workout video for Wii or maybe it's a computer fitness program that, when followed faithfully, will enable me to transform myself into her image and likeness. 

Such news generally causes me to inventory our supply of stout rope and mentally map which overhead fixtures might best support my weight, so enthralled at this prospect am I, and then came the deal-clincher. In the background, though thankfully NOT by the original artists, the music to her sales pitch was The Beatles' Revolution. 

I'm sorry but The Beatles were the soundtrack to my growing up years and not just me, a whole generation of nations. Every time their song catalog gets sold, someone does something like this and (take my word for this) it really grinds a lot of us greatly. 

Almost ten years ago, someone in the telecommunications industry thought exploiting Come Together to a server or whatever they made was a brilliant idea. I was hoping we would, indeed, come together and throw stones through every plate glass window in their corporate headquarters. 

Now, I can dream, should I find the workout under my tree, to finally develop enough upper body and arm strength to be able to hurl a small car both for distance as well as height. 

-bill kenny

Pools of Sorrow

I fell across an ancient (for me) post earlier in the week and despite the years since I first wrote and the events, it describes I could still feel the sting of regret. So much for time passages, I guess.

These days it's dark when I get up and drive to work and it's dark when I come home. I'm lucky that my current office has a window. I've had jobs where I was not so lucky and would come home and ask my wife probing, intimate questions like 'what was it like outside today?'

Speaking of which, one of those jobs for many years was working in radio and television both on the air and as a producer, writer, editor, videographer, audio grip etc. No business like show business unless you're a landscaper and then this time of year it's no business like snow business I suppose.

In putting a paperclip back in the center drawer of my work desk this morning, I saw my old audio splicing block. I've had it all my life, or just about. I got it when I was twelve in a downtown music store in New Brunswick, NJ, that disappeared I have no idea how many decades ago. Until just now I hadn't thought about it for many years and for a moment, I forgot its name but I have it now, "Varsity Music."

The music store, like PJ Arnold's, like the George Street Playhouse, like Macarones' Town House Restaurant, were businesses struggling to survive, huddled together, perhaps for warmth, near the railroad station. At first it was the Pennsylvania Railroad, then Penn-Central as two bankrupt operations, the Pennsylvania and the New York Central joined forces to, together, NOT make a profit even larger and faster than each had done individually. 

Then it became Amtrak and then after yet another reorganization that took six inches off the front of the blanket and put it on the back but insisted it had made the blanket a foot longer, Conrail). Varsity Music had singles, 45 rpm one-song per side pieces of vinyl, posters, albums, musical instruments and supporting equipment, to include blank reels (but only the five-inch kind on the plastic hubs, ugh!) of audio tape, and grease pencils (fancy folks called them 'china markers'),splicing blocks and splicing tape.

I smiled as I touched the neglected block sitting in the compartment where you could store pens and pencil (it's an old desk, for an old man in an old building) back when you used those, and paper, to do jobs instead of the keyboard, mouse and computer workstation now sharing space in the office. 

We each have favorite songs, or TV shows, foods and movies and have memories of events associated with specific moments in our lives and as I realized this morning, a lot of mine are tied to that splicing block and to a life and lifestyle that's not only in the past but would be historical if it were not already obsolete.

I've tried on more than one occasion in our shared past to explain to each of my now grown children what it was I did for a living when I met their mom. Children are always curious about this, I'm told, though I never remember asking my parents how they met (but I do recall my stunned surprise when I found out). Radio has changed so much, in corporate structure and in how it's actually created, that NONE of the skills I learned in the course of decades working in it have survived.

I can remember dubbing an interview to open reel that had been done with the late John Lennon. I was supposed to fly to New York to do an interview, based on the question areas I'd created for the European record company (who were surprised 'you didn't ask any questions about the Beatles?', no I said: 'do they play on his record?'). 

I was on active duty in the USAF, and had a military training requirement (needed for future consideration for promotion and an immovable object) that prevented me from flying to New York to do the interview so the record label had a staffer ask all of my questions, and agreed to embargo the use of the answers for 48 hours after the interview so I could use them first.

Great plan and real coup except Mark David Chapman murdered Lennon the following day making the interview a very valuable item indeed. And all I could hear as I transferred the entire conversation to open reel so as to better edit it was the sound of what could and should have been. Never to be.

Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box, they tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe.
-bill kenny

When the Sun Stands Still

This is the shortest day(light) of the year. From here until late June the amount of daylight every day will get incrementally more until by the time we're ready to start planning summer vacations we'll be sick of all the sun (present company excluded). Or not. 

Winter is why I don't enjoy Autumn, (<= understatement alert!) because I know what's coming next and the fact that it's been getting darker for months, and even more so and faster after we fell back at the end of Daylight Saving Time, just makes it harder to see both in the morning when I get up and when I come home from work in the afternoon. We can treat the cold and the snow as read for purposes of this discussion. 

Osage Forest of Peace 

So as we sing the seasons through, today is the day for a dark and deep note as we begin to moderate the key and alter the tempo as the changes that make up our universe enfold and unfold around us.
-bill kenny


 

I Stare Up at the Tree

It's crunch time for gift-givers as online merchants and brick and mortar stores angle for just one more fingertip from that fistful of dollars we each spend every holiday season. Like you I tend to split my time between sitting in front of a computer screen and roaming the aisles. 

It’s a little disquieting when you think about it that what we call the season of giving has become such a big business focused on the getting. Maybe that's another reason why I try not to think too much (and usually succeed). 

We both probably have one or two (or, in my case, more) gifts still to get and then we have to make sure they'll arrive by Christmas but let's devote less time and energy to the getting and more thought and heart to the giving.

Almost every store we've been to since Thanksgiving has had donation stations for those less fortunate, and they are wonderful opportunities to share. I can think of three different small businesses I frequent who have sponsored or supported fund-raisers for families in need and I know I'm not the only one who has contributed. 

Of course, the Salvation Army kettles are part of the season as they should be. And who hasn't helped 'fill a police cruiser' or 'stuff a bus,' on almost any weekend this month? 

Each of us has been blessed in one way or another and we can, in turn, share our blessings with someone else. Our giving can be our gift.  

When I talk about giving I'm not, thinking about the one-offs or the spontaneous moments we have. Yeah, that couple of bucks and the loose change in our pockets gets us a smile and nod from the bell-ringer and makes us feel better about ourselves but we have another opportunity right here and now to give gifts that benefit and sustain many across our city and region more in need of help than they will ever say or that we could ever imagine. 

When I think close to home I think of the annual St. Vincent de Paul Place Dinner for All. They are in need of helping hands to provide thirty dozen Christmas cookies, two-hundred and twenty servings of roast beef, sixty pounds of yellow squash or zucchini. Perhaps you're more of a potato person? That's good because they need a hundred pounds or so of spuds. 

And let's not about forget dinner rolls, or the butter to put on them, paper plates, holiday napkins, and coffee with cream and sugar for afters. You can find the full list of needed items online or you can send a note to Bonnie at bysvdpp@gmail.com.

It seems like a lot of food because it is but they feed a lot of people every day of every week all year long, so why not make a cash donation to sustain their work in addition to helping out right now, When you do, you’ll receive far more than you gave. Merry Christmas. 

-bill kenny

Time the Conqueror

Today is my Dad's 94th birthday. He didn't live to see it-he didn't even get close, passing away in 1981. I often thought we didn't get along because we were so different, and I blamed him for that, but in the decades since his death I've come to realize it's because we are very much alike and all this finding fault junk is foolish, especially since I'd have to be the one to blame. 

My dad had a very quick mind and a mouth to match. The laws of probability suggest he wasn't always the smartest guy in the room but I don't ever recall being in a room when he wasn't probably the smartest guy, no matter the subject and no matter the size of the room. He was a natural wonder of the world and while, in hindsight, I realize he was often wrong-he was never in doubt.

I recognized the exact moment I had become my dad, ironically not in any form of interaction with our children (who hadn't even been born yet), but in a work situation many years ago in radio broadcasting with someone who could have been far better than she was, had she made the effort. She explained through tears after what she felt had been an especially caustic critique session that "I can't work as hard as you can!" And though it was my voice, it was my father's words which coldly countered "I don't want you to work as hard as I can; I want you to work as hard as you can."

Where my father and I differed is in our circumstances-I suspect he was far more of a humanist than he was ever comfortable admitting. He was very much a man of his time, born in the years before the first Great Depression of parents who'd migrated to the Land of Opportunity. They had a family of all boys who were strivers, all of them as near as I can remember. In the years since his passing, I've thought of them only rarely and lost any means of contacting any of them. I never cared to speak with them since I don't think they knew much more about my dad than I did. 

We were six children, two groups of three, two boys and girl in the middle in the first cohort and then two girls and, finally, another boy in the second cohort. We three oldest knew him as a two-fisted force of nature who got up before anyone else in the neighborhood, perhaps even in the whole world, and rode the train to "The City" where he taught the sons of the rich (to little effect as I had opportunity first hand, repeatedly, to discover) and came home when everything was dark. We wanted for nothing and, speaking for myself, I never once considered what it cost him for us to live that way.

Our second cohort had different lives as he died before my middle sister, the oldest of the three, had graduated from high school. By that time, I had gone as far as you can in this world from him, distance wise, only to learn no matter how fast you are you can never outrun your own shadow or your own conscience. When the American Red Cross operator notified me of 'an emergency, a death in the family' I wasn't surprised it was my dad but my sense of guilt at hearing the news did surprise me. For just a moment I was again that little-too-small and little-too-loud boy who often felt overmatched by a father, a Captain of the Universe no less, who never knew what to say to his own children that would sound like the love and encouragement he was trying to offer.

About a year after we married, my wife and I came to the United States. It was very important for me that my father like the woman I loved, even as I told myself it mattered not at all. She wasn't Irish, she wasn't Catholic and he loved her anyway. I had worried for nothing. It was a delightful relief and a wonderful visit. He and I almost talked but there would be time for a real conversation on a future visit. When we said goodbye at the airport, he was misty-eyed and I thought of my sister Jill and her 'it's very warm, my eyes are sweating' but I didn't say it aloud.

That moment at the departure lounge proved to be the last time I would have an opportunity face to face in this life to ever not tell him something I could, and perhaps, should, have. I spent many years struggling with the burden of that moment and the memories not so much of all the things said but, rather of all the things left unsaid that now will stay that way for all time until memory ends. Happy Birthday, Dad.       
-bill kenny     

Putting the Van in Karma

Some of us are born lucky while some of us not so much. If like me, you are in the latter category, there's ample proof that no matter how bad things are currently going, given half a chance they can, and will, get even worse. 

If you think you're the butt of some practical joke the universe is playing on you, be of good cheer. You could always be former tire thief Jeremy Michael Dickey, previously of a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It came to pass that feeling of being run down was so consuming that not even Joni could cure it. Thus endeth the lesson.
-bill kenny   

Though Dark Our Days May Often Be

Despite all the days of malevolence and hate-filled utterances throughout what has been at least for me a very long year and most especially now during what we called as kids a Season of Hope, today, Gaudete Sunday remains a favorite of mine (since my earliest school days). 

Before I had memorized the entire Latin Mass, in hopes (forlorn) of becoming an altar boy, I had theorized from what I understood of the roots of the word Gaudete and its proximity to the birth of Jesus that it must somehow be Latin for 'just hold on a little bit longer.' I still think I should get partial credit for grasping the feeling if not the exact meaning

A lot of the warmth of our human hearts regardless of your beliefs is reflected by the holiday seasons that fall together this time of year somehow reminding us, I hope, that we are when we can see and live beyond our differences all very much the same people.

Underscoring that is the life of Lt. Col. Leo K. Thorsness, who, though he passed on before we reached the Third Sunday of Advent, is I think someone we should and could each aspire to become.

We have too many horns in the cacophony of life and can most certainly use another light, especially in this, the most hopeful of seasons. 
-bill kenny

Upon Further Review

Our son, Patrick, stopped by Thursday afternoon (my first day of vacation since whenever it was I last took a vacation, probably to go to Margaret and Adam's beach sanctuary in August) to walk me through money after I retire at the end of June next year. 

I'm still struggling to accept there's something other than that decades-long tradition we have around these parts that what I do for a living defines who I am as a person and turning my attention to what  I'll should and could say when I'm asked as of 1 July.  

He helps people plan financial futures and he's incredibly good at it (I cannot balance my checkbook so I have no idea where his aptitude and ability come from) and in less than an hour, he took a world of worry off my shoulders about what we'll have in terms of dollars and sense. 

My life is brilliant. I have as my best friend a woman I've loved from the moment I first saw her and to whom I've been married for over forty years. Together we have two children who are ridiculously capable adults with rich and fulfilling lives of their own despite (because?) the fact I have no idea how any of all of that might have happened since I really wasn't involved (carrying on in my way a tradition I'd rather not have thought too much about.) 

My superpower, recalling my own childhood, is and always was staying out of the way, not so much as a benefit to me as an advantage for everyone else. Our children and so much of my life are amazing because of my wife and her efforts. I tend to moan about all the things which I don't have instead of cherishing the intangibles which I do. And I always forget that redemption is never earned, but rather a gift that's given.     
-bill kenny  

I Say John, You Say Wayne

This is from a long, long time ago about this time of year. If there was a lesson in it then, it didn’t survive until this now, but between us, I’m pretty sure I was just enjoying from moot point. Anyway, that said... 

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 in what’s now called Pomonok (we called it Flushing), Queens, than were Dad's, someplace out in Illinois (I learned many 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. 

Our 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 Offices of Culture and Tourism. 

In my mind’s eye I can see swarms of competitors, pedaling furiously with ski masks on, in a line stretching to the horizon with satellite TV uplink vans and bloggers, twitters, and 'live right now on facebook!' as far as the eye can see, along a getaway route lined with tourists who come just for these races. 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, 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, 'but wait there's more!'. 

Apparently not fully appreciating the right to remain silent might be for his own good, Nick "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, as part of his sentence had Nicholas also been transported to the pokey riding on the handlebars of a bicycle pedaled by a corrections officer, though I'm unsure the officer could have reached the bell. 
-bill kenny

Naming the Souls Who Departed

Five years ago horror came to "where is that?" Connecticut as someone who should have never had access to guns did and used them to horrible and horrendous effect on a day where we were all pre-occupied with the approaching holidays, just like today. 

And aside from a moment to send thoughts and prayers, we've done nothing (and the scale and scope of all ensuing carnage increased). I'm shifting my investment strategy and sinking all my money into small, stuffed teddy bears and votive candles because the demand for both of those just keeps going up. 

Five years on, we know nothing more because we have chosen to learn nothing. I was angry when I wrote this and I'm still pissed now, and that won't do. It's really hard to work together to fix something with balled fists. Anyway..... 

No other animal works harder to rationalize our sometimes unthinking behavior than do we-no other animal is even capable of seeing the absurdity and contradiction of how we so often live our lives. Because the carnage at Newtown, Connecticut, happened in the state in which I reside I'm haunted by a feeling very similar to the aftermath of 9-11-01.

I suspect you've been doing what I've been doing: watching television and reading rafts of online commentary and analysis (a three-dollar word for what on my block we called a WAG) nearly non-stop assuming, persisting in the belief might be a better phrase, that at some point a penny is going to drop, a light is going to go on and someone, somewhere will say or write something that causes us each to have an 'aha!' moment and understand what has gone on.

Both of us are only reluctantly starting to accept the notion that there may well never be a nice, neat, explanation with a timeline and expert testimony that explains the inexplicable. Leaving so many moms and dads and friends and relatives of the deceased (an abstraction of the first order) not to even start to think about the surviving school-children with holes in their hearts that will never heal.

Those murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School weren't 'victims,' they were people, mostly incredibly tiny and very young people. The Innocents included:

Charlotte Bacon, 6; Daniel Barden, 7; Rachel Davino, 29; Olivia Engel, 6; Josephine Gay, 7; Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6; Dylan Hockley, 6; Dawn Hochsprung, 47; Madeleine F. Hsu, 6; Catherine V. Hubbard, 6; Chase Kowalski, 7; Jesse Lewis, 6; James Mattioli, 6; Grace McDonnell, 7; Anne Marie Murphy, 52; Emilie Parker, 6; Jack Pinto, 6; Noah Pozner, 6; Caroline Previdi, 6; Jessica Rekos, 6; Avielle Richman, 6; Lauren Rousseau, 30; Mary Sherlach, 56; Victoria Soto, 27; Benjamin Wheeler, 6 and Allison N. Wyatt, 6.

"This is a prayer for the souls of the departed" and sadly we should all know it by heart.
-bill kenny

What You Remember Will Save You

There's a lot of counting going on right now on my street, around the city and elsewhere. 

There are the eight candles of Hanukkah which began yesterday evening; twelve days until Christmas as well as the twelve days of Christmas and one day shy of two weeks until the start of Kwanzaa, a celebration of family, community, and culture. And of course, the annual countdown for the arrival of the new year has already begun.

Your time is in high demand and in very short supply I know, but I have a suggestion of a better use for that half hour or so you were going to stand in line somewhere hoping to buy that certain someone this season’s hot toy or to try and assemble that shiny new bicycle. 

This Saturday at noon is the annual Wreaths Across America (WAA) Day observance conducted by American Legion Post 104 at Taftville's Sacred Heart Cemetery to honor veterans during the holidays. 

Recognizing the service and sacrifice of our veterans and their families is very poignant anytime but truly timely and appropriate during the traditional holiday season. Doing for others can help us refocus on what this time of year is about for so many, being with those for whom we care and who care for us. 

Wreaths Across America has a three-fold mission: Remember, Honor and Teach. 

Every year for the last quarter of a century this national outreach has coordinated wreath-laying ceremonies on veterans’ graves on the third Saturday in December at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, as well as veterans’ cemeteries and other locations in each of our 50 states, at sea, and in over two dozen cemeteries in other nations where US military members have been interred.

Attendance at the Taftville ceremony has always been good, and with you along this year, it will be even better. Seven specially designated wreaths for the Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, and Prisoners of War (POW) and Missing In Action (MIA) will be placed on memorials during the ceremony along with wreaths for each of the graves of the sixty-seven veterans now resting there. 

If only for the few moments the ceremony takes, neither we nor those whose sacrifice we are remembering are alone, and that's as it should be, and not just for the holidays. No matter the temperature and weather conditions, your presence will warm the hearts of the organizers and definitely put a smile on your own face.

As an attendee at previous ceremonies I admire the words offered by the speakers but confess to not having enough of my own to capture the essence and adequately describe an event that's a heartfelt and homegrown acknowledgement of the lives of our departed veterans (of all services and from every conflict and era of our history). 

It's a time for us as a community to gather, reflect and remember the fallen, honor those still in service and teach one another freedom is free only with sacrifice. 

I’ll look for you Saturday at noon.

-bill kenny

Don't Touch that Dial!

I have a habit of thanking the imbeciles who drive through parking lots and down residential streets with bone-rattling bass rumbling strongly enough to set off seismic shocks for sharing their music. I'm probably very lucky they can't hear me otherwise I'm sure I'd have a few dents and dings than I currently do but I have always been fascinated with by cars (and trucks and motorcycles for that matter) and music.

I've come to appreciate, though don't tell her, my wife's perspective on the pairing, which seems to be that it's foolish and stupid. She doesn't drive so she brings to her side of the front seat a very different point of view than I have and, yes, I am the guy who turns down the stereo (rarely the radio anymore) when he's trying to find a particular street address which is an excellent example of her foolish and stupid paradigm and I wasn't even really trying though she assures I often am very trying.

I am not a fan of Rastafarian country and western music, but I like almost all other kinds of music, except crunk which I cannot define but know it I when I hear it as well as any and all of whatever it is Kanye West, Justin Bieber and others who unload on the public. It matters not to me that in the universe we all share, I am no more than a "who?" to any of them because they remain 'stop leaning on my Torino!' to me.

I devoutly believe employment of Auto-tune should be punishable by ten years in prison and a ten thousand dollar fine and if you spent more money on the production of the video in support of a song than you did on the song itself I think we should take away your birthday. I'll pause for a moment while you compose yourself and recover from that shock.

But music hath charms though it appears, based on this story that if you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, you may be the opposite of immune to those aforementioned charms. Mune? Is that the opposite or would it be Unmune? Or dark side of the moon?

Each of the songs mentioned in the article makes me smile because I've heard nearly all of them, and so, too, have you (okay, Barney not so much), and hundreds of others on every hike across a mall's macadam. Just the soundtrack for when you're on top of the world and you can't get any higher. 
-bill kenny