These Twisted Games We Play

Somewhere on the interwebz I saw not that long ago an exhortation to “Everyday do something that scares you a little bit.”  I am intrigued by the idea if not the execution of it at both the personal and societal level.

For reasons that would tell you a LOT more about me than I might like and WAY more than you would ever desire, I am exceptionally risk-adverse in all manner of endeavors from choosing to change or not to change jobs, all the way down what tie to wear with which shirt. It’s not the decision-making so much that frightens me as the incessant murmuring of the voices that second-guess every step of the process.

And to varying degrees, I think that’s true for a large number of us. That whole ‘the pool ain’t in but the patio’s dry’ mentality that instinctively looks first at what we might lose as opposed to focusing on what we could win.

All these millennia of evolution on and we still wonder about the footfalls we hear from journeys never started and long wistfully for destinations never arrived at.

-bill kenny  

Lighting Up City Hall and All of Downtown

Did we not have ourselves a time around here on Saturday afternoon with the 30th Annual Norwich Winterfest Parade? It was really fantastic and a belated but very heartfelt thank you to everyone who helped The Rose of New England defend its title as Christmas City, first won eighty years ago. 

Habits can be so strong that I started to pull on my coat and gloves to walk down Broadway Saturday night for the lighting of City Hall because that's how we've always capped the Winterfest Parade for all the years I've lived here, but then I remembered we're starting a new tradition this year by having the Lighting of City Hall kick off the First Friday Downtown Norwich, December edition, the day after tomorrow. 

What a great idea (and I can say that because I certainly would never think of it) because hundreds and hundreds (and more) of us pour into every nook and cranny around City Hall for the carols, the singalongs and (of course) the countdown to and lighting of one of the most beautiful public buildings in all of New England (making it even more beautifuler?). And afterward, in years past, we all then just went home. But wait! 

From a "Light Up City Hall" Past

Now, when we're downtown Friday evening, we'll have a chance to sample and enjoy the ever-growing palette of attractions and "I-did-not-know-that" moments which the artists and merchants who call downtown home have to offer. First Friday is a handy label to write on your monthly calendar but the attractions and events are an ever-changing delight. 

Sponsored by the Greater Norwich Area Chamber of Commerce, it's really a collaboration among the galleries, theatres, businesses, and civic organizations allying with local artists to include painters, sculptors, actors, musicians, culinary experts, authors, and photographers to bring each of us a night they hope we'll long remember and strive to equal on any of the other nights of the month that isn't First Friday.

And speaking of authors and downtown, and combining both, tonight at 6:30, Otis Library is hosting Norwich's own John Manuel Andriote for a discussion on, and book-signing of, his latest work, "Stonewall Strong: Gay Men's Heroic Fight for Resilience, Good Health, and a Strong Community." It's an important book at an important time and I think, tonight is a fortuitous opportunity for those who are interested.

Returning now to City Hall, First Friday, and spaces and places that should be lighted as well as highlighted this Friday evening, would you be surprised to learn that if you spent just an hour in each of the attractions, you'd be downtown through Saturday afternoon? 

Different lighting, but the same City Hall

I'm not kidding the scale and scope of activities (okay, maybe a little) that include (alphabetically by height) Encore Justified, Gallery at the Wauregan Inc., Norwich Arts Center, The Art House of Norwich, Reliance Health, Inc., NAC Gallery, Bold As Love Artisan Guild, Central Baptist Church, Bully-Busters; Reliance Health Gallery, and ArtSpace Norwich. 

I know, you can get hungry and thirsty just reading the list; First Friday has something for that as well to include: Billy Wilson's Ageing Still, Harp & Dragon, Namoo, These Guys Brewing Co. LLC, La Stella Pizzeria, Epicure Brewing, Ice & Fire, Mi Casa Mexican Restaurant, and, in their new location on Water Street, Strange Brew.

So I'll look for you Friday night and maybe we can share a laugh at all those who complain that there's never anything to do in downtown Norwich. More for us; works for me.
-bill kenny

The Dark Side of Hands Free Cell Phone Operation

I think we all agree that cell phones transitioned from a "Dig Me!" item of personal and flamboyant extravagance to a ubiquitous and an absolute essential in nearly less time that it would take Donald Trump to diagram this sentence (bigly). I mean, what would life be without the ability to send one another cat memes? If you just said 'catastrophic,' thank you because that's what I was thinking and  I didn't want to be alone.

I agree fully with public safety officials' contentions that, while driving, they are a distraction but I'm waiting for all of those experts to agree with me that we must also include listening to the radio, drinking coffee, eating a burger (and/or a slice of pizza), shaving, and applying makeup (all of which I have watched transpire in vehicles in front and beside me) aren't a walk in the park. 

Truth to tell, putting glass in the front windshield (the Brits say 'windscreen' like you were driving some sort of a motorized colander) was probably the first and biggest distraction and we've been coping ever since. 

Just about every one of our fifty not as United-as-we-hope-to-be-states has hands-free while driving cell phone prohibitions in our laws, and that's undoubtedly a very good thing except when I recall that old admonition about 'idle hands are the devil's workshop.'   

As an example of that, allow me to introduce you to one Ruberto Pasquale, who single-handedly (pun intended) has done more to boost auto interior roof cleanings than anyone in the history of car washes could have ever hoped. When self-pleasuring becomes an Olympic event (you scoff? We have selfies, don't we?)  we're going to see Ruberto on the medals podium. You probably do not need a reminder to NOT offer him a congratulatory handshake.
-bill kenny               

Rumbling from an Alien Distant Shore

These are some notes from some time ago when I hit a Mickey D's in the morning for breakfast, back when the only time they served breakfast was at breakfast. I saved them because I knew a day like today would happen and I would need them. 

! started my day, creature of habit that I am, at a fast food joint, having already grabbed the other daily newspaper for the area (we get one home-delivered and the other one I buy out of a box because I'm an old-fashioned guy, or I was until I stopped drinking). 

When I'm off during the work week, and have breakfast out, I'm always amazed at the number of people I encounter in these places. Everyone knows everyone else, basically from eating breakfast in the same location. Who knew hash browns and a senior coffee had such a powerful impact on building a community? Maybe we should think about carpet-bombing Kandahar or, closer to home, Bridgeport, with Egg McMuffins and see what happens. 

I knew it would be a magical experience when the guy in front of me wearing a vivid (and that word doesn't even come close) golden sweat suit, hood down, ordered 'a medium coffee, black, with eleven sugars' while jogging in place. Yeah, he probably hates the taste of sugar and uses the coffee to cover it. My own breakfast was slightly less turbo-charged and as I sat down, I was within earshot of four elderly men analyzing the newspaper (the one we get delivered to the house) over their growing colder by the moment coffee.

The fellow in the yellow shirt offered his insight into the crisis du jour, (then) Governor M. Jodi Rell's intent to shrink the state of Connecticut's ever-expanding current year operating deficit by reducing aid to the 167 cities and towns across the state, thus putting the deficit monkey on someone else's back. He and his dining companions agreed 'we need to get rid of the lot of them.' 

There were no suggestions on who would replace 'them' or even much of a discussion on exactly who 'them' is, and I estimate of the four of them, at least three probably voted for the Governor in her election attempt, as did so many of us, but now, M. Jodi, don't call us, we'll call you. You may not like what we call you, lady, but you know the gig was iffy when you signed up.

Sitting across from the yellow shirt was Buzz, for haircut-inspired reasons, warning his repast companions of 'what happens after the government starts running health care' though I couldn't help but wonder, in light of their probable ages, if any of them had Medicare and what they thought that was all about. I decided discretion was the better part of valor and kept silent. 

Good thing, too, as one of the other two, with high-water pants (cuffs that wave to, but are nowhere near, by three or more inches, his shoes), explained that government health care will allow 'the illegal aliens to go to the hospital' adding he knew all about this because he'd 'read it in the paper or heard about it on television'. That threw me for a moment because of the confusion on the source. The only way I can ever hear anything while reading the newspaper is if I'm having Rice Krispies with milk. 

Of course, we dissected the sports page-all overpaid babies (they may have been talking about the high school football scores, which means I'm in the presence of hard-core), and wondered as to the whereabouts (and the health) of 'Dave' and 'Bob' as the four of them set about putting the world in order at least for the day from their table facing the window looking out on to West Towne Street. 

I smiled listening, but envied them a bit as well, as when they finished and stood to leave, they shook one another's hands, remembered to say hello to those spouses who were not in attendance and offered each other a breezy 'see ya tomorrow' (as they undoubtedly shall) before heading out to inspect how successful their solutions had been implemented. 

I imagine they'll come rolling back in here this morning between seven thirty and eight, regular as clockwork. Except maybe for eleven-sugars-guy. I wouldn't be surprised if he were still running it off somewhere.
-bill kenny

Where's the Plaque for On This Day

From a disturbingly long time ago, through the miracle of technology, delivered to your screen fresh as the day it was first posted.

I never had the chance to see David Letterman, in a previous life, as an Indiana television weatherman, but I did think of him when I came across this story. To my "Ruth is Stranger than Bridget" file, crammed with examples of The Lord's puckish sense of humor, I can now add, just in time for the holidays, "Paula Deen Hit With Ham, Doing 'Okay'".

To everyone's relief, this story doesn't seem to have any long-term harm or injury to add a lot of tears to the snickers, giggles, and guffaws and it helps underscore the importance of community support for food banks.

I don't know anything about Paula Deen except she's another media attraction and creation. She's famous for being famous, Y'all (and for something to do with food). Heck, I eat food-if you've seen me in the flesh you know it's been decades since I missed a meal, but I don't have a TV show. 

Yes, I understand that Paula Deen's TV appearances are, more often than not, connected to her culinary abilities, which, as someone who struggles with Ramen Noodles, I find to be terribly discriminatory. Just because the woman has a skill (and a killer drawl), she gets a TV show, and poor me, with no skills, gets zip! Discrimination hurts.

As does getting popped in the kisser with a ham. You know the Hormel guys had to be sitting in their corporate headquarters, staring at their pig screen, sorry, BIG screen, TV watching that news clip, trying to calculate just how much that kind of product placement cost Smithfield (and how handsomely it paid off). 

I think we've all learned a valuable lesson here: there's a difference between a spiral ham and a spiral pass. And the consequences for dropping each seems to be different as well. Between us, I wouldn't be surprised to learn Paula doesn't volunteer to help unload the trailer of donated candied yams and I think making her do so might be gruel and unusual punishment.
-bill kenny

All Exits Look the Same

Someone much wiser than I once explained to me that freedom of speech doesn't entitle you to shout fire in a crowded theatre, nor does it afford you the privilege of sitting next to someone and whisper non-stop as the celluloid races through the projector gates. The danger, he said, each one of us faced was that 'sometimes the things you do speak so loudly I cannot hear what you're saying.' 

I thought about that yesterday as I watched people scurrying through the mall beginning the search for low-cost holiday gifts for their mailmen and newspaper carrier, oil tank filling guy, coffee making person, pizza deliverer, etc; a dozen or a hundred jobs that no one notices until they're not done. The trick is to make sure to find something that doesn't like cheap and when you start the hunt early, you have a better chance. 

I've had this conversation with work colleagues in years past who have a very complex and complicated mental math they do to compute just how much to spend on a gift for a person whose name they usually don't know or for one who, if the job is done right, they rarely see (not at Adam's house, of course; he probably takes the news carrier with him for a jog). 

And in the case of the 'sandwich guy' or the 'coffee server' (and the like), it's a person with whom you would never speak, aside from 'please' and 'thank you', but if you crossed paths in a locale such as Borneo or even Boise, you'd chatter away like magpies who'd known one another your whole lives. The concept is called familiar strangers and many of us have a world populated with them and very few others. 

I've gotten better as I've aged (I'm not bragging; I set the bar pretty low) and I no longer immediately say everything I'm thinking, which I did for decades and then wondered why I had tension-filled relationships with people. Turns out I had difficulties distinguishing between inside and outside voices, especially as I tend to hear both, and if you don't, it's your loss. Blurting is often hurting, a little tip from me to you about getting along here on the ant-farm. 

There was a time I'd ask those shopping for the knick-knack thank you gifts, 'why don't you just give the person money?' After all, it's a holiday whose primary colors seem to be red and green and since most of us are in the former why not share some of the latter? I think we give each other seconds of pleasure that are put away and forgotten or lost by the end of the holiday season because we can't stand the insulted silences if we didn't. 

It's not words, so much, that frighten us, it's the quiet between the words. That the words have, perhaps, sharp edges is all well and good as long as they keep coming, because that way we don't have to worry there might be time to think about their meaning and the last thing many of us want to do is find ourselves alone with our thoughts. 

I sometimes wonder if there's life on other planets and, like us, have giant parabolic microphones to pick up the sounds emanating from this septic orb if they've long since learned to turn the volume all the way down. We wouldn't know or mind, I fear.
-bill kenny

Ack! Friday!

If you're reading this on a handheld device while standing in a line outside a big box store to snag a once-in-a-lifetime-deal that isn't on a television, a new cell phone, a refrigerator-freezer or gaming console, please go home now.

No need for greed

All of us who have the capabilities to read this blather have all the physical possessions we shall ever need-anything you're standing in line for now, or elbowing folks out of the way to get to later in the day as Black Friday accelerates, is sheer and absolute greed. 

Thanksgiving, and this is still Thanksgiving my friend, is to celebrate with friends, old and new and not acquire more things to put in the basement or attic with the other things we already own and don't use.

Striving to maintain an attitude of gratitude

Many years ago in Germany I had an acquaintance who described Americans as "people who buy things they don't need with money they don't have to impress people they don't like." I really disliked him for that characterization but I always think about what he said when Black Friday rolls around and know I cannot argue with his point.

Where I live, Norwich, Connecticut, a town of about 40,000, if I were to add up all the square footage of all the shops in our downtown, occupied buildings or otherwise, I suspect it's less than the floor space in the average Super Box Store. It's getting better and will keep growing but the big bucks head to the Big Box stores. Fair enough, I guess.  

I can be gracious and concede that reality because tomorrow is Small Business Saturday, and assuming you're not tuckered out from that super deal you got on the 1932 hand-carved mahogany Terraplane at MaxBucks MegaStore, you could support one or more of the local shops where you live, all of whom help make your city or town an even better place to come home to.

This is what we're about in Norwich. Come join us!

Perhaps to help you keep that same small town in each of us, you have where you live a semi-official start of the season such as ours here. We have a Winterfest Parade tomorrow afternoon stepping off at one that will amaze. astound and (I'd hope) set just the right tone for this soon-to-be-upon-us holiday season.

We've given each other some hard knocks lately, and I'd suspect/expect a few more before the New Year arrives but we do this Christmas kick-off stuff really well and we always have room for more so if you're waiting for an invitation, this is it. And though it's been said many times, many ways.....

-bill kenny

A Song of Thanksgiving

We were, I've read, thisclose to following the suggestion of Benjamin Franklin in making the turkey, and not the bald eagle, our national symbol. Just as well as I have difficulty wrapping my brain around the notion of Hunter S. Thompson embracing Wild Eagle and Ibogaine as essential tools in gonzo journalism. The road not taken. 

This hasn't been the best year for many of our neighbors (and perhaps ourselves) and it's far too easy to regret what we don't have rather than pause for a moment to be thankful for what we do have. That, for the most part, is what today is more or less about. 

I equivocate because there are people, public safety and public health workers and others who don't have a holiday because of who they are and what they do. I don't know how many millions of us work shifts, but there are many and their time off differs from others. For vast segments of the country, today is a prelude to Black Friday which starts earlier every year (as does the decorating, storefront displays, holiday music et al) until quite soon we shall go directly from Independence Day to Christmas and children will no longer be born in hospitals but in malls. 

Haste makes waste and also makes us less grateful for what we have and for the effort it took to possess it. It was many years ago, but I can remember being grateful for sharing an American custom with my bride, who was (and remains) a German citizen in her country where the fourth Thursday of November traditionally falls before the fourth Friday of November. As the years went on, we were to celebrate this holiday with our son and, later, our daughter, both of whom have lives of their own now and who come to visit us in a very different home, in a different part of the world from where we all once lived. 

Sometimes you appreciate more what you once had when it's absent. I have to remember and be thankful for my brothers, Kelly and Adam as well as my three sisters, Evan, Kara and Jill, and for the brave and long life our mother, Joan, shared with all of us as well as for my wife's siblings, Beate, Klaus-Peter and Gabrielle and their mother, Anni. We are, in sum, everyone we've ever known (sorry for dragging down the cumulative, everyone, but thanks for being who you are). 

Of course, our national frame of reference is the First Thanksgiving in 1621. The handful of Pilgrims who had survived the voyage across the Atlantic and the hazards and vicissitudes (something about Pilgrims makes using that word mandatory) of the New-but-growing-older-by-the-moment World had every reason to be grim, but then grateful and thankful for the generosity of Chief Massasoit and his Wampanoag tribe. 

In a way, this is a brave new world in which we, too, are now journeying. Much of what we believed and thought we knew, politically, socially, financially and philosophically has been altered and, in whole or in part, swept away by what is coming and what is yet come. 

With all of our wealth and power, we cannot hold a moment longer than our forefathers could or longer than our children's, children's children will. But we can cherish what we have and share it among ourselves, actually making the blessing greater even as the number partaking of it grows. 

For all that we have or will ever have, to include that which we have lost, we shall always have one another and this moment together. To ask for more is beyond the bounds of this day and to settle for less is too tragic for words. 
-bill kenny

An Attitude of Gratitude

Maybe where you live the preparations are already underway. We're borrowing chairs from neighbors who were planning on borrowing them from us. A search party to locate card tables has been formed, places in unlikely spaces in the house have been cleared for the kids' tables and the aromas already emanating from the kitchen are causing mouths to water.

Thanksgiving may be the only holiday in America where many of us become, if just for the day, math majors as we try to compute how many hours how large a turkey needs to be in the oven at how many degrees so that it can feed a houseful of family and friends we've invited to join us for dinner. And let's not forget how many side dishes and who's bringing what--all important elements on our national Day of Thankfulness.

No matter how rough times have been leading up to this week, and for some of they sure have been tough, we still make that extra effort to put a smile on a care-worn face and to enjoy the warmth of home and hearth.

Let's face it, for a lot of us those smiles have been in short supply over this past year despite efforts to the contrary and local successes we should all celebrate. Sometimes it's just easy to mourn what we miss than to cheer what we have. And we have enough examples of that suggesting it's hard to argue about it. We've all seen local businesses fade and close and watched neighbors move away in search of something more than we have right here, right now. And for those of us still here, there's a little more doing with a little less than we remember from the year before.

Yeah, it's weird in Washington as well as in Hartford, but when hasn't it been weird? There are big newspaper headlines about deficits, public posturing and unbridled partisanship while here at home, we whisper and worry about the cost and the price of living where we choose to live and wait for a winter that has yet to arrive.

Maybe it's the cold snap in the weather as part of the change of the seasons or maybe it's just fatigue with one another on our part, but there's a bit more bite in our disagreements over policy and politics, and probably not something we want to bring with us to wherever we are having our holiday table.   

So much for dark thoughts on dark days. There's also light among the shadows, as Norwich Free Academy hosts New London High School tomorrow morning at ten with two old football rivals renewing their adversarial acquaintanceship and by game's end, we can be sure some one's Thanksgiving is getting off on the right foot, even if it has turf toe.

The Greater Norwich Area Chamber of Commerce has a Holiday Bazaar, on Saturday morning starting at nine over at the Holiday Inn on Laura Boulevard which is a great way to mark Small Business Saturday and also get a head start on your gift shopping.  

And (of course) this Saturday afternoon at one it's the Winterfest Parade starting at Chelsea Parade wending its way down Broadway and then Broad Street before concluding in the heart of downtown Norwich, Franklin Square. A celebration of everyone here in Norwich created and supported by friends and neighbors who want us to enjoy ourselves. So easy to say and sometimes, so hard to do. 

Ready or not, the holidays are here and as we gather family and friends closer to celebrate, and hopefully in the rush and crush of events we can remember strangers are friends we haven't yet met as we give one another hope when we celebrate Thanksgiving.

-bill kenny

A Morose and Melancholy Memory

As I recall, we had already had lunch and recess on the closed-off portion of what I recall was Division Street. The grammar school had been built less than three years earlier in what had been a vacant lot near the high school on the city block in New Brunswick that St Peter's Parish owned. 

The church, flanked by the convent on the far side and the rectory on the near side, was actually two blocks away, down the street and up the hill from the railroad overpass across from Makaronis' Town House Restaurant and next door to Albany Wines and Liquors, at the train station where my father and hundreds like him congregated workday mornings (and for my father, Saturdays, too) and traveled first by Pennsylvania Railroad, later (after the merger of two failing lines), Penn Central and still later (when Uncle Sam 'rescued' rail travel in the Northeast Corridor) on Amtrak into "the city.' 

I was in fifth grade of St. Peter's School.  I learned years later, despite the name carved in marble on the front of the building, the possessive case was inaccurate and incorrect. But no one had yet invented industrial Wite-Out and when I first returned to the USA, I drove through my old hometown one weekend while my family was still in Germany, looking perhaps, for myself and the person I was then in the hopes of better understanding the man I had become. The school name, in all its incorrectitudeness, was still there. There have to be some constants in the universe, I suppose.

Our classroom was in the basement, on the Division Street side of the building (as opposed to the courtyard side, facing the high school). We had been working on our penmanship. Our school was a firm practitioner of the A.N. Palmer method of cursive writing. Those of us in third through fifth grade loved the name of the writing style and found it incredibly funny for what it almost sounded like. We assumed the Sisters of Charity (a misnomer of some magnitude I should note), our teachers, weren't in on the joke.

I can see the classroom. Sister Rosita's desk in the front, centered and in front of the blackboard that took up the entire wall behind her, facing in the far corner, to her left, the entrance and exit door in the back of the classroom. Our desks faced her, arranged in academic order. 

That is, the student with the best report card was in the far upper left corner at the head of the column with everyone through to those who failed lunch and recess at the far lower right-hand side of the room, as defined by Sister Rosita. Fifty-two students of varying abilities and enthusiasms--all blank slates waiting to be drawn upon. 

Everything in that classroom was defined and controlled by Sister Rosita with the occasional support and intervention of Sister Mary Immaculata, the principal, whose office was upstairs (no talking in the stairwells! no running in the halls!) who existed, aside from report card day, as a voice on the cloth-covered speaker in the upper left corner of the classroom, above the blackboard alongside the American flag to which we pledged Daily Allegiance. 

If you are left-handed, as one of my brothers is, the Palmer Method is a trial as it assumes and presumes all of us write right (in Latin, left is 'sinistro' from which we have derived sinister; do you sense a bias here?) but even for right-handers, the capital Q can be a challenge. It's a fine line between a cursive Q and a very pretentious number 2. 

There's also the two variants on the lower case 't', one for in the middle of a word like 'little' and the other for when it's at the end of a word such as 'variant.' When you're in fifth grade, these are matters of great concern. 

Earlier in the week, before lining up to board the buses that took us home (and there was always a snobbery of those who walked home, the townies from New Brunswick, towards those of us from the developments in Franklin Township, beyond the city's borders) we had all watched, again, the Civil Defense film on what to do in the event of an Atomic Attack.

I remember the sound of the film threading through the projector gate almost drowning out the assault music soundtrack laid down by the 101st Airborne String Quartet over the ominous narration of someone like Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (no one had ever heard of Sr.; which being a Junior, I had more than casual curiosity as to how that had happened. I still use the Jr.with my name even though my father died in 1981). 

Orchestra crescendo, vivid orange flash that filled the screen and turned it red and then black, and something about turning away from the windows and putting our heads under our desks. Most of us were ten and eleven and hadn't spent a lot of time confronting thoughts of our own mortality. We weren't thoughtless-we just hadn't thought about it. It made for a quiet ride bus ride that day.

All of that evaporated as the loudspeaker crackled as Sister Mary Immaculata activated the microphone at her desk. We waited and then waited some more as, instead of her usual imperious summoning of a hapless miscreant for a punishment of a real or sometimes imagined offense, there was the hum of an open microphone and the sound of a radio or television, whose volume was very low. Sister Mary Immaculata was, for the first time in my history at St Peter's, at a loss for words. We all leaned forward as if willing her to speak and perhaps it was as long as thirty seconds later our efforts were rewarded. 

She started slowly and softly in a tone of voice I had never heard from her, or I think, from anyone. As I was to learn later in my own life and to use myself, it's the voice we use to explain events and occurrences that defy explanation. 

She started by telling us the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (with whom every child of the Roman Catholic faith in the United States had an unspoken and unbreakable bond. He was our President-the first Roman Catholic, the first President who didn't look like our grandfather, a President with a pretty wife whom our moms liked a lot with small children (younger than us), had been shot, later adding he was in Dallas, Texas. 

All of us at St Peter's School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and (very probably) across the United States and (maybe) around the world, bowed our heads and clasped our hands as Sister Mary Immaculata led us through The Rosary--the entire Rosary, not just a decade. 

That was how I knew something more horrible than what she was telling us had happened, was really happening. I'm not clear if we had completely finished when she interrupted herself, struggling to remain composed, to tell us the President had died. We said another Rosary for the repose of his soul, but my heart wasn't in it. 

I don't think I'd ever wondered until then why God didn't answer every prayer the way a petitioner wanted (I'm pretty sure I didn't use the word 'petitioner') but as the afternoon abruptly ended and we all went home to participate in the national seance provided by the three TV networks (no cable news, no satellite, no video on demand, no Internet) almost all in black and white (color television was a luxury almost beyond measure), I knew without knowing the world as I had lived in it had ended, not changed. 

I looked at the calendar this morning with regret and incredulity in equal measure. I and everyone who was born, who lived and perhaps died in the USA in the fifty-four years (as of tomorrow) since President Kennedy's murder, will never know what we and our world would have looked like had we prayed harder or longer or louder. 

I'm not sure I ever prayed again, or in the hope of my prayer being answered. And after so many years and tears, I'm not sure I would still know how. I remember that kid, head bowed, at the front of the room and I envy him for the strength his faith gave him in such a dark hour, knowing that the darkness was not only beginning but had already won. 
-bill kenny

Hooray for Holidays!

As we head for The Holidays (mental, if not actual, capital letters always expected), we (or at least, I) start to lose sight of the reason for the season and regard this time of year as just another obstacle to be cleared, another steeple-chase to be run, another 'thing' to be gotten through. 

I'm not alone. I saw lots of grumpy and frumpy folks out in the stores over the weekend wondering 'what are all these people doing out here shopping today while I'm out here shopping today?' I was, and remain, another obliviot alone on my exercise wheel alongside the other human hamsters, chasing the pellets I want for Thanksgiving dinner and a head start on the Christmas gift lists.

It's a cliche, I know, but that doesn't make it less true: we are blessed as a society. We really do throw away more of everything than most other people on earth have ever had, or will ever have. And yet, given the chance, we cry for the moon and the stars and cry even louder when we all we receive is the sun. 

Is it possible our greed grows exponentially as our needs grow arithmetically? How much is enough and how much more is too much? Did The Lord give us two hands so we could take as much as we could grab and two pockets to put it all in? And how are we supposed to offer a prayer of thanks when our mouths are full?
-bill kenny

Not Dark Yet

It's just one more recent moment in a seemingly unending series of moments in the horror show that has become Life in these United States. Another shooting, more fatalities and we don't even look up anymore. 

Order up some more thoughts and prayers because there's not much else we are willing to do to try to change anything that's been happening. It's stupefying, it really is. If a creature emerged from the ocean and devoured people with the same regularity and frequency with which we use all manner of guns to kill one another, we would have long since banded together and figured out a solution.  

And yet, here we are cause and effect about as close to one another as they can possibly get and we remain steadfast in our insistence that we can see no way to end this cycle of violence. We could start by repealing the Dickey Amendment but that's the third rail for the gutless wonders we send to Washington addicted as they are to the big bucks of the NRA whose new motto seems to be "Make Americans Grieve Again." And we shall. 

-bill kenny

Is There Life After Breakfast

As we head towards Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays, the year seems to feel like it's accelerating. Perhaps because the daylight has shifted, the days are all shorter and more jammed with activities. Personal calendars that were already pretty full are now loaded with holiday parties, travel, shopping outings and all kinds of other activities. 

So here I am on a Saturday morning lobbying you to not only put another event into the mix but one that happens today. Trust me on this one, you'll thank me later. Today, starting at ten and running through the middle of the afternoon, is the annual holiday festival with many local area artisans offering some pretty amazing items suitable for gifting to others (and, truth be told, also keeping for yourself).

The Otis Library on Main Street in Norwich is, for me, the last man standing who is now being rewarded for steadfastness. A decade ago, there was very nearly nothing in downtown, aside from potential. And now, after a lot of work from a lot of different folks, there are actual businesses lining the streets around the library with even more on the way. 

As I've said a million, billion times because it's completely true, Otis like so many other libraries across our country is not close to the same place we went to as kids, wherever that library was. Here in Norwich and elsewhere I'm sure, city downtown districts look to the library the way the fingers on the hand look to the thumb.

We have an ongoing discussion going on here about needing a 'community center' and, for me, we already sort of have one in the Otis Library, bustling with more activities and uses than either of us have fingers and toes (leave your shoes on; I believe we're on the honor system around here). 

So find the time today to head downtown and enjoy yourself and the company of so many others you probably haven't seen since this time last year. And if the latter is indeed the case, remember (and I am proof of this) women tend to age like wine, men, like milk.
-bill kenny

Love Is the Answer.....

...assuming the question is 'what can you fall into that doesn't stick to your face?' 

As part of the generation that insisted 'All You Need is Love' might I be permitted a do-over on that concept as I make my way through my Autumnal Years?  I have an excuse, and no it’s not the one I offered my Mom who always wanted a doctor. And now I have one and/or more, though not quite in the way she'd originally hoped, proving again sometimes the only thing more dangerous than unanswered prayers are answered ones.

My actual point (hard to see because I’m wearing a hat) is I’m not sure anymore that the world (or the one in which we find ourselves at this moment) can be seen in absolutes like 'love' and 'hate' or black and white. Moreover, I'm not sure that was ever the case, despite a generation's fervent conviction to the contrary. Perhaps that's why Tolstoy entitled his tome, "War and Peace". 

I think 65 plus years of running around on the ant hill, forty of it as a spouse and thirty-five of that as a Dad has taught me that what I don't know may be of far more importance than what I thought I had learned.

While my generation sang a Beatles' anthem, we were actually living the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" ('just as every cop is a criminal and all the criminals are saints....').

I’ve worn glasses for the last two (plus) decades in an effort (often forlorn) to see other people’s point of view, but I have the sinking suspicion that was both foolish and pointless. Sometimes the difference between essential and existential is both nonexistent and utter nonsense.

-bill kenny

Tendency or Casualty

Buckminster Fuller once said 'truth is a tendency," while Philip Snowden, who may have been channeling Aeschylus, popularized 'truth is the first casualty in war.' For just about the last decade, the topography and landscape of corporate communications have undergone extensive if not radical reshaping, rendering truth nearly a moot point. 

There was a time, before the last ice age, sorry the current administration doesn't believe in global warming (or, by extension, global cooling) when everyone worked to have a website. Just get a website were the watchwords used by all and sundry. But that's all so 1994ish now as we've migrated to social media platforms and beyond. I'm still trying to understand why for so many folks CNN dot.com doesn't have the cache or credibility that their Facebook page does. 

And don't get me started on the importance of having a twitter feed, or two (or more). I have an account but use it like twice a day because I cannot figure out how to follow conversations happening in the twitsophere, despite the popularity that the small-minded and small-handed Chief Executive has brought to the platform. 

In this new age of I say it and you can decide to believe it or not, and truth doesn't seem to enter into it in any way, we are running faster and faster as we, in my opinion, circle the drain. 

Not sure when the truth became a fashion accessory, I guess, because it's no longer an absolute, starting at the very top of our national food chain. When you have a manipulative, mendacious media creation as President, you have to wonder about our decision-making ability as a country. 

I found myself choosing to believe the alleged lunatic running the Philippines in the wake of the US president's recent Asian trip when the former's office assured us that the latter never raised human rights issues while the pair were in bilateral conversations. I rationalized, in light of everything Trump has lied about since stepping into the Republican Presidential primaries, why would he tell the truth now.

It took me a moment to realize I'm thinking about the President of the United States, whose office's reputation for honesty and veracity should be beyond reproach and above question except for the broken-down real estate grifter currently occupying it. Think I'm being harsh? Think again. Here's a bean count on his balderdash, broken promises, and bullshit last tabulated during the late summer. It hasn't gotten better and it won't.

When honesty becomes a relative term and a fungible commodity you can't tell truth from lies which, in our culture, means we are losing our moral compass and slowly sinking into a morass of tribal suspicions where we place Infowars and the New York Times on the same scale and think we're being even-handed. One of my local newspapers asked its readers on Tuesday "who do you believe most about whether the Russian government meddled in the 2016 presidential election?" and over 50% of those answering said they believed the Prevaricator in Chief.     

Buddha once said, "Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth." I'm thinking the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had better be praying for permanently overcast skies. For my part, I don't mind rain or snow in the forecast as long as it leads to the truth.
-bill kenny