10 and 90

Lots of flotsam on the internet but sometimes there's a gem or two, like this one: 

And in the end...
-bill kenny

It's Good to Have More than Two Choices

With apologies to Kermit the Frog who once lamented "It's Not Easy Being Green," it actually kinda is to do this time of year most especially here in Norwich where the Sixth Annual Saint Patrick's Day Parade is very nearly upon us.

Weather permitting (something that should be in all capital letters especially this time of year), the Norwich Saint Patrick's Day Parade steps off at one on Sunday afternoon led by Jeff Blayman, owner of Greeneville's Ideal Skate Shop, as the Grand Marshal starting from Ferry Street, meandering around most of the downtown area to include Franklin Square, Franklin, Willow, and Chestnut Streets, a bit of lower Broadway and then a left just beyond the Wauregan Hotel back onto Main Street, before finishing up at City Landing.

I always bring a compass even though I never get lost because people tell me where to go but I mention the march route to emphasize that no matter from where you choose to enjoy the parade, you're guaranteed an eyeful of marchers and an earful of music.

To my memory, we've had very kind weather more often than not and I know you'll join me in wishing for more of the same for Sunday. With special thanks to volunteers like Norwich Events Organization and Global City Norwich, our city has a growing number of celebrations of ourselves in downtown, with each event better than the one previously.

Each year the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade adds marchers, vendors, and spectators, contributing to cosa a chur ar an tsráid (Gaelic for ‘putting feet on the street’) in Chelsea, but don’t take my word for it, come downtown and see for yourself.

And while you’re enjoying the parade, look both left and right and you may be more than a little surprised at the steady pace of development across the heart of downtown, which helps put a lie to that tired old refrain of “there’s never anything to do in Norwich,” since, well, you are doing something.  

With my last name, of course I’ll be there, looking forward to seeing again someone I know only as “Paddy O’ Furniture,” a fine figure of a man in full costume who attends every year as do many from beyond Norwich who come for the parade and then stay for the family-oriented crafts festival, the live music as well as the authentic food and beverages (both adult and unadulterated).      

If you want to march, you’ll be in some fine company. Traditionally, the parade features all/some/part of our Norwich City Council and the Mayor, members of the Norwich Police Department and various area fire departments, marching bands, local service organizations and basically anyone who felt like stepping out and stepping off.

When Irish Eyes are Smiling, let’s hope they brighten and warm up Sunday afternoon enough to allow both the wearing of the green and the marching of the feet. And, yes, it’s technically early, but right on time for Sunday: Beannachtam na Feile Padraig "Happy St. Patrick's Day!"

-bill kenny

Immediately after Spring Training Starts

It's a trick of the calendar, I know, but like clockwork, Spring training baseball games start up the last week in February and right after that municipalities turn their attention to formulating budgets for the next fiscal year. 

I can already predict two things for any city in Connecticut (and stop me when you've heard this before), the proposed budget is "the tougherst we've had in a long time," just like the last dozen or so have been, and there will be a lot of uncertainty because here in Connecticut the Governor just proposed his budget last Wednesday and in recent years because of equal parts petulance, intransigence, and incompetence the legislature hasn't been in any hurry to approve a state budget which is the device that allocates money to the local governments who, in turn, have no idea how much to ask us for.

As I said, nothing new. 
As a matter almost a decade ago, having already watched the kabuki theater any number of times I offered a less than charitable assessment called:

Stuck Between Stations

"There are nights when I think Sal Paradise was right." It's almost time to name the dark fears we know are confronting us as we start to face up and address the approaching municipal budget formulation season 

For those making do with what we have for our own households and who are trying to hold the line on expenses, take those struggles and place them in a one-hundred million dollar frame of reference (now double that number) to better appreciate what Norwich is working with and against.

"Most nights are crystal clear." There are no good guys and bad guys when money gets tight. What there needs to be is a discussion and consensus that defines essential municipal services, details the levels those services should be offered with their costs and identifies those means to fund them. We may, as the poets write, cry for the moon—but we have finally acknowledged that we can only have what we can pay for.

For too many years, all of us have been spectators in a process that pitted various agencies of our own city government against each other. Too many didn’t think we could get involved or should get involved until the City Council public hearings on the budget. 

The trouble with that level of engagement is by the time those hearings are held, most of the budget discussions have been had and the decisions have been made. When we, the residents, don’t show up until the landing, it’s poor form to complain about the plane’s take-off or destination.
There's no point in posturing or hand-wringing or talking AT one another, rather than WITH one another. It’s NOT just the “schools” who have a budget problem, or “public works” or “public safety.” It’s ALL of us and if it helps, it's not just here and closing our eyes to the scale and scope of the problem will fix nothing.

The Golden Age of Glittering Generalities is a luxury none of us can afford. Specific goals, and means to achieve them, to include paying for those goods and services we want, is the only way to work through the current situation. 

That means plan on being active now so that when the discussions begin we can each offer informed suggestions instead of just shaking our heads no. We can all agree that we cannot afford everything we want. "Big heads and soft bodies make for lousy lovers." That means we'll need to lower our expectations and our voices and work together to pay for what we need without bankrupting ourselves today or tomorrow. 
-bill kenny

For Mature Audiences Only

Our children have a very strange sense of humor which I suspect they inherited from their mother. Of course, I only voice my theory on its origin when she is not in the general vicinity in the interests of preserving matrimonial harmony. 

Our daughter Michelle found this and it quite tickled me. Quite.

Actually, I laughed my butt off. 
-bill kenny

Thank You, Interwebz!

I was stymied as I stared into the empty screen I was hoping would become today's blog. 

My Muse was both mute and missing and my perspective was woe is me. 

And then, as if hearing my silent screams, the universe or at least the part that's on the World Wide Web answered me. From the screens of nola.com, this irresistible headline: 

Man in Gorilla Suit Breaks into Louisiana Home, Hides Under Bed

Somewhere Warren Zevon is smiling.
-bill kenny

And So It Begins Again

I rhapsodized earlier in the week about the start of spring training which promoted someone to drop me a note insisting 'the games don't count, so who cares?' The answer, obviously, is that I care. Doh. 

Spring training games are NOT important in terms of season standings (we don't let you start the regular season with more wins just because you captured the Grapefruit or Cactus League title) but rather because it's baseball, damn it, and if you have to wonder about more than that, you need to find another table to park your lunch tray at because you are most certainly NOT sitting here with me.

I mention any of this because the best rivalry in professional American sports (and, in my opinion, perhaps in all of sports anywhere) is renewed today when the Boston Red Sox host the New York Yankees starting at five after one this afternoon in JetBlue Park at Fenway South in Fort Myers, Florida. 

And feel free to trot out that 'these games don't matter to anyone' perspective to one of the folks seated in Row Eight in the 100 Block of Section 106 who shelled out $263 for a ticket to watch it. 
That reaction could be as entertaining as the game on the field. Play Ball!
-bill kenny            

Trouble in Trumpland

In case you hadn't noticed (though how could you not?), the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC is a piece of shi work who besmirches (I love that word) everything he touches with his tiny, little, orange hands. 

The Fake President calls every news outlet with whom he disagrees "fake news," which is a less than complimentary characterization but it pales next to being labeled an enemy which he has done via his favorite soapbox, Twitter, the one where he gets to jabber away as incoherently as the day is long knowing no one (to include those who run the platform) will ever hold him accountable for crap like this: 

Yesterday morning his hometown newspaper who knew a talentless, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic  pantload when they saw one (sometime around the point where he was cheating on his first wife with the woman who was to become his second wife until he started cheating on her as well) chose to use its front page to stand shoulder to shoulder with his current target.

#TimesUpTrump
-bill kenny       

Today Should Be a Holiday

Maybe, just maybe, the worst of winter in the Northeast is over (though so far, I, for one, can't really complain though I still shall) not just because the sun is up longer and starts out earlier, just a little bit, but because today is the first spring training baseball game of 2019. 

All together LOUDLY (you know the tune):
"Take me out to Hohokam Stadium,
Out near Mesa Arizona..."
(trails off as the only word I can think of that rhymes with Arizona is Babylonia...) 

Meanwhile, Thank goodness! 

Taking nothing away from hockey and pro or college (men's and women's) basketball (I root for the UCONN women every NCAA tournament and am so spoiled I am disappointed when they don't win it all), but at the same time dismissing out of hand whatever that pro football still being played is called (it's televised on those TV channels just above the police calls I think), it's time for baseball and not a moment too soon.

If you don't have a favorite team then go get one, now, and get ready to enjoy all of the spring and all of the summer and a small amount of the autumn before all the other sports return. And feel free to pick a minor league team to cheer on as well because that's baseball you can see and touch and we need a damn sight more baseball in our lives every day.
-bill kenny    

Choice, Chance, and Change

I'm a clutter bug. I throw almost nothing away, ever, and save things for years even if the reason why I saved it escapes me. Agendas from City Council or Board of Education meetings from years past, complete with my scribbled notes in handwriting that would make a doctor jealous? Yep, I have them by the boxcar, together with whatever supporting documents were offered at the time. 

They come in handy as they did just the other day while I was reading that news story on "Norwich welcome to additional housing units downtown" because in my pile of papers is a copy of an older Norwich Plan of Conservation and Development from 2002 (I've saved a number of them since moving here) with this in its foreword, "Good cities don't just happen, they are made" and a line I should hope none of us forget, 'the future of Norwich depends(s)on the ability of City leadership to bring together disparate opinions around a common vision.' 

Here we are in the almost-spring of 2019 and some things, like those two sentences, are constants. And others like this one should be. No matter who you are, where you live or what you do, life, reduced to its most simple and pure is: You have to make a choice to take a chance and make a change.

Too often, our personal (and collective) fear of making a mistake keeps us from doing something in the belief that not doing anything means we can't do anything wrong. I'm not sure sitting still in a world always in motion does us any good, especially when it comes to advancing and improving where we live.

In conversations, comments offered on radio call-ins, letters to newspaper editors, and on social media, we want those in positions of (formal and informal) leadership to do the 'right thing' for us and by us, though (and I'm one of those offenders) we're not always clear on what that 'right thing' looks like.
    

Our most recent election for Mayor and City Council brought a mixture of fresh as well as familiar faces to Council chambers with new ideas and enthusiasms which I think we're still working to harness and channel. It's one thing to decide a new direction is needed and another thing entirely on defining that direction. It's important we never lose sight that change is a never-ending process and not a product—in other words, its a journey, rather than a destination. 

Too often for a variety of reasons, we don't invest the time in taking an active part in our city government aside from glancing at a headline. It doesn't have to be that way and the more engaged we each are in how where we live is maintained and improved the more successful we are as a city. 

If you want to stay up-to-date on the progress of the reinvention of Norwich, check the city’s website and pick a meeting to attend. And if you don't mind a suggestion you might start with this Saturday morning at nine for an "Informational Meeting and Workshop" at Foundry 66. Will your life change? Probably not. Could our city change? I'm thinking maybe.

There was a healthy cross-section of municipal leaders, city department heads, and local businesses at the first one last month (and as there had been at the City Manager's Special meeting earlier this month), defining goals and mapping milestones to measure progress while sharing insights and information I hadn't heard anywhere else, which I suspect is sort of one of the reasons for having the conversations because knowledge is power.

For too long enthusiastic beginners, be they residents or businesses, have been worn down by discouraged experts. All of us, no matter where we see ourselves need to promise that 2019 is the year we stop making excuses and start making a difference. See you Saturday?
-bill kenny

Look on My Works, Ye Mighty

Despite some current, and (I hope) temporary, setbacks we really are a phenomenal species who have done and continue to do some very neat things. Sometimes, when I'm knee-deep in the minutiae I can forget about that and that's not a good thing. 

This is from a long time ago when I was being relentlessly cheerful because we were heading into a bright future at a really high speed. I called it:

Boundless and Bare

It was a very long time ago when I wanted to grow up to be an astronaut. I wasn't alone; there was a whole generation of us who watched Jules Bergman, 'Science Reporter for ABC,' bring us all the rocket launches from Cape Canaveral, later Cape Kennedy, dreaming of being John Glenn.

Our window on the world back then was about fifteen inches diagonal and almost always in black and white. It was our electric fire with a place of honor in the living room. We didn't know any better, or any other, and were happy with what we had. 

Now we have so much more but there's a hunger with an unease that never leaves us. It was a time when you had a transistor radio with a white six-foot earplug and if your mom wrote a note to the teacher, you might be able to take your radio to school and listen in to the launches, but you had to promise to be so much more well-behaved than was humanly possible, it was hardly worth it.

Still, we all sat up, in my case on the upstairs landing of the summer house, catching glimpses of the flickering images in the living room from the TV showing the world as we walked on the moon. I saw a story that put me back on those stairs, and it was nice to be numbed by the majesty of achievement that we humans are capable of when we try, "Astronauts Unveil Phenomenal New Window on the World."

I guess the AP style guide frowns on headlines that read "Holy $h*t! Are We Not Amazing?" because that's what we're talking about in terms of the newest addition to the International Space Station (I had more or less completely forgotten about it. Some junior astronaut I turned out to be). We've made a mess of so many things as a species. 

We are the hit and run artists of the cosmos in so many respects but when we do something gobsmacking and over the top, there's a nonchalant arrogance, or perhaps an arrogant nonchalance that makes me grin from ear to ear. How's this for a view of the Sahara to put in your wallet, between the happy snaps of the kids and the spouse. Seriously? Seriously.

"Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

-bill kenny  

Our Poorly-Kept Secret

I can get as caught up as the next person (and maybe more so) with the shitshow occupying the White House and the damage that the Mango Mussolini is doing to our country. 

Sometimes so much so that I forget to step back and take a more global view about the relationships the Trump Kleptocracy has been developing with other countries.

This is from Friday, and the silence after Vice President Pence mentions the name of his boss at the 55th annual Munich (Germany) Security Conference (of our traditional allies and friends), is where customarily applause should have gone. Except it didn't.   

Everybody knows Pantload45 is a joke. 

Except, it seems, some of us.
-bill kenny

False Spring?

Raised as a Catholic one of the things that's second nature to me whenever something nice happens is to look around and wait for the other shoe to drop. It can get awkward when I'm in a shoe store, of course, and less than pleasant in most other locations as well.

We had accumulated snow earlier this week in South Eastern Connecticut that turned to rain and then had warming temperatures so by the following afternoon it was almost all gone. I wept not one tear for its departure. Ever since I broke the Flexible Flyer I got for Christmas all those years ago, snow has been one of my least favorite vegetables and so far during this winter I've been mostly all smiles. 

Yeah, we've had windy and grey days, one after the other and I've whined about them incessantly when they've happened but yesterday we had glorious blue skies (okay, sometimes a persistent and strong breeze) and temperatures flirting with the forties. All in all, not bad for mid-February even as I wait for 'real' winter to arrive. 

This is the Lower Falls on the Yantic River at the Uncas Historic District a three-minute walk from my house. There's still lots of ice on the cliffs facing the falls but the roaring waters against the bluest of skies encourage me to root for this false spring hanging around until the real thing gets here.
-bill kenny       

The Real National Emergency

Yesterday morning the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, proclaimed undocumented immigration is a "national emergency." 

But it apparently wasn’t a national emergency during his first two years in office.

And it wasn’t a problem when he was hiring undocumented people to work for him.  

Listening to him trying to explain his national emergency in the Rose Garden yesterday was like listening to one of those oral book reports back in Mrs. McGary's 4th-grade class from a kid who hadn't read the book.

-bill kenny

A Timeless Sentiment

Yes, I know yesterday was Valentine's Day but as someone who puts the hopeless in hopeless romantic, I'd like to believe some of us have Valentine's Day every day. I wrote this almost a decade ago for my love on Valentine's Day. At the time I called it:

They Say He Travels Fastest Who Travels Alone

I do often wonder, in light of the journey so far, if he who travels so fast misses the entire point of the sojourn when he has no one with whom to share it. As someone who was very much, and for very long, unlovable, Valentine's Day is a day of major import and a minor miracle, all at the same time.

I looked at photos of my wife, Sigrid, and I, back when we were fab and she was, as she still is, absolutely beautiful to me. It took zero intelligence for me to fall in love with her at first sight and something far rarer than intelligence to help us stay in love all those years on. I do find myself looking at her, then and now, and wondering if she still sees me as I was or as I am now and if the latter, why does she stay?

We have, she and I, grown old together which causes me to smile as I had nothing nearly so grand in mind when I first saw her. And there are those who knew me back before the day who would be amazed that she kept me nailed to one place long enough for all those years to have become all these years, and to some degree, I share their amazement. 

We share a life that isn't and will never be the one I thought I wanted when I believed things worked out the way we desired (if we only wanted something bad enough), but when I reach the end of every day, to include today, I look at her and at our two adult children, Patrick and Michelle, and know that I love, and am loved by, them and I can't complain about some settling of the contents during shipment. Happy Valentine's Day.
-bill kenny

Enough of Thoughts and Prayers

A year ago, today, February 14, 2018, a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing seventeen students and staff members and injuring seventeen others. Time does not heal all wounds.

Gun violence is an American epidemic that impacts every aspect of our nation and cuts us to the quick every time we attempt to seek solutions. We can never end the cycle of violence if we never begin to stop the killing. 

One year after Parkland, we owe it to every survivor and every victim of gun violence everywhere to never again accept that there's nothing we can do. #NeverAgain
-bill kenny

Beyond Bob and Carl

Yesterday was Abraham Lincoln's birthday. When I was a child (as opposed to being childish), his birthday was a holiday from school as, too, was George Washington’s birthday which is next Friday.

We still have those dates on our calendars along with "Administrative Professionals Day" (which is on 20 April if you were wondering) and “Remember to Bring Tweezers Day” (which I may have just made up), but days specifically honoring Abe and George have had less significance for quite some time, since Congress passed the Monday Holidays Act and we rolled Lincoln and Washington together into a single date (always a Monday hence the name of the act) calling it Presidents’ Day (this coming Monday) honoring all who have held the office.  

That George spent more than half of his farewell address warning all current and future countrymen about the dangers of political partisanship, I find, in light of where we are today, astounding.

And that Honest Abe used his Second Inaugural Address to offer "(w)ith malice toward none, with charity for all..." at a moment in our history where we most fervently hated one another (with a ferocity that would cost Lincoln his very life a little more than thirteen months later) causes me to wonder why we, you, me and all the lunatic loudmouths and bombastic blowhards on either side of the political fence, simply can't pipe down long enough to work together to get this cart we're all in at this moment in our history out of the ditch we've so resolutely maneuvered it into.

To put it into perspective, when Washington and Lincoln were presidents, people disagreed to the point they fired weapons at one another--and you've seen those weapons, it took work to shoot at somebody.  Words can hurt but muskets and grapeshot killed.

And now we’re consumed by political pouting and posturing across our Sunday morning television talk shows, on the lawns of the White House and in the Halls of Congress that it makes my teeth hurt and when we get all through sorting out who's to blame for all the wrongs and shortcomings, real and/or imagined, maybe we can devote a scintilla of that energy to fixing things. 

We certainly have a long list to choose from, and all day this coming Monday, Presidents’ Day, to think about how we could create solutions, don't we?

It might be a moment to transform immigration, open borders, accessible, affordable health care for all, climate change, economic opportunity and voting rights from some kind of pitched, and high-pitched, shouting match that alienates everyone into topics deserving of reasoned and reasonable discourse rather than diatribes and demonization.

Those who have served as Presidents throughout our history, arguably, weren’t always the best person for the job, but I’d hope we’d agree, they did try to do their best for our country. And that’s a fine line. Perhaps we should try drawing it and then get real. And then stop being so cranky with one another.

-bill kenny

16 > 45

As a frighteningly homely person myself, I've always had a fondness for an observation from our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln, whose 210th birthday is today. 

Mr. Lincoln grew a beard as an adult at the written suggestion of a young girl so he knew whereof he spoke in the looks department. 

And in responding to members of both his own party and those across the aisle who questioned his constancy as the War between the States dragged on, he rejoined to charges of hypocrisy that "if I were indeed two-faced why would I choose this one?" 

Honest Abe seems to have an insightful quote for any occasion which is why he's so often invoked by his successors in office. Well, all except one whom we all know already has 'all the best words.' 

Going out on a limb here, I'm guessing "azzhole" isn't one of them but it should be.
-bill kenny   

Like a Restless Wind

"They tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe."
-bill kenny

Another Mantra in the Mail

Whoever invented spam filters should receive an award. I'm not sure what that award would be called or how we would notify them (probably not by email because, well...you know why) but it's the thought that counts I guess. I love checking my spam folder and finding literary brilliance like this item from earlier in the week.

"Hello, my dear,

      

Calvary Greetings in the name of the ALMIGHTY

I sent this mail praying it will get to you in a good condition of health, since I myself are in a very critical health condition in which I sleep every night without knowing if I may be alive to see the next day. 

I bring peace and love to you. It is by the grace of God, I had no choice than to do what is lawful and right in the sight of God for eternal life and in the sight of man, for witness of God’s mercy and glory upon my life. 

I am  Mrs. S***** l****, a widow and citizen of United State of America. I am suffering from a long time brain tumor, It has defiled all forms of medical treatment, and right now I have about a few months to leave, according to medical experts. The situation has gotten complicated recently with my inability to hear proper am communicating with you with the help of the chief nurse here in the hospital, from all indication my conditions is really deteriorating and it is quite obvious that, according to my doctors they have advised me that I may not live too long, this is because this illness has gotten to a very bad stage. 

I hoped that you will not expose or betray this trust and confidence that I am about to repose on you for the mutual benefit of the orphans and the less privileges ones. I have some funds I inherited from my late husband, the sum of ($ 11,000,000.00, Eleven Million Dollars).  

Having known my condition, I decided to donate this fund to you believing that you will utilize it the way i am going to instruct here in. I need you to assist me and reclaim this money and use it for Charity works, for orphanages and gives justice and help to the poor, needy and widows says The Lord." Jeremiah 22:15-16.“ and also build schools for less privilege that will be named after my late husband if possible and to promote the word of God and the effort that the house of God is maintained. 

I do not want a situation where this money will be used in an ungodly manner. That's why I'm taking this decision. I'm not afraid of death, so I know where I'm going. I accept this decision because I do not have any child who will inherit this money after I die. 

Please, I want your sincerely and urgent answer to know if you will be able to execute this project for the glory of God, and I will give you more information on how the fund will be transferred to your bank account. May the grace, peace, love and the truth in the Word of God be with you and all those that you love and care for.

I'm waiting for your immediate reply  please don't endeavor to contact me at my private email (s*****-l****12@yandex.com)

May God Bless you."

-bill kenny 

Not in Kansas Anymore, Toto

This is from a long time ago when I was battling (I assume) different sniffles than the ones I'm currently struggling with. 

At the time I called it: 

F.O.D.

Was sent on an errand by Sigrid, my wife, yesterday morning. I was home because I had bronchitis and since the last two times I've had it I've either ended up in the ER or actually admitted to the hospital, I decided Thursday afternoon to cut to the chase, leave work early and see my doctor during his regular office hours. He was quite pleased to see me though I got the impression he was surprised to discover I could learn things, like how to not be such a knucklehead with my own health.

He gave me a Z-Pack (because the name is too long to ever need to learn to say) and a note telling the people I work for I would not be in to work until Monday (the joke being that I won't give them the note until Monday when I'm back at work) and sent me home to put on scruffy clothes, drink lots of fluids and stretch out on the couch.

I decided yesterday I would get cough syrup because I was barking as Sigrid phrased it, "like you are smoking two packs of cigarettes a day", which, since I used to smoke three packs a day, is a bit spooky. While I was out, I bought the other daily newspaper in this region and I was to swing by the donut place and get a box of Munchkins.

I get that they are the filling knocked out of the doughnut hole-but Munchkins? I like the name but I'm wondering how they managed to get the rights to use it from MGM and whoever owns all the ancillaries connected with The Wizard of Oz. 

As if with the pounding headache I currently have from the percussive coughing I'm doing, I have enough room in my brain to worry about this stuff. And for no special reason, there were ten people in line before me, so I had some time to ponder the mystery of the Munchkins.

We did move rather quickly, all things considered, and it wasn't long before the fellow behind the counter asked me for my order and I told him, Munchkins. Any particular type, he asked, which wasn't a question I expected since it never crossed my mind that Munchkins came in types. 

No, I told him, but try to avoid giving me too many of the Lollipop Guild because they sing so loudly I can't hear my car radio. He stared at me like he'd never seen a person with bronchitis before.

-bill kenny

Miles of Nile

My girlfriend of over four decades and I are heading to Hamden near the end of next month to see Willie Nile of whom I am inordinately fond, thanks to a heads-up from Lee H, a colleague, and friend from a much earlier life. 

And then as if to underscore the Great Clock theory of the universe that I strive manfully to ignore, the following showed up in my timeline feed. Back then I called it:

Watch the Ripples that Unfold Unto Me

Had a pleasant surprise the other evening in my email inbox, a postcard from my past. I had a kind note from Johannes D in Regensburg to chat, briefly, about a Graham Parker project he's working on and to share with me his memories of listening to me on the radio, in another life, on the multiple occasions Graham was kind enough to stop by the station and visit. 

The 'station' was American Force Radio, headquartered in Frankfurt am Main in the old days of the two Germanys; in this case in West Germany, known as the Federal Republic of Germany, to distinguish it from the People's Republic of Germany. 

Those were Cold War days, not that I had a walk-on part in any of that as a skeeter-winged Airman in the US Air Force who played records, wrote and produced public service announcements and interviewed rock and rollers for GI listeners and their families numbering into the hundreds of thousands. And don't get me started on the millions in the 'shadow audience' (citizens of the nations in which US forces were stationed).

I had the time of my life. Though to be honest, I had also enjoyed AFRTS Sondrestrom, Greenland even when it went to seventy-five below zero on Christmas Eve 1975 and stayed there for three weeks in the twenty-four-hour darkness. Sure, it was miserable, but we were all miserable. 

Being an Airman, even a jeep (junior enlisted personnel), in a primarily Army organization, like AF, was, a day at the beach by comparison and you never had to worry about the sands of time getting in your lunch. Except, of course, they did.

Rock and Roll kids grow old, even if they don't grow up. The number of nights in the week where you can hang with the trolls and the gnomes after the gigs start to shrink as Neverland recedes in the rearview mirror. 

I smiled reading Johannes' note for all that it brought back to me and for all that has escaped forever, never to return, because had I realized then he was listening as intently as he was, I might have tried harder to be better at what I did than I proved to be. Maybe I've worked out more, or harder because "...you can't be too strong. You decide what's wrong. Can't be too hard, too tough, too rough, too right, too wrong." 

-bill kenny

At 66 Looking Back 55

Fifty-five years ago today, The Beatles landed in the United States of America at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and the world really has never been the same. 

Maybe the BOF in me and maybe a little channeling of my father at his reaction to the music I was listening to as a kid  when I look at the charts of today's music and artist popularity when I offer 'sorry you missed it.' Except, I'm glad I didn't.  
-bill kenny  

Stop Making Excuses

While out walking on Sunday morning, perhaps inspired by the NFL's use of Roman numerals to count Super Bowls (though never mentioning Roman Gabriel), I struggled to remember any of my school-boy Latin as I wended my way down Washington Street to the Norwich Harbor both of us enjoying a break in the days' previous very cold air, me probably a little more than the ice forming on the banks of both the Shetucket and Yantic Rivers as they met to form the Thames. 

Mostly I remembered that 'All of Gaul is divided into three parts (Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres).' but (I think) more appropriate (and on point) to some of the painfully recent events here in Norwich might be, 'what is permitted is what will continue.' 

Between us, rendering that second quote in the 'original Latin' is a bridge (wider than the one spanning the Rubicon, sorry Mr. Moore my teacher) too far for me after all those years ago but...

Here we are, a little more than half-way through the winter of our discontent and we've done little more than ruminate over the very public failings, if not failures, of two institutions with our city's name in them, Norwich Free Academy, and Norwich Public Utilities. 

You read the same newspaper I do so I don't need to quote from The Bulletin of two Saturdays ago on NFA or from its editorial page last Sunday on the now-former general manager of NPU or the NPU Board of Commissioners' explanation of its decision from last Thursday. I appreciated very much the Commissioners feeling they needed to offer an explanation although a similar perspective from the NFA Board of Trustees was striking in its absence. Sometimes the things we do (and don't do) speak so loudly I can't hear what we're saying.   

What I found eye-opening and thought-provoking were the comments and responses, and absence of same, from readers and residents, about the articles not only on the Bulletin's website but also across the social media platforms where so many of us offer drive-by analysis with almost as few characters as we had thoughts prior to writing, most of which seemed to reflect a 'what can we do?' resignation mixed with a grim 'someone should do something!' attitude, which, to me, were both terribly short on specifics.

Yes, our lives are very busy, sometimes too busy, we have convinced ourselves, to take the time to make and to be the difference in our community and so we suffer in (somewhat) sullen silence and wait for someone to show us how to be the people we've told our children they should aspire to be. 

Might I suggest the time for searching for someone to do something is over and encourage each of us to be that someone because otherwise, what is permitted is what will continue.'
-bill kenny



   
          

Tuesday 'Tude

If I - won't be - able

To hold - a good - conversation

If I - feel - big - and ballooning

If I - turn up - today

If I - can't be - appreciated

I - won't be - 'preciated - at all

And if I - look - red - and - confusing

Well, I - am all - of the above

Joining the witches

Feeding them straw

I'll be feeding the witches

The witches

Yes I'll be

Joining the witches

Feeding them straw, I'll be

Joining the witches

The witches who live next door

-bill kenny

Halfway to Spring

Decades ago math and I agreed to see other people. I'm not sure of the exact number of years but that sort of proves the point about needing to see other people. I mention that because as I do my reckoning we are exactly halfway to Spring 2019.

I think we are the only species who cuts time up into years, months. weeks, days, minutes, and seconds (phew! Wasn't sure when that would stop) except maybe for the swallows at Capistrano and that rabbit who crossed paths with Alice, or Grace Slick (I've lost track of which).  

It got above freezing yesterday for the first time in a couple of days (that math thing again) and I took myself for a walk to the Norwich Harbor and then back through downtown passing City Hall on my return trek via Broadway to our house. 

On Super Bowl Sunday morning, the gulls and ducks think they
are either Jesus or Tom Brady as they walk on water

I realized admiring the harbor and the ice forming along the banks of both the Yantic and Shetucket Rivers, which create both the Norwich Harbor and the Thames River, that today is the midway point between the start and end of winter. I was both cheered and warmed at that thought. 

Not that it means we won't see ice and snow and cold between now and the date on the calendar where we say Spring starts because six and a half-plus decades of experience here on the ant farm strongly suggest otherwise. 

I like when I can get City Hall to stand still
long enough to get a picture of it

But that little bit of extra daylight we have with each passing day helps persuade me to take a page from James McMurtry even though in my case, at least from a distance my smile and grimace look about the same.
bill kenny      

Another Natal Anniversary

The title is NOT a reference to a birthday party for an orange. I wrote this when I was younger as was the subject of it. One of us got older and the other better. No names, please. At the time I called it:

An Ounce of Blood

Today is my brother Adam's birthday. The law of averages being what it is and the population of earth being what it is, he's probably not the only one (as a matter of fact, I know of at least one other celebration happening in Portland, Oregon, not Maine). 

I am the oldest of six. Adam is the youngest. Sandwiched between us are three sisters and another brother, all of whom at various times did so much more than merely take up a seat in the Chrysler Newport station wagon and/or the Renault 10 as we traveled from who we were to who(m) we became.

Joan and Bill (Senior) were our parents. We buried dad a long time ago. Mom died almost two years ago.  At times, walking away from the grave is easier said than done and not all the promises we made to ourselves about who we were going to be when we grew up were delivered. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. 

Adam wasn't even yet a toddler when he was hospitalized as part of a medical safari of sorts that his pediatrician put him and my parents through in search of causes (and treatments) for a mystery he couldn't solve. Adam would stand in the crib and howl in pain until Yakky Doodle Duck came on the ward TV. I learned how to do the voices of all the characters to distract him. I still do them, except now to distract me.

Later, I dragged Adam to undergraduate classes while I was at Rutgers. He wasn't a mascot or a talisman or a babe magnet and he wasn't my show and tell. He was my guy. Those were exciting times, there was revolution in the air and I wanted to make sure he was a witness. After graduation, my classmates and I traded blue skies and air you could breathe for BMW's and stock options. Sell-outs! you may say. Perhaps. I saved my receipt if there's a tie-breaker. 

I recall a mad dash behind the wheel of that barge of a station wagon after discovering Adam was having a seizure on the couch in one of the eighty-five or so rooms in the ranch house we lived in, hurtling towards Saint Peter's Hospital in New Brunswick with this tiny person's jaws clamped tight on the thumb I'd jammed into his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue. It was about then that I figured out the doctor in Highland Park was full of crap (I had long since concluded he was an a$$hole).

Somewhere and somehow I wandered off and away. 

Not all who wander are lost but many of us were more than a little while others of us stayed that way. Bob's your uncle but Jack was the role model. For decades I had the same contact with my brothers and sisters those in the witness protection program have. Didn't start out that way but stemming the tide is harder than riding it, even when you know it ends in the sea far from land. 

I always told myself there'd be time to catch up/make up for all the missed weddings, the births of children and in some instances, grand-children--most of that didn't work out and my Air Force salute (shoulder shrug) became my silver bullet signature. Adam grew into the man he was supposed to be. 

He found Margaret, Suze, and Rob and forgetting my (broken) promises of that armadillo from Texas and a penguin from Greenland (he was too smart to believe that one but too polite to call me on it), he invited my family to be part of his life on a very important day for him and his family and he remains my guy, often despite me. 

I've got lots of IOU's to redeem should the 'really big' reunion be held, and not all of them will or can be because redemption is rationed and rarely earned. There are bridges to rebuild and fences to mend with almost everyone with whom I grew up. That's for maybe tomorrow.

Meanwhile, it's oh bright early as I post this and, speaking of early, I can still hear Mom, on seemingly any morning for many years when we all shared the same roof, shouting 'Up and At 'em, Atom Ant!' (don't ask). He probably is already. All I can add is Ayup! and Happy Birthday!
-bill kenny