Bazooka Joe and His Poser Posse

Wound up one table over yesterday at lunch from young people who were quite taken with their own extreme coolness. In fairness, I'd like to think when we were that age, we were more circumspect and behaved, but we weren't-our, or my, saving grace was that I was a dork as opposed to a thug.

I knew fun time awaited when the young man, leading the parade was asked by the extremely thrilled-to-be-making-minimum-wage-cos-I'm-worth-so-much-more-except-for-that-dope-bust on-my-record employee of the week behind the cash register to please remove his sunglasses and ball cap. 

There's always a concern in fast food places about robberies and people wearing sunglasses and ball caps are regarded with some suspicion. I fully expected to see Ronnie Milsap try to beat the check and dash out to the parking lot with his bag of food where Stevie Wonder was waiting to step on it as his getaway driver.

Phew! Sorry. Must have been overcome by all the naturally occurring glutamate in the fries. Was momentarily light-headed, now I'm permanently so. Seriously, I understand the concern and I also understand when you give impotent people even the smallest and most insignificant piece of power, they'll bludgeon you like a baby seal with it. 

Anyway, point made and the Pranksta Gangsta doffs his cap and slips off his shades and pulls his tee-shirt up to just below his nose in a startling homage to Bazooka Joe (without the eye-patch). That I'm the only person in this scarfing establishment, and possibly the hemisphere, who sees this similarity should be more sobering than it is.

Speaking through his shirt, Bazooka Joe orders with meticulous attention to detail, your basic burger and fries lunch (I find it amusing to imagine the person impersonating a grill master knowing what to make of an order of tartare for a hamburger as if that would happen). 

The duo behind him, Pesty and Toughie (if you're gonna go Bazooka Joe go all the way, okay?), spend as much time talking to the menu and to one another about the menu as they do to the sartorial sheriff at the register all the while twisting one another's arms behind their backs. The sixteen-year-old equivalent of 'look at me! look at me!'

I am a simple lad who orders simple food and I actually have mine and am seated when theirs is ready and they walk away from the counter. The sole empty table in the entire establishment (seemingly) is next to mine and they mark their territory by having a brief, albeit loud, food fight with french fries (damn glutamate again?). 

My theory on their surreptitious outfitting is probably true since I hear one of them suggest they need to hurry up and finish so she can get home because if 'my Mom sees me dressed like this, she'll go crazy.' As if that were all the reason necessary.

-bill kenny

The Delusion of Collusion Is No Illusion

When I saw the headlines and news bulletins over last weekend when AG Barr released his haiku summary of Special Counsel Mueller's investigative findings and the reaction on both sides of the aisle and across various media platforms it provoked, I guessed (correctly as it turns out) without too much hard work that this would be a car crash in an attempt at civic civility and comity. And it has been and continues to be. It's really proof positive that we cannot outrace our own animus, ignorance, prejudices, and fears. 

As a kid in New Jersey, we had a rule for our cut battles (the put-down contests we gnomes and trolls engaged in on our front stoops after school to make us feel like we were somebody): no mothers. It served us well all those years ago, but it looks like we've abandoned that in the present day for the more universal scorched-earth approach that's too often been the default since the dawning of the time.

In recent years we had a 'village idiot' as President, a person many insisted had grifters and grafters for advisers. As a matter of fact, there were days, if not weeks, at a time when it was hard to find anyone who had voted for this man-much less voted for him twice.

But, in a way, that was okay because, on the other side, we then had liberals (I don't have a keyboard with a sneer font, because that's how some always say this word ) who somehow tricked us into electing a person whom some claimed wasn't even an American (GASP!)

And now, so consumed were so many as to whether the current White House occupant was a Russian mole or a Putin plant that we've forgotten completely about his mental, moral and ethical, unfitness for the position he holds, to say nothing of his absence of any qualifications whatsoever. 

Of course, all of the above is to some extent hyperbole and purple prose and it should fall under the heading of 'sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me', except words do hurt if you pile enough of them on top of one another and never correct, rebut or refute any of the mischievous misstatements and lies set loose in the heat of the moment. 

Speaking of heat when did the melting pot reach the boiling point and of more immediate concern, what are we (ALL) willing to do about it? We are not so much a nation as we are a revolutionary idea-a proposition so absurd on its face that almost no one, anywhere on earth at the time we told His Majesty to pound sand, gave us a snowball's chance in Hades of succeeding.

And yet here we are, not just an idea, but an ideal for the rest of the world, but so filled with self-hatred we cannot and will not encourage or improve ourselves at a moment so precarious, that we haven't been here in since perhaps the less than Civil War.

We didn't invent this form of government-but we are its poster child to the world. Remember the faded slogans on the walls from back in the day? "Ballots not bullets. Choose or lose." What happened to the power of ideas to change lives? When did we decide to stop believing in the majesty of the thoughtful voice?

Too many men and women since our founding have sacrificed their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor so that we could claim as our own, the right to be disagreeable and hateful towards one another, to EVER dare to decide to behave that way.

Each of us knows better. We must learn, or learn again, to respect the opinions and beliefs of others even when they are different from our own (even when they are wrong), and return civility to our civil conversations. Intolerance of others has led to insanity in our past on this planet. It doesn't take a lot for that to happen again, or too many to make it so. 

-bill kenny

For My Next Trick, I'll Need a Volunteer from the Audience

I'm smiling as I type this because the event I'm anticipating is most of the day away from when it will happen, but tonight my Lady Love and I will enjoy the musical stylings of Willie Nile, whose career I first stumbled upon while I was in Germany and he was being marketed by his then record label as the next "New Springsteen" along with Elliot Murphy and a half dozen or so of others.  

He, better than so many of the others, managed to overcome that marketing kiss of death and has had for the much of the last three-plus decades a very fulfilling career that has him pledge fund to finance new albums which he releases pretty much through his website and then tours to support those releases and to increase interest in his next project. 

Sigrid, whose reaction to seeing Bruce Springsteen all those years ago I've chronicled in this very space, agreed to go to the show in Hamden with me because she loves me and I'm hoping after the show the tense of the verb is still accurate. 

I'm pretty excited about this whole evening, what with the live show and my best girl and staying up after my bedtime (I hope) and getting home safely. And a thank you to Eagle-Eyed Lee H for passing along the tour information. (Gotta get me one of those top hats.)
-bill kenny     

We're Born Again

The older I am the better I was, in just about every way imaginable. 

I believe in a few more years I'll be regaling passers-by with tales of my youth from when I was a Cy Young Award-winning pitcher, an astronaut, while also serving as a President of the United States. But today, you're in luck because my calendar doesn't stretch that far. 

I have waited for this day since about a half-hour after the last out of last year's World Series was recorded and it didn't arrive a moment too soon. Today is the day that whomever you root for starts out in first place in the standings, just like my team, even if we root against one another. 

How can this be? Because today is Major League Baseball's 2019 Opening Day, this is the day Abner Doubleday (historians be damned) has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it. Play Ball!

-bill kenny

Progress Is a Process

We're fond of history around here and maybe that’s why we’re slow to recognize the danger of allowing who we once were to prevent us from being who we need to be. I’ve lived in Norwich for almost three decades, which, for many people I meet, is no more than an eye blink, or so it seems.

I've heard a lot, though by no means all, of the 'back in the day' stories about Franklin Square, the sea captains who built houses on Laurel Hill, the Sears and Roebuck (whatever happened to Roebuck, anyway?) store that was the heart of downtown and all about Thursday nights so hectic in the center of The Rose City that small children clung tightly to a parent's hand lest they find themselves in the street and lost in the throng.

These stories, if you will, always have a sepia tinge to them, at least to me, and a soft focus in terms of detail. They always bring a smile to the face of the person telling me the tale. And then, of course, we turn our attention to the present and either no one seems to know what happened, how or why or everyone knows but the reasons involve everyone but themselves.

You’ve heard/read the stories and they all go like this: the people who lived here ‘back then’ woke up one morning and Down City was a ghost town. The stores were all gone and so, too, were the people who shopped in them.

I’m always struck by the unspoken ‘suddenly’ implied in the explanations rather than an acknowledgment of gradual decay and decline that concedes devolution, like its mirror image evolution, always involves progress and planning. The former is relentless and inevitable while the latter is conspicuous in its absence.

To my mind, we spend so much time mourning a past many of us never experienced we cannot, or choose not to, see a present slowly planting and spreading roots that will continue to bear fruit for a lot of tomorrows yet to come.

We're hobbled by the past, even when we weren't here to live or remember it. Instead of using what was as a step of the ladder to tomorrow, it's a hurdle in the steeplechase we've made for our city and ourselves. It wasn’t just Rome that wasn’t built in a day.  A walk through downtown with our eyes and mind open would tell us steady and lasting progress is being made with more to come if we have patience.

Alvin Toffler wrote about Future Shock but that’s not our illness. We suffer from Present Shock and the fear of taking action and having to own the consequences of it.

Maybe tomorrow will be better we sigh. Unless and until it's not, and then still we sit and wait because if we do nothing, we can't do anything wrong. Nothing ever happens, if you don't make it happen. Silence is NOT agreement and we've been too quiet for too long.

-bill kenny

Difference Between Essential and Existential

Grocery shopping is something we all do; not sure how many of us like it. If I'm being honest, I'm not a big fan of shopping (I'm an eater, not a fighter) but my antipathy towards shopping has a lot to do with being too stupid to cook unless Lipton's Chicken Noodle Soup counts and I already know that it doesn't. 

When I first offered this, I was perhaps channeling  Eugene Ionescu, or not. I called it:

Jean Paul-Sartre, Clean-Up in Aisle Two

Our local supermarket, feeling the competitive pressure no doubt of an Arkansas retail chain in a business where profit margins often disappear, has gone to a form of robo-shopping I find fascinating. Some parts of the country have had it for many years but out here in the woods of Southeastern Connecticut where men are men and sheep are nervous (I offered that as a slogan for a recent municipal anniversary and was turned down cold. Humor-it's in the ear of the beholder, I guess), we've more recently gone a bar-coded rewards card we sweep across a reader/scanner that releases for our use a handheld device tied to our card. That I should live to see such a day...

You wander the aisles, grabbing stuff you want, scanning it and putting it in bags (if you bring your own recyclable bags, hopefully). When you're done, you head to the checkout and scan one final bar code that tells your handheld sidekick you're past tense, and it transfers your order to the register with the total amount in the display. You pay for your order and out the door you go.

I feel so brave new worldish every time I do it, assuming I can get it to work at all. I don't have performance anxiety, but my rewards card does. I can be a little slow in getting the master scanner to release into my care one of the handheld devices and as other shoppers start to pile up behind me, I have to do my best Coolhand Luke impersonation to compensate for the failure to communicate.

This whole process is a bit like Tom Sawyer getting people to paint his fence for him. It's not that the groceries cost less if we do all the heavy lifting, they don't. But this system isn't designed to make our lives easier. Once upon a time in grocery stores of a bygone era, there were actual employees who took the items a colleague was ringing up, placed them in bags (eggs and loaves of bread on the bottom, canned goods, and automotive supplies dropped on top of them) and placed those bags in your shopping cart and, if asked, would help you get that cart to your mode of transportation and then back to your abode where the unloading and putting away were your job.

Here in the new now, we've still got (some) cashiers, baggers, courtesy desk employees, the whole kit and caboodle, who stand around as we wander the store with what looks like Star Trek weapons at the ready. All we lack are the communicators over our left breast pockets. And pointy ears, I suppose (check aisle four behind the breath fresheners).

Yet to come but soon I suspect are announcements over the store PA system that the Metamucil truck has arrived at loading dock two and twenty-of-those-of-us-formerly-known-as-customers-but-now-called-morons, are needed to unload it, and to stock the shelves in aisle eleven. 

Don't laugh-that day is dawning. We'll end up playing rock, paper, scissors to decide who's unloading the home pregnancy tests (they go at the header in aisle twelve beside the KY jelly display and thanks for not asking how I know that).

Yesterday, underscoring the perfect beast isn't quite yet where the Grocer in Charge would like it, I grabbed and scanned (in one motion; I've gotten quite proficient at this) a jar of lightly salted (with sea salt, no less) dry-roasted peanuts but, instead of a little peeps and a small green light, I got an electronic squonk and a near zen message in the device display: "The item you have scanned does not exist within your order." Oh? 

Hell is, indeed, other people, JP. Will that be paper or plastic?

-bill kenny

More Wisdom than Advertised

I was in the generational cohort that grew up reading and admiring the work and words of Kurt Vonnegut. I have no idea how many millions of us bought and read Slaughterhouse-Five, my hand is raised by the way, but I've always been partial to the sweet sadness of Slapstick, not that you asked. 

Something that tends to get lost in the churn of his body of work is how spot-on some of his observations and not all of them are in his works, really are such as my favorite: "True terror is waking up to find your high school class is running the country." 

I'd argue that point but the awards assembly starts at ten in the cafeteria and bring your varsity jacket. Here's a part of a long ago good breakfast opus that I called:

Kurt Would Probably Use Rice Milk

I am not a big fan of experimentation (I used to be a huge fan of things created through fermentation but that was another lifetime, one of toil and blood, and I make it a rule to not go there now) and plod along for the most part with one foot in front of the other in travel and travail from Point A to something like Point B. It fills up the day and makes the time go fast.

On weekday mornings I'd have a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast after I've gotten to work. I spent more time there than I did at home because I lived for the approval in strangers' eyes, I guess (keep your pity or contempt to yourself; I have my own). 

Perhaps true for you as well, I had a routine from the time I opened my eyes to about a half hour after I was actually at work. All the stuff in between happened, of course, because I was the one making it happen, but it was an auto-pilot operation. I was and still am such a slave to the routine that if anything changes or shifts, I'm like one of those wind-up toys that walks itself into a corner, I just keep bumping into whatever the roadblock has become, unable to clear it or go around. 

Cheerios at work was my decompression food, I suspect. When I sleep, I cannot recall if I dream though my wife has told me there are nights (and early mornings) where I shout out and/or talk or get up, and for which I have no explanation because I have no recollection. My dream world is just black. I use the whole going to work and getting used to being there for the next twelve hours part of the day as the Re-entry to Earth part of the program. And the fuel for this is Cheerios.

I knew someone who called them bagel seeds-suspect the Big G folks wouldn't have been too happy about that but it makes me smile and I repeat it to myself every morning and crack myself up. I never tire of saying it or laughing at it. If I had but a million or so folks with my delightful sense of humor (someone had to say it, and it didn't look like you were about to) I could have my own cable news show-and oh, how we'd all laugh then. I have Cheerios in the next to last of the red plastic bowls we had when we lived in Germany and used for cereal there. 

Some time ago, Sigrid finally (endlich!) found very nice and (actually) quite pretty replacement bowls and the red plastic ones went to the land of their ancestors on trash day. As the oldest thing still in our house, I get VERY nervous when anything is pitched out 'because it's really old.' You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows on that equation. 

I eat Cheerios without sugar or milk. Actually, and I don't eat a lot of cereals, I NEVER eat dry cereal with anything other than a spoon and my mouth. Why do you think they call it DRY cereal? 

What am I supposed to do with the milk? Drop little tiny people in the bowl so they can be rescued? Perhaps I should get a recording of Nearer My God to Thee, and with sugar cubes to construct a fake iceberg, reenact the sinking of the Titanic. Of course, with that much sugar in my system, I'd be crayoning all the walls from the outside in, until sedated with a croquet mallet. 

I used to eat Wheaties, back when Bob Richards (if I were shorter, I could ask him for a pony ride for my birthday) was on the cover (I don't how old I was before discovering he didn't invent them but was the first endorser of a cereal. I never count the Quaker guy on the oats). 

I guess if you had a cereal box with Michael Phelps, using milk would make sense, but in these days and times, I guess you'd use the ultra-high temperature stuff that looks like white water. I've never understood how they get the cows to stand still while they heat 'em up. I suspect they catch them early in the morning before they've had their Cheerios...
-bill kenny

Postcard from Positivity

Found this from some point in my past and, for the life of me, couldn't believe I was as optimistic and relentlessly cheerful as this read. Unless of course, I was just deranged; leaving me to wonder then or now? At the time I called it:

Here's Hoping that the Days Ahead

I'm remembering a morning a very long time ago when I stopped in at a fast food place for breakfast probably because the way I was already living wasn't doing enough damage quickly enough to my body. Anyway.

Standing behind a dad and his young daughter, based on the time of day and their clothes possibly on their way home from Mass (Holy Communion and a McGriddle, who could ask for anything more) I realize from the way he's speaking to the counter person about employment he doesn't have a job. 

There's a discussion of shift availabilities (all of them) and pay differentials (doesn't sound like many) and he's nodding as she's talking while scribbling names and numbers down on a McNapkin.

I think as we age, it takes us longer to bounce back from the knocks and bruises of what we insist on is everyday life. In our twenties, we went from position to position with nary a thought of tomorrow or even later the same day. 

Then as the decades advanced, each job started to look more like a career until the economic tsunami we endured a number of years ago and its crashing waves that continue to this day to thunder around us ended up sweeping away savings, self-respect and maybe home.

The child at his feet was no more than five and had a tiara on and a pink fairy-dress that parents think every daughter at that age loves. He's making sure he understands the sequence in which to call the numbers, because 'if you call region before district, they'll tell you there aren't any vacancies' when the child squeals in delight and holds up her prize.

She's found a dime on the floor-perhaps someone dropped their change from a purchase, or, more likely, it didn't quite make it through the slot in the counter collection box for the supportive housing of parents of children with cancer the franchise has constructed across the USA and around the world.

I'm not alone in this latter supposition as the father bends to pick his daughter up and explains to her where the dime really came from and, by inference, where it really belongs. Without hesitation, safe in his arms, the child leans across her father and drops the dime through the slot in the top of the box. 

He smiles as his order is given to him and both dad and daughter head for the parking lot and home with breakfast and, perhaps, a new hope. For a just a moment, a bright Spring morning brightens even more. The past is gone, it's all been said. So here's to what the future brings, I know tomorrow you'll find better things.

-bill kenny

Why I Don't Buy Green Bananas

I'm typing as fast as I can and only hope that spell check saves me from the ignominy of reading like a Hottentot at a Hootenanny. It's my own fault really-I like to live on the edge, walk on the wild side, sail too close to the wind, hang on by just a thread and as many other cliches and bromides as I can get on a 24 hour loan from Billy Bob's Emporium of Previously Used Sentence Components located in Del Rio, Texas. 

Went to make myself a little pick-me-up and decided to skip the Java Jive and the tea leaves and made a cup of chicken bouillon from those cubes that are so dense I've always suspected they are actually made from the matter that comprises a black hole in space. I especially like how there's always one piece of the foil wrap you cannot get off until you're reduced to trying to scrape it off with a fingernail and then, uh-oh, there are bouillon fragments under the nail. Do NOT put that fingertip in your mouth. Ever. If you have to ask why it's too late.

So here I am, struggling with eight fingers (the foil was really hard to get off), putting the cube container back in the pantry and checking out the label (thank goodness for that Literacy Volunteer!). There's some disquieting news all the way around, starting on the front that tells me there's chicken 'with other natural flavors'. Sure wish we'd be more forthcoming detail on that. And what about the LARGE yellow letters that brag NO MSG ADDED ('contains naturally occurring glutamates' Huh?) or the nutritional information that ONE cube provides 45% of your daily intake of sodium. Let the Morton Salt girl put that in her umbrella at the bus stop with Graham and Alan and smoke it.

And then atop the screw cap, I saw the fateful advisory, 'Best by August 2007'. OMG (as opposed to MSG). I'm lousy at math (and English as we both know) but I knew there was trouble. The light grew dim and my life started flashing before my eyes. It's been so unremarkable, mine was replaced by the Jimmy Dugan Story and since that's so short, the second reel was the Song of Bernadette (Peters, which was disconcerting especially the excised dance of a thousand veils scene from Barney's Great Adventure). 

And then, just before the darkness enveloped me, I tried to figure out how anyone, even the manufacturer (yeah, Hormel, I'm talkin' 'bout you) would distinguish among good, better or best in chicken bouillon cubes. Turns out it was getting dark because I was dozing, not because the mortal coil was assuming the shuffle off position. Talk about relief! Of course, I'm still a little peckish-perhaps a slice of fruit cake will hit the spot.
-bill kenny

From Christchurch to Infinity

Calendars not only mark the passing of time but the shifting of attitudes and sometimes track the revisiting of history.  And sometimes all they do is remind of how right Santayana was about learning or not learning from history. This week, sixteen years ago we made some more history we've worked hard to not remember. 

When I commented it on it at the time, farther up the road I called it: 
 

The Final Cut

This week marks the beginning, five years ago, of the "Shock and Awe" with which the liberation of Iraq began. Being almost 56 years old and realizing I've learned next to nothing about myself, or anyone for whom I care, I'm not sure what I think, hope or pray we might learn about ourselves as we look back at what is the first five years of the Last War on Earth.

I came across a reference earlier this morning to The Thirty Years War which, for a moment, I found comforting until I realized the name is a tag developed by historians long after its end and NOT by the leaders who provoked it or the soldiers who fought it. 

This will sound cynical, and I'd apologize for that, but it's not like you didn't already realize it, but even the critics of President George W Bush (and he had a few of those) would have to concede he didn't underestimate how this would play out, at least not when he described an enemy the likes of which the world had not yet seen.  

I'm old enough to see Southwest Asia as Vietnam with sand instead of rice paddies. Does that mean My Lai and LT William Calley were replaced by Abu Ghraib and Lynndie England? That's not what frightens me so much as that we're not ready to acknowledge the 'monster label' we conveniently place on  others (actually, a variety of denigrating terms for everyone with whom we disagree) makes it easier for us to 'deal with them' and NOT have to interact with one another and own the consequences of those actions and inactions. 

It took decades longer to get here than Orwell feared in 1984, but that brighter tomorrow has finally arrived for this province of Airstrip One, and I just hope we live long enough to appreciate it.

When you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. And while I love W.B. Yeats' Slouching Towards Bethlehem it's with a growing unease that I re-read the lines "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world......Surely the Second Coming is at hand. " and wonder if he's drawn a map or created a souvenir book of where we already are. 

The Rand Corporation has offered, online, a cleverly entitled attempt at a way ahead (use of the indefinite article is deliberate on my part) War By Other Means, that can perhaps be made into a motion picture to be shown on a plasma screen in the back seat of a stretch Hummer limo while chatting about whatever with some BFF on our I-phone. 

We don't know what 'victory' in these endless wars looks like. Maybe it's the Stars and Stripes flying from a minaret on a mosque in Baghdad or Kabul, but I suspect not. 

In the maze we've created of our lives here on earth, we persist in moving the cheese. When we reach the day when we don't remember what life looked like before 09/11/01 or the Nairobi Embassy Bombing, or Khobar Towers or the USMC compound in Beirut, what then? Reboot?

There are too many home fires burning and not enough trees.
-bill kenny

Equinox Arrives

Spring started on the East Coast shortly before six last night, so this is our first full day and no matter the weather I intend to enjoy it, possibly despite myself.

Many years ago when we were renting an apartment in the house we bought last fall, my wife planted an amazing variety (and quantity) of different kinds of flowers, annuals, perennials, bicentennials, etc. And then landscapers the house's owners hired showed up and covered everything she'd planted with I-don't-honstly-know-what but as a result, all of her flowers disappeared.

Well, almost all. On the left side of the house, as you face the street, where there's sun most of the day from early until late, two crocuses still make an appearance.

Or, at least this early in the Spring, as I like to think of it, a statement.

-bill kenny

     

Today Is Yesterday's Tomorrow

You might think reading these words today, they were precipitated by last week's story in The Bulletin or, more immediately, by the excellent editorial in Sunday’s Bulletin about funding Norwich Public Schools except, you’d be wrong.

I first offered them nine years ago proving yet again that those who do not remember history are fated to repeat it. We need to stop having amnesia.

When it comes to the education of our children, all of us have skin in the game. We must think larger and wider about what we want and expect for children from our schools and then examine and evaluate means of funding other than, and in addition, to the way we’ve been doing it. The more ideas the better, and the more voices taking part in the discussion, the more choices that are a part of the decision.

At budget time, money drives every discussion and the easiest way to end anyone's argument about an initiative, idea or ideal is to ask 'and how will you pay for this?' The silence is often deafening.

But here's the thing, especially as work begins on another city budget many fear we cannot afford, we should assume there's not going to a lot of state or Federal help in making ends meet leaving us to decide if can we afford to run our city.

We all agree we want to enhance and enlarge the municipal revenue stream by expanding private sector investment in Norwich, and that is happening, but if we don't recapitalize our infrastructure, reinvest in our public safety and readdress decades of make-do funding for our public schools, whom do we hope to attract to Norwich and what will we have left of Norwich for ourselves?

No one wants to pay more taxes, none of us like what we're paying now. But all of us want the services we currently have to remain exactly as they are, and maybe even get a little more. And each of us has an opinion on where (else) in the budget savings can be realized.

The only people who can get us out of this situation are already here. We are all we can count on and that's perfect because we are all we need, but we have to take risks to achieve rewards. And we need to remember there are NO silver bullets. And while we should always hope for the best, we must remember hope is NOT a plan.

Each of us is worth every penny of the current city budget as well as the one being developed by the City Manager and the various department directors. Soon enough the men and women of the City Council, the neighbors we elected to make tough decisions like budget expenditures, will need every informed idea and constructive suggestion we can offer.

If we are worth saving, we'll have to reinvent every aspect of how we do business. The difference between a rut and a grave is the depth of the habit.

-bill kenny

My Version of The Atheist's Mass

I return to this thought every year on this day because I think I need to remind myself that all of us, present company included, are the sum of everyone we've ever met. I know, as a result of two extended encounters, I'm better than I have any reasonable hopes of otherwise being. 

As I said, I've posted this before and appreciate your indulgence in allowing me to post it again. When I first wrote it I called it:

Scared that He'll Be Caught

This is a tough week for anyone who's ever picked up, owned, or been named for, anyone in Alban Butler' Lives of the Saints. I say that because this week the main event, of course, was Sunday, Saint Patrick's Day. 

I'm not sure everyplace on earth paints the median strips on main street green as part of the parade or adds food coloring to the beer (or gets into fist fights in New York's forgotten borough over matters of ethnicity and sexual preference) but let's face it, Saint Patrick is the 800 pound gorilla in the room for the entire month of March.

Which is too bad, because today is the Feast of Saint Joseph, husband of Mary (Mother of God) and (to my mind) Jesus' step-dad. I sometimes dream of an at-the-dinner-table exchange between the Son of Man (as a child) and Joseph that has the latter suggesting "then go right ahead and ask your 'real dad' for a new bike and let's see what happens." And then I wake up in Hell and have no reason to complain.

Today, the Feast of Saint Joseph is when the swallows come back to Capistrano. I wonder if the village fathers paint the center stripe on their main street a shade of bird droppings white and grey or if they even have a parade (I think I'd steer clear of the beer, but that's just me). 

As urbane and worldly-wise as I like to think of myself, I love the story as much now as I did hearing it as a child. I find it reassuring and, while my belief in a Divine Being fluctuates wildly (and how screwed am I if Her/His belief in me reflects my faith in Her/Him?), I hope (in a faint-hearted, wimpy sort of way) that Paley is right about the Great Watchmaker.

I borrow a sentiment from Jackson Browne, in claiming that 'I don't know what happens when people die.' And in keeping with that latter point, I have known two very dear people who shared the Feast of Saint Joseph as their birthday. 

They are both from long ago, at the time when I knew everything (and everything better) while I worked for American Forces (Europe) Network and Bob was my first (and very best) boss in Radio Command Information (together with Sara, Marge, and Brian) while Gisela was the record librarian of the most amazing (and amazingly organized) collection of vinyl in the world.

Bob was married to 'local color' as I was to be as well (GI's who married citizens from the country in which they were stationed; usually guys marrying women but NOT always). He and Erika had no children but loved as if she were one, a stray dog they took in and kept all its life, Sandy. 

Erika and Sandy passed away pretty close to one another, leaving a hole in Bob's heart that never healed, filled with a pain of which he never spoke. Bob himself passed a number of years ago and I see him at this very moment in my mind's eye in a beaten beige long coat with a beret he wore in every kind of weather. 

Gisela was my translator when the letter of permission from the Standesamt of Offenbach am Main (where Sigrid and I hoped to marry) arrived and I raced frantically from office to office trying to find someone to be my eyes (I was illiterate auf Deutsch and vowed to never be that guy again). 

Gisela put her glasses on near the edge of her nose and would read a line and then look over the tops to give me the English translation. I still recall the shine in her eyes and her warm smile when she reached the paragraph granting us permission to marry and she clasped both of my shoulders and hugged me in congratulations. 

I remember both of them today, maybe more so than Saint Joseph, perhaps because I don't know how many others remember them and I'm sad when I think about what happens to you when the last person on earth to know you has died. 

So today I tell again a little of the story of their lives, as I knew them, to remind me to celebrate their lives and hope there comes a day when we can laugh together about all of that and so much more. 

Happy Birthday, Bob und Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Gisela.
-bill kenny

Right Now

If you're waiting for a sign, how about this one?

If you're waiting for the time to be right you'll wait forever. 
-bill kenny

Celebrating the Absence of Choice

If you're getting your Irish on today, don't mind me. 

With my last name and what I know of my own heritage, I do that every day and have as little and/or as much to show for it as anyone else I suppose. I'm happy to celebrate myself and I guess happier when others join in as well, though, digging through my archives, I'm thinking it wasn't always so. 

Like this essay that I originally called:

It Was Death, Starvation or Exile

This is a day that, as full of Irish heritage as I am (along with so much else (maybe more?)), I get more than a little creeped out by the celebrations of all that is emerald even when it's not. There's a claim there are more persons of Irish descent living in New York City than there are in Dublin, but I suspect that's a statement you can make without (nearly) fear of contradiction about almost every ethnicity who've come to settle here in The Land of the Round Doorknobs.

Whether your tastes run from Danny Kaye singing Danny Boy to U2 through The Chieftains or Horslips and how you wash down your bubble and squeak, if you're celebrating being Irish or pretending to be Irish, or you just like to bathe with Irish Spring, hope the day is a good one. 

When The Gangs of New York was making the rounds, I watched it like a deer in the headlights growing more disquieted and discomfited with each frame. Though I was already old enough to realize history is written by the winners and should have been old enough to know better, I learned of a past of which I had only suspected. 

For cinema, the movie had more than an inconvenient truth or two about alternatives to the 'melting pot' (myth) explanation every child received as part of her/his American history classes in grade schools across this country for most if not all of our growing up years. (And I'm not just talking about Leo's accent.) 

Instead what more of us learned as we aged was that we have as many dirty little secrets as we have truths we hold to be self-evident (and sometimes the former is also the latter but in that case is always unacknowledged). 

The stories of the 1863 draft riots in New York City during the Civil War were as well-known in their time as the number of leaves on a shamrock and the animus and enmity directed at 'the others' (of all stripes) is as true to this day, a century and a half later. 

So whether you're marching down that New York City Fifth Avenue today or in any of the hundreds of slightly out of control celebrations across the nation that we tend to use to get us closer to spring, spare a thought for the Battalion de San Patricio five thousand miles from a home to which they could never return who became a Legion of Strangers to those who would have been their countrymen, but were refused.
-bill kenny

This Much Madness

Some events freeze the blood in your veins, the prayer in your heart and the hope in your soul. The murderous rampage by a white supremacist of Muslims in prayer in their mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, is just another in an unending series of unspeakable acts we insist and persist in inflicting on one another. 

I have had the opportunity to visit factories of death, former Nazi concentration camps devoted to the "Final Solution" of the 'Jewish Question' in Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, so I am more than aware that evil is alive in our world and that we must oppose it every day in every way.

I will NOT waste one second of the time I have remaining on this earth attempting to understand any aspect of this hateful animal's logic or reasoning. I often question the existence of God, especially at moments like this, but I never doubt that the Devil exists or that Hell is real because assholes like the Christchurch Coward are most certainly going there. 

I have to fall back on words, not my own, but those of Marianne Williamson and hope that today and all the days which follow prove to be better than the ones we've had. 

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

"We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you."

Strive to be an exclamation and NOT an explanation.

-bill kenny