Let's Let Bygones Be Forgotten

The trials and travails of 2019 will be over in a matter of hours, and in some spots on this orb, the first day of the next year of the third decade of the twenty-first century as already begun, so forgive me if I encourage you to linger for a moment in the Here and Now, not to look at where we were this time last year and where we are today, but to simply celebrate today and tonight for what it is and who we are. 

What we lose in any given year, I'm told, is balanced by what we gain, though hand on my heart I'm not sure how much of that math I accept. But here we are, in the dying of the light with dreams undreamt and schemes that never came to fruition as the calendar runs down and finally out. 

Tomorrow, we'll start again.  
After all, it's the same procedure as every year, James. Hurrah! Wir leben noch.
-bill kenny

Revisiting the Space Between

I tend to get morose, lacking the intelligence and sensibility to become introspective, as one year fades and the next dawns. This is from a long-ago musing that borders on the maudlin, so consider yourself warned. And no bitchy letters, okay? 

The Space Between

This close to the Next Year, rather than rue and regret what has been, perhaps we might mentally better prepare for what is to come (assuming we believe ourselves to have some control over what is to come). I've met those who see themselves as hostages of Cruel Fate or an Indifferent Deity as if we had been plopped down on this orb and abandoned to our own devices.

I'm not sure I can articulate specifically or enumerate to any detail, but I respectfully disagree. Yes, we are each our own Captains, lashed to the mast of the ship that is our life, alone in an ocean of souls, but it's a big ocean and we've all found ourselves here somehow and, at least for me, coincidence isn't really going to ever explain the how much less the why.

Thornton Wilder's The Bridge Of San Luis Rey may have been his contemplation on the value of his own life, a speculation that there's a land of the living and a land of the dead and his belief (or hope) that the bridge between them is love. To his own question, would his death matter to God (Wilder was a veteran of World War I, with carnage and brutality never seen in the history of our species, who became in spirit, if not, in fact, part of The Lost Generation), he was willing to ask the complementary question: how do we make our lives have a meaning beyond our own lifetimes?

Not the cheeriest of questions to ponder while the old year's days creep slowly to their appointed end and we embrace the next with the same wild-eyed frenzy we did the last, and look at how that turned out. And if the question disquiets you, what of the answer? "Between the idea and the reality. Between the motion and the act, falls the Shadow."

In New England, and across these United States, we are surrounded by memorials in stone, from monuments to buildings, dedicated to the selfless sacrifice of all those who have preceded us--who have set the bar, so to speak, for the rest of us to clear, each in her and his own way. Not all of us can be a general, but all of us can be generous. 

Not every one of us will be President, but each of us can be present when a helping hand is needed, be it next door, around the block or halfway across the world. We each have the power to save the world, at least the small plot of it on which each of us stands. Where can we be this time next year if we strive to be great at this time this year? We have a year to work on the answer and make one another forget the question.

"The Space Between the bullets in our firefight is where I'll be hiding, waiting for you."

-bill kenny

Definitely Different and Maybe Better

I never know what to make of TV commercials for products that boast they are "new and improved." I mean, which is it? You can only be one OR the other; not AND the other. I didn't make the rules, sorry, but I do insist we all live by them.

I was thinking about this on Friday morning when, finally, weeks of sporadic outages with our 'bundle' of cable, phone, and internet (First World Problem akin to having a too-short mobile phone charging cable), while we were out on other errands, we stopped into a store from a different billion-dollar combine that provides these services and signed up to 'switchback' to them (we were a customer from 1991 until the early summer of 2011). 

A somewhat disquieting moment during that otherwise pleasant office visit: the realization that the company still had all my data from when I was last a customer...eight plus years earlier. I decided to NOT ask why they'd retained it as Mom once told me 'don't ask the question if you can't stand the answer'  and I am very sure I would not have been able to stand the answer.

I have basically nothing to do at this stage in the process, aside for waiting for the installer to arrive 'Friday morning between ten and noon,' said the customer representative and swap out all of the new guys' equipment for all the old guys' equipment. 

I'm thinking maybe I'm the one who has to ship the stuff that worked, at best, only fitfully for the last three or so months, back to the soon-to-be-former-providers so someone else can nearly enjoy the convenience of almost having a 'bundle' if not of joy than of cables, routers, and back-up batteries and such.  

It should be a lot like heaven, except we'll have clothes on (I hope).
-bill kenny

It's Not Like Dr. Hook on the Cover of Rolling Stone

The January edition of Norwich Magazine has, gracing its cover, one of my most favorite reasons for living in Southeastern Connecticut (and don't accuse me of being a 'homer,' because my number of most favorite reasons fits on one hand if we leave out an obvious finger), the Hosmer Mountain Soda folks in Willimantic (they have a shop in Manchester but I have never been there).

I like that I can get their Birch Beer, which really should have been on the cover of the magazine, in Cafe Otis, another of my most favorite reasons for living in Southeastern Connecticut (see previous disclaimer) in downtown Norwich, and elsewhere, though more often than not I gladly make a trip to the shop in Willimantic and grab two or more six-packs of shorty bottles and vow to not drink them all on the ride back to Norwich (and sometimes keep my vow). 

There's no really deep message today (why should it be different from the rest of the calendar year?) except to remind you that #ShopLocal takes many forms, and in this case is delightfully carbonated as well.
-bill kenny

And You Can't Find Your Waitress with a Geiger Counter

Today's news nugget has Tom Waits written all over it, and then some. 

Read this and see if you agree. 

What can I say that Waits himself hasn't already said and said better? 
-bill kenny

One of the Hidden Days of Christmas

As a kid, I grew up listening to and singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas" a lot this time of year though as I've aged (matured is the preferred term), not quite so much so I'm guessing somewhere along the line it fell out of favor.

I never really grasped the idea or purpose of a 'partridge in a pear tree' or 'four calling birds.' But while it's too late to take advantage this year, there's always next Christmas, so how about something practical from the good folks at Costco to get some action in your traction? (and let's admit it, the gift wrapping of one of the tires is inspired, innit?)

Glad I'm wearing my Thinking Toque to better calculate the savings.

bill kenny

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, to you and yours, from me and mine.

If this isn’t your holiday, I apologize for the wording of the salutation but not the sentiment. As I've gotten older, I've learned there are many marvelous customs and beliefs this time of year, and I think we are the better for having and enjoying as many of them as we can.

I've spent a lot of this year trying to be my best me and realizing I’m falling short while also accepting I'm rounding the clubhouse turn, so I'm grateful for a wonderful woman for over forty-two years of marriage who promised to love me. Life is very much what happens when you're busy making other plans.

I'm filled with gratitude beyond words for the present of the presence of our two children. The adults they have each grown to be are as wonderful and extraordinary as the children who blessed my life when I so needed those blessings. Both of them have lives and loves of their own with whom to share as the next chapters in their stories continue to unfold. And happiness I would hope is a large part of their lives today.

I’ve often read that we are a society too busy spending money we don’t have to acquire things we don’t want to impress people we don’t like. That’s why today however you celebrate Christmas, I’d hope we can be grateful that if we have family and friends, we have everything we need.  

All of us know one or more people who are packing for, or unpacking from, journeys near and far but mostly to and from someplace they call home. And speaking of which my wife as always completed her checklist making sure everything was ready for Christmas in a home that blends German traditions and American ones to create something all its own and with which she and I are perfectly comfortable after so many Christmases together.

Sigrid, as always, did all the decorating inside and out, enlisting our daughter as a consultant and helper while I tried (mostly successfully) to stay out of her way as strings of light and garland and tinsel transformed that artificial pine tree in the living room into so much bright and beautiful.

Maybe this year we'll again post pictures to social media as billions of fellow travelers on the Big Blue Marble do every year so that people we know, and others we don't but think we do, can share in something we all believe we understand when its actual meaning is purely personal and deeply private.

I've been told a friend is a present you give to yourself and that there's no such things as strangers, only friends we haven't met. If both of those statements are true, and it is, after all, Christmas, when everything and anything can and does happen, then I hope you’ll agree to accept and celebrate that when we have given each other the best of ourselves, it’s the most perfect present possible.

And in that spirit, Merry Christmas.

-bill kenny

The Gift

"At that time a proclamation was made by Caesar Augustus that all the inhabited world should be registered. This was the first census, undertaken while Cyrenius was governor of Syria and everybody went to the town of his birth to be registered. 

Joseph went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to David’s town, Bethlehem, in Judea, because he was a direct descendant of David, to be registered with his future wife, Mary, now in the later stages of her pregnancy. So it happened that it was while they were there in Bethlehem that she came to the end of her time. 

She gave birth to her first child, a son. And as there was no place for them inside the inn, she wrapped him up and laid him in a manger."

or 

Our choice.

-bill kenny

Jetzt Wird Eng

Or as translated from German, it's getting close. And if you think I mean Christmas, or Hannukah (which started last night at sundown), or Kwanzaa, those are all good answers and I'll give you at least partial credit. 

What I really meant was that whole 'hurry, hurry, and scurry' mindset we seem to have had since shortly before Thanksgiving (and that threatens to start even closer to Halloween) and goes full-tilt until the New Year. We run breathlessly and heedless of the danger and damage because, well, because everyone else is running it seems.  

And as part of my delayed commemoration of the Fourth Sunday of Advent, let's revisit one of my most favorite (not) clips of the season, Christmas Light Hero because nothing says 'let's commemorate the season marking the birth of the Savior of Mankind' better than over the top conspicuous consumption and ostentatious displays of excess. And many of us wonder across these United States, why so many people in so many places around the globe don't like us. It is a puzzlement to me as well.

At one level this, it may be argued, is harmless and "American" in every positive sense of the word. After all, check the wording in our Declaration of Independence, "...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." F-U-N. Who else lives in a country founded on fun? Anyone? Judging from the footage I've seen of Mardi Gras Rio, maybe Brazil, but that's about it. And admittedly, no one's getting hurt and it's all lighthearted and that's fair enough I suppose.

I have no idea what a display like this cost in terms of money and material or into the service of how many other uses all of that could have been placed, but I suspect whatever amount, it would have disappeared without a trace into the chasm of need we have on this planet, or just in this country. 

The (unconditional) War on Poverty declared by then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson began fifty-five years ago. How do you suppose that's going? Perhaps we could ask one of the homeless who shuffle from abandoned threshold to threshold in my downtown, and yours, trying to get a break from the winter wind--or inquire of the poor who sleep on heating grates as people step over them on their way to work every day in every major city in this country.

I don't pretend to know the intricacies of the most recent census (or the politics of manipulation as we gear up for the next one) or the truer meanings of the New Testament, so I'm not sure how many unwed, pregnant women we have who are living in barns across Connecticut or the county it's a part of, and in many respects, it makes no difference. As a culture and a country, I fear, we've not only come to expect the giant government program, we rely on it.

Instead of neighbors helping neighbors in a thousand small ways, we group together to form advisories to draft a plan and organize a feasibility study. We've gone from the preamble of the Constitution, "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity...." to "Greed is Good."

If I'm distressed by anything I've seen or known in my sixty-seven years (so far) on this Big Blue Marble, it's that we keep having to choose between extremes; there's never any way to lift all the boats. Coming out of the local Stop and Shop earlier this week, the ringing of the kettle collector's bell prompted me to offer a dollar bill to a foot soldier in the Salvation Army. This has been a tough year for many of us, but, hand on my heart, a buck is nothing. If each of us gave a buck, how many people could that money help and, before we get too euphoric, how many would remain to be helped?

Enjoy the success of excess but try to remember, as covered in Santa suits and reindeer poop and Black Fridays and best deals of the year distractions that all of it seems to come with, the reason for the season. 

Others around us may not celebrate Christmas but their holiday and ours share so much of the same values that it's hard to believe after all the work we've (all) invested in helping those of us less fortunate that there's still so much yet to be done. So go ahead, double click on the YouTube funny clips about holiday lights-but reach into your pocket today as you look into your heart, and give of yourself to someone else. Their smile of gratitude will light the world.
-bill kenny

Open Your Heart

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

Perhaps today is a good day to see someone in a corner of our lives we usually just glimpse while on our way to the many big and important things we each do and never really acknowledge.Let's face it: we're a pretty crowded ant farm with appointment calendars, beepers, and briefcases and sometimes the person next to us falls through a crack and we never notice they're gone.

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

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

Darkness Peaks and then Slowly Diminishes

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

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

Osage Forest of Peace 

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

A Day Delayed, But Not Denied

I wrestled with this, as I do every year, and thought I was past it but of all the things one can never leap over, one's shadow is at the top of that list. This should have been in this space yesterday but wasn't. When I wrote it a very long time ago I called it:

And All This Time the River Flowed

I don't ever remember celebrating my father's birthday as I grew up. Logic dictates we, our mother (his wife) and my brothers and sisters (his children) must have done so as we did for everyone in our family, and yet every year I struggle and fail to find a single memory of a single moment of that day.

I mention that because had he lived, today would be his ninety-sixth birthday (he died thirty-eight years ago) and I'd like to think he would be something I never felt he was while we shared the earth, proud of something, anything, I'd ever done. In this case, as was so true in our shared lives, I would be cheating (oh so slightly) as I'd hope he'd be proud of his grandchildren, Patrick and Michelle, who are my wife, Sigrid, and my children.

My most lasting memory of my father isn't really a memory of him at all, but a reminder of how life goes on within you and without you. Many years ago while shopping, Sigrid found what she assured me was 'the perfect card for you to send to your dad for Father's Day.' This was all pre-Internet and global village days, remember, and actually, it was back when it was only she and me and work (and sadly, not always in that order).

I don't remember the card, though this would be a better lesson for me if I had, but I signed it after Sigrid had addressed it, put a stamp on it and had me throw it in my work bag (a shoulder-strapped book bag, of sorts, that carried, judging from its weight, most of the world's most curious and heaviest items).

And that's where the card stayed. Months later, and well past Father's Day, she was rooting through my bag, in search of something I had promised to bring home but had misplaced. Her theory, more often right than I'd like to admit, was that whatever it was, it could be found in my bag. The body of Jimmy Hoffa, the other gunmen on the grassy knoll, Weapons of Mass Destruction--check in the bag.

What she found that day, and registered a quiet note of disappointment with me because of the discovery, was the card we both thought I had mailed months earlier for Father's Day. Faced with the reality that I hadn't, all I could do was to mumble a promise to do so 'next year'.

You've guessed, of course, that my father died before 'next year' ever happened. As a self-centered oldest child, stiff-necked and incapable of bending, I had clashed with my father nearly every day of life-I think from the time I could talk, all I said to him was 'no.' 

I don't recall what we fought about or why, but they were bitter arguments, often ending in physical contact that made me more fully appreciate the weight of his hands, but I refused to yield anything at any time and we passed months, if not years, exchanging as few words as possible for as long as possible. 

I had wished him ill growing up countless times, and when notified by the Red Cross (I was still on active duty in the Air Force) that he had died, my first reaction was overwhelming guilt.

We three oldest children had moved out and away, but our three youngest sisters and brother were left to be raised by our mother in circumstances vastly different from ours when we were their age, and that I made no effort to ever learn or to mitigate or improve. 

I've never spoken to them about those times and know I'll never do so. More casualties in a war that should have ended decades ago, but continues even as I type this and feel the gorge rise in my veins as if "enough" weren't already, and finally, truly enough.

I am, like it or not, my father's son in ways neither of us could have ever seen or imagined. Perhaps he'd be proud of that, and yet I truly hope not. Life is a sum of all your moments--waking and dreaming; everything you've done or left undone; every word, said and unsaid and of all your prayers, answered but, most especially and finally, unanswered.
-bill kenny

Wait! No Figgy Pudding?

A lot of families, mine included when our children were still children, have dinners and get-togethers to mark the Christmas season. Our two children, now grown and gone, have their own someone's with whom to have holiday meals in much the same way as their parents got started over four decades earlier. 

I've fantasied about having spaghetti and hot sausage as the Christmas meal. Sprinkle a lot of parmesan cheese on top for that freshly fallen snow effect and there you go, Bob's Your Uncle. 

Speaking of all things British and don't worry I'm not about to go on a Boris Johnson and Brexit rant (though it's nice to live in a nation that is no longer the dumbest English-speaking country on earth), how about an evolution that could only come from a country where for decades the sun never set on the flag of their empire? 

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Christmas Tinner, for Christmas dinner. 
All we need now is a drive-through gift exchange and it'll truly be heaven on earth. 
-bill kenny

You Look Older Without Your Clothes On

One of my favorite Christmas customs, aside from amusing my wife and children with my ill-advised attempts to gift wrap presents, is enjoying "It's A Wonderful Life". Anytime it's on television I find the time to watch it even though we also have it on DVD and if I knew how to work the player I could, in theory, view it anytime I wish. (In much the same way as if I had ham I could have a ham sandwich. (If I also had some bread)). 
  

I was surprised to read when the movie was first released it was NOT hailed as a classic or celebrated for its art but was seen more as both a commercial and artistic failure. In the decades that have passed, as more of us have had an opportunity to look at its larger message and ponder the implications of the road not taken, the appeal of the movie has, I think, grown.

I arrived here because we won the Cold War and NATO cut the overhead. I had lived in Germany since 1976 and had a wife and two children. We had a gemutlich existence in the heart of a moderate-sized German city. 

Our two children were old enough to realize Dad's German wasn't as good as theirs (actually it was about as good as my daughter, Michelle's if you forgot that I was in my late thirties and she wasn't quite four). And then the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact collapsed and we in Western Europe thought the Age of Aquarius had dawned. Turns out it hadn't and it still hasn't, but that doesn't mean someday it won't get here-just not today.

There were hundreds and thousands of decisions that had to be made (or not made) in order for us to settle here in The Rose of New England. I cannot imagine all the ways my life has been enriched by those with whom I share my neighborhood and by the neighbors from across the city with whom I've worked with on a variety of volunteer committees. 

I'd hope I've added something to their lives as well but know better. I am humbled and grateful for what they have shared with me and realize I am who I am because of every person I have ever met on the way to who I am now.

For some, knowing me has been more of trial and error (emphasis on the latter) than either of us wish to admit. For others, a little contact goes a long way and absence makes the heart grow fonder (and so they are waiting for me to leave so they can like me). 

I lack the grace and style of Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey, though I've often attempted to lasso the moon for the love of my life. I'm not sure I could stand up to Potter the way George did and that whole 'angel gets his wings' thing gets me confused. The first Clarence I knew of growing up was a cross-eyed lion, so, child of the video age that I am, the programs sometimes get edited together and the meanings get diffused.

The days of 2019 are dwindling dwindle down with Christmas just a week from today. I think we should all look forward with both hope and confidence to what the next year brings because of what we have endured, persevered and triumphed over during this year.

I'd wish the same for you and yours: a moment of respite in the hectic days ahead to reflect at where you are and how you got here and to better appreciate that trials and tribulations to the contrary, indeed, "It's A Wonderful Life."

-bill kenny

Should Be Coming Up for Release

This is from a little more than a decade ago and I confess I had forgotten all about it until I fell over it and smiled not at how clever I am (I stopped doing that hours after birth I guess) but for how amazing and different we all are from one another (and how happy I am to not be Nicholas). At the time I called it:

And One to Grow On

We were a loud and large family when I was a child. My parents had heeded the Biblical injunction at least in part-my dad always had a garden though how fruitful it was, it's hard to say now-but we were many so they were good at math, at least at multiplication.

Birthdays usually involved grandparents, Mom's, who were much closer geographically, living in Elechester out in Flushing, Queens, than were Dad's, someplace out in Illinois (I learned years later, Taylorsville (maybe without the 's'). Sightings of Grandma Kenny were rarer than Elvis, the live Elvis, who's not nearly as successful as the dead one, so we always called Grandma Kelly, Grandma.

It was of her I thought yesterday morning when reading the saga of Nicholas T. versus Sue H., actually Judge Susan B. Handy, in a courtroom in New London, Connecticut, Thursday. Grandma had, when her children were our ages, she told us, started a birthday tradition of gently smacking the birthday child on the bottom once for every natal anniversary topped at the conclusion by a pinch, 'to grow an inch' by your next birthday. 

In the ensuing decades, the notion gentle was lost. Reading that now helps explain why, usually for our tenth birthday, most of us received a set of Esso road maps as a gift so we wouldn't get lost when we ran away from home.

Anyway, Nicholas wasn't ever at those gatherings which is just as well as Nicholas comes across as a bad man when you read the news report. I couldn't help but wonder if he'd built up his stamina if Lance Armstrong couldn't have used him on his Tour de France team. But that was not to be. Nicholas had other ideas and when a boy and his bike (and his sawed-off shotgun hidden under a pink blanket) have their mind made up about something, that's all there is to it.

Nicholas, says the news story, was in Groton visiting from New York when he robbed someone of $140, making his getaway by bicycle. The idea of a bike race where you commit armed robbery along the way probably hasn't yet been broached to anyone in the Connecticut Department of Economic Community Development who handle tourism for our state(I envision swarms of competitors, stretching to the horizon with satellite TV uplink vans and bloggers, twitters and facebookers as far as the eye can see. Tourist Ka-Ching!). I just hope when they go with it that we don't owe Nicholas royalties for intellectual property rights.

Back to Grandma. 

Nicholas the Biker had not been Mr. Congeniality during his incarceration says the story, from the time of his arrest, through his trial to his sentencing Thursday, where he was awarded fourteen years for both robbery and weapons possession (I wonder what became of the bike?). 

As they say in the infomercials: wait, there's more. Apparently not appreciating the right to remain silent might be for his own good, Nicolas "unleashed a stream of obscenities... when Handy asked Trabakoulos if he had anything to say. His responses are unprintable." Johnny, why don't you tell us what Mr. Trabakoulos has won?

The judge ordered Nicholas removed from the courtroom, gave him two hours to mull over his actions and then brought him back to ask if he wished to apologize. Nicholas had a number of wishes, but apologizing didn't make the list. 

Judge Handy, like Grandma, then gave him six additional months on top of the fourteen years, for contempt of court. It would have been too much, I suppose, had Nicholas also been sentenced to be transported to the pokey on the handlebars of a bicycle pedaled by a corrections officer, though I'm unsure the officer could have reached the bell.
-bill kenny

I Have Been a Desperado

Sometimes all I have to do to find inspiration to fill up this space is look to the interwebz and like manna in the desert, it's all right there. Or in this case, right here.

That may not be the greatest story ever told, or even this year, but it reminds me to remind all you junior cowpokes that you've got spurs (San Antonio and otherwise) that jingle, jangle, jingle as you go rolling merrily along. 

Don't take any wooden cowpies, podner.
-bill kenny

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Am I blaspheming if I look at the past fifty weeks of this year and exhale as I say 'it's been a helluva time'? Rhetorical question in my case, I suppose.

I know this is supposed to be the Season of Hope but still, at times it's a hard slog. For me, thankfully, today, Gaudete Sunday, remains a bright spot and has since my earliest school days.

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

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

-bill kenny

Already Seven Years On....

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

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

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

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

I suspect seven years ago you did what I did: watched television and read rafts of online commentary and analysis (a three-dollar word for what on my block we called a WAG) nearly non-stop assuming, persisting in the belief might be a better phrase, that at some point a penny would drop and a light would go on and someone, somewhere would say or write something that caused us each to have an 'aha!' moment and understand what happened.

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

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

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

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

A Public Service Announcement

I don't do this often, so savor it.

I know you did not see that coming.
-bill kenny

Almost a Postcard

I have never claimed to be a fan of snow though I will concede under some circumstances, it can add a spirit and sparkle to my everyday. 

As was the case yesterday afternoon coming back from running some errands and stopping to admire the sights and sounds that were part of the scenery at the Lower Falls of the Yantic River, my most favorite place to pause in all of Norwich.

Yesterday was exactly two weeks until Christmas and for a moment it sure felt like it.
-bill kenny 

The Toil of Tradition

This is the time of year when traditions drive a great deal of who we are and how we behave. Smiles are a little brighter, steps are a little lighter, and hearts are gladder as we wish one another the best of the holiday season however it is we choose to celebrate and share it.

This Saturday is one of my more favorite holiday traditions and while it's somber and solemn, it's also in keeping with the season as we spend a moment or more thinking of others and what they sacrificed for us. I've offered similar thoughts in previous years-just think of it as my part of the tradition.

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

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

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

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

The Taftville ceremony is always well-attended but there is still room for you to be there, too. Seven specially designated wreaths for the Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, and Prisoners of War (POW) and Missing In Action (MIA) will be placed on memorials following some brief remarks by Mayor Nystrom and State Senator Osten. 

Following the conclusion of the ceremony at Sacred Heart Cemetery, there will be a second ceremony with nine wreaths placed in Monument Park at Chelsea Parade.

If only for the few moments the two ceremonies take, neither we nor those whose sacrifice we are remembering are alone, and that's as it should be, and not just for the holidays. No matter the temperature and weather conditions, your presence will warm the hearts of the organizers as well as your own.

As an attendee in previous years I always admire the words offered by those who speak during the ceremonies because I can never find my own words to capture the essence and adequately describe a heartfelt and homegrown acknowledgment of the lives of our departed veterans (of all services and from every conflict and era of our history). 

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

I’ll look for you Saturday at noon.

-bill kenny

A. N. Palmer Died for Someone's Sins

I came across a news story that will probably not evoke a lot of happy school-day memories from my left-handed siblings (who have an under-handed sibling in me). 

Cursive writing is making a comeback (exclamation points sold separately at fine stores everywhere), most recently in The Garden State (I'm imagining 'fuhgeddaboudit' in script; maybe something like Fuhgeddaboudit). Not sure how Tony Soprano would feel about that.

I will confess that I did NOT know teaching cursive penmanship had been disappearing from classrooms across the country from years (based on recent experiences I assumed it had been outlawed in medical schools), but now, it's on the comeback trail. 

I'm thinking we should start to watch the police logs in the coming months to see if there's an upward trend in illegible hold-up notes.

-bill kenny

Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 Need Not Apply

We're an odd lot, us Crown of Creation types, who cover this earth like Sherwin-Williams Paint with often just about the same amount of intelligence as a can of the no-drip enamel finish stuff. 

While there are as many hours in the days that comprise the weekend as there are of those during the week, news organizations, be they print, online and/or electronic, tend to bare-bones staff their weekend crews so you have fewer people covering and reporting at any length on events, be they across the street or around the globe. 

I guess that's what happened here though in The City That Never Sleeps I'd have assumed the New York Daily News would have already had its hands full.  Not surprisingly, the coverage by ABC News Australia of the same item is much more expansive.     

I leave the next to last word on all of this to the South Australia Police. 
And invoke Bob Dylan for the absolute final one. 
-bill kenny

Presidents, Residents, Foreigners, and Aliens

A memory of the season, and the Second Sunday of Advent for me at least. 

Somewhere on the way to here and now, I lost my way. Not as in shuffled off the beaten path and got lost, but defiantly chose to not do as those who came before me had so chosen for generations. Too stiff-necked to this day to acknowledge my failings and weaknesses, I'm often in doubt but never in error. At least in my own mind.

Advent is a season of preparation; for the devout, it is for the coming of the Savior. The annual path to the birth of Christ began last Sunday and I know the calendar and the ritual. But I've never been quite sure what it is people like me are doing or supposed to do as flail about seeking land and trying to keep our heads above water theologically.

I envy those who bundle up and head out for early Mass, with confession beforehand and who can then leave the church fortified for their week ahead. I miss the comfort of the ritual and the sense of shared belonging. I fill up my hollow days with noise to distract me from hearing the approaching roar. 

I've never been clear if I should look to the future with anticipation or fear. However, I do understand I'll find out soon enough and far sooner than planned.

-bill kenny