I Can't Wait Much Longer Before We Begin

It's hard to believe that the end of 2020 is finally here. And while so much was different, radically different than in years before it, let's not kid ourselves. We looked forward to 2020 with expectations that no decade, much less a single year, could have possibly fulfilled. and, really to no one's surprise, it didn't. Not even close.

But to our credit, we soldiered on. And okay, we are here at the threshold of the end of the old year and some of us who started on this sojourn have vanished along the way, but that's the natural order of things because that's what life really is, a series of hellos and goodbyes with pregnant pauses between and among different people.

You'd think (hope?) with our big brains, our command of language, and our use of tools that we might be a bit better at carrying over into the new year a little more of the insight we gleaned from the old one, but it doesn't seem to happen. 

Perhaps we get distracted by the bright and shiny stuff, not that we seem to do much with it and the timeless and treasured eventually just become part of the scenery and the machinery. It hides in plain sight and we don't see it at all.

Tonight's tolling of the (John Donne) bells at midnight that signal (and usher in) the Next New Year are neither a challenge nor a warning, they are the turning of a page. Not the closing of a chapter or the ending of an age.

Twenty-five years ago, today, those two remarkable cartoon creations, Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, said goodbye forever as the first rays of the First Day of the Next Year were just peeping over the horizon.

They left quietly but with a prescient present that we can still employ to propel ourselves further along long after the mirror ball has dropped and the champagne corks have popped. There's a difference between childish and child-like that we would do well to remember when the confetti is through falling.

We're about to have a blank page to write upon. The moment to pen our first word is nearly at hand. Choose well, for all of our sake, because for some of us that first word may prove to be the last one as well. That doesn't mean you should hesitate before writing; just the opposite!  Enjoy every sandwich.

- bill kenny

From Horribilis to Mirabilis

I didn't get quite as much out of those Latin classes I sat through in Form III and IV back in my prep school days. The appeal, if I may use that word in choosing Latin in a school where everyone was enrolled in a language, was supposed to be the wonders it would work on my college SAT vocabulary skills. 

Between us, I was well on my way to developing a very colorful vocabulary riding the trains, buses, and subways to get to and from school every day (but knew better than to show off those words at the dinner table). Hand on my heart, the only thing I got out of Caesar's Gallic Wars was all of Gaul was divided into three parts, and though I loved the musicality of reading aloud Cicero's Orations, Ovid's Metamorphoses left no marks anywhere. 

And I'm not sure how much of all of that school-boy Latin I needed to appreciate a description of 2020, which ends not with a bang but a whimper this Friday morning, as annus horribilis, a year of disaster.

Certainly sounds about right, doesn't it? At least at first glance and don't worry I'm not going to offer you my rose-colored glasses in an attempt to reinvent a past we've all just barely survived with skill and luck. But, and here's my point, we did. 

We got up every day and did what we needed to do for ourselves, our families and friends, and our communities. Our need to learn new skills and new ways to do things may have vastly exceeded our desire to do either, but we persisted and we're about to start on the next chapter of the voyage with lessons learned no one can ever take away from us. 

I'm revisiting something I wrote years ago at this time not so much because my circumstances haven't changed (they have) but because who we are invites and incites me to dream a bigger dream of who we might yet become. 

Let's face it if we don't live large, what's the point of it all? This close to the Next Year, rather than rue and regret what has been, perhaps we might better prepare for what is to come (assuming we believe ourselves to have any control over what is to come). 

I've met people who see themselves as hostages of Cruel Fate or an Indifferent Deity as if we had been plopped down here and just abandoned to our own devices. Sorry, I must most respectfully disagree. Yes, we are each our own Captains, metaphorically lashed to the mast of the ship that's our life, seemingly alone in a vast ocean of souls, but it's a big ocean and yet we've all found ourselves here somehow and, at least for me, calling that coincidence isn't really going to ever explain the how much less the why.

Might I point out that 2020, with a sense of urgency none of us could have ever guessed, should have made us focus on answering an age-old question: how do we make our lives have meaning beyond our own lifetimes?

OK, that's not the cheeriest of questions to ponder while the old year's days creep slowly to their appointed end while we embrace the next that's yet to be. And if the question disquiets you, what of the answer?  

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 left their mark and who have set the bar, so to speak, for the rest of us to clear, each in her and his own way. 

Not each of us can be a general (where would we put all those statues and what about the pigeons?), but all of us can be generous. 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 are about to have a new year with which to work upon an answer that eclipses any need to ever worry again about how we choose to define ourselves. 2021 will be here in little more than a moment. Let's make sure it finds us ready and willing to make it truly annus mirabilis, a year of miracles.

-bill kenny

Cliff's Notes for 2021 Prepping

Do people still do things like make resolutions for the New Year? I was never big on that as a kid and for the life of me I don't remember if anyone in my family was into that, or why (assuming they were). 

Some of us take the making of resolutions a lot more seriously than others of us (me) do. I'm looking at you, Harvard Medical School. And where would we be without some insight and inspiration from the New York Times? 

Perhaps I'm inspired by their example, leading me to offer you a little tip as you start hardening your resolve in preparation for the turning of the calendar page. 

It's always helped me.
-bill kenny

The Revenge of Mexican Radio

More and more of my family live in The Sunshine State. You would think having me as a sibling or a parent would be all the sunshine you'd need, but apparently, you'd be wrong. 

In addition to getting used to palm trees instead of pine trees, a transition two of my sisters assure me that can be made in mere seconds, you need to develop a different set of references for cold and hot weather, with both scales being adjusted upwards to a certain extent. 

I have some first-hand experience with that as Sigrid and I spent a week in the Tampa area in mid-November of 2018 for my nephew's wedding (and obviously other activities) and returned to a typical nippy November in Connecticut, I wasn't really ready for having spent most of the week in shorts. 

All of which I think should suggest I have some sympathy for the plight of iguanas in Florida when a freak cold spell hits Miami. Or to hope my family members are safely out of harm's way. Except in my case, all it does is make me appreciate Wall of Voodoo even more.
-bill kenny

This Escalated Quickly

This is the last Sunday of a year that I know I am not alone in hoping to forget forever almost immediately, except for all the damage it has done to so many people I know and love (and hope you are NOT in that number).

2020 was in all likelihood not a good year for you either. I welcome the arrival of 2021 and the hope and promise of what it may bring for us all. I'll also concede a year from now some of us will not be here to read the update to this entry (or write it, for that matter) but that can also all be true as of a day, an hour, or a minute from now as well. 

I admit while actors and actresses are changed and exchanged often on a daily (if not more frequent) basis (in every aspect of our everyday lives), still, the play goes on. We change partners but continue in the dance. 

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

Zweite Weihnachten

There's a PBS Christmas Eve broadcast tradition to which I look forward, which is very enjoyable (I know I found it to be watching it on Thursday evening) but I like to save sharing it for Second Christmas, which in Germany at least is a time to celebrate the joys of the season with friends. 

This is why I'm sharing this with you now.

Merry Christmas. Again.
-bill kenny

Pass the Figgy Pudding

Merry Christmas. To you and yours, from me and mine. If you don't observe the holiday, I apologize for the salutation but not the sentiment. As I've gotten older, I've discovered there are many different customs and beliefs, but I've realized they aren't mine and do not need my approval.

And based on how my life has gone for 68 Christmases, I don't need snow or frosty weather or sparkling lights and boughs of holly or gift wrap and holiday cards--though all of those are very nice and help complement a contented and contemplative state of mind. 

I've spent a lot of this year being ill, and less time getting well and realize I'm rounding the curve in the road where the ratio rarely evens out, so I'm grateful for the love of a woman for forty-three years of marriage who promised to love me in sickness and in health, though neither of us thought either of those circumstances included Norwich, CT. Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

I'm filled with gratitude beyond words for the presents of the presence of our two children, Patrick and Michelle. From the memories of walking the floor of the delivery room in Central Germany with a newborn while I sang "I've Been Working on the Railroad" for hours on end, to holding my infant daughter, her feet in my hand and her head in the crook of my arm as she clicked her tongue just moments after being born. He is 38-she is 33 and they are both used to their old man dissolving in a puddle of tears and smiles as I talk about them growing up as if they somehow had missed it.

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. Through a move from the only culture and language that all three, my two children and my wife, had known to the rocky near-seacoast of Southeastern Connecticut, to a people and lifestyle unlike that of my childhood. 

Today, the first Christmas is for family and though we are not all together physically, I hope you and yours are, no matter the distance or time. Tomorrow, the second Christmas as the Germans call it (the Brits call it Boxing Day which may go some way in explaining how they colonized and subjugated the planet two hundred years ago) is usually a time for visiting with friends--the phone will ring often in our house as my wife reconnects with those from her previous life, wishing them well for the coming year, knowing that our chances of getting together anytime, soon or otherwise, is very limited. And also knowing we have given each other the best we have, ourselves. 

Merry Christmas. Or bust.
-bill kenny

I Hope Sometimes You Think of Me

I don't enjoy a reputation for being the most Christmasy of people on my street, in my neighborhood, across my city, or in this hemisphere if I were being honest. 

It's Christmas Eve Day which may or may not actually be a separate thing all of its own now, I'm not really sure since after retirement I don't get the memos with the same alacrity and frequency I once did. 

I do know like this nearly accurate photo below, by this time tomorrow Christmas is history.  

I hope you have the Christmas you deserve.
-bill kenny

Not Quite a Gift from the Magi

I think last week's snow across the region helped accelerate a lot of youngsters' hearts and even more young-at-hearts to include the two-sizes-too-small one in my own chest even though snow is one of my least favorite vegetables. 

This time of year, in New England especially, there's an expectation of snow for Christmas that's shared by so many people who don't ski or sled or snowboard but who see it as a celestial seasoning and crowning holiday ornament. I hope they are pretty pleased with themselves right now and in light of the year most of us have been having, I believe they're entitled to put the holiday snowfall in their win column if that's what they want. Small victories are still victories (unless you have to shovel them).

Speaking just for me (and my aching back), I personally might have appreciated a little less of the white stuff, but the first time I walked around Chelsea Parade after it fell and watched a couple of folks and their four-legged children enjoying themselves it put a smile on my face as well, mostly as a reflection of the joy the dogs seemed to feel but also because it reminded me of scenes from some old home movies playing in my head. 

I can remember when our kids were kids (Patrick was in either 3rd or 4th grade and Michelle wasn't even old enough to go to school yet) after a big snowfall and a snow day because school was canceled (and is it just me or were the snowfalls heavier back then?) and how we'd bundle up in layers and layers of clothing and then grab the sleds and trudge down Washington Street to Buckingham School.

Once we got there, along with what felt like every other family in Down City, the kids would rocket down the hill alongside the school (thank goodness for that low fence near the sidewalk, and the backstop over by Buckingham Avenue, it kept many a mini-tobogganer from an unplanned and unwelcomed merge with oncoming cars and trucks), shrieking in delight as they hurtled downhill as fast as they could. 

Most of us stayed on that hill even as the daylight faded deciding only to head for home when every child we came with was completely soaked through after being covered in so much snow it was a miracle there was any left to still sled on. 

Now, snow days are relegated I've read to the history books as part of 'what we once did,' and while I can understand why in an era of remote learning they're not necessary or needed, that doesn't mean they aren't missed, and maybe not just by the school-kids.

I was driving on New London Turnpike the other day heading towards Route 32 and just past The Rink a blanket of snow covered the Norwich Golf Course and families from across East Great Plains covered the snow. It was a great Currier and Ives moment especially in a year where so much of what we've known has been radically changed if not simply disappeared. 

The holiday season, however you celebrate it, is a time when magic fills the air and friends fill our lives. I'm told a friend is a present you give to yourself and there's no such things as strangers, only friends we haven't met. If that is true, and this Friday is, after all, Christmas, when miracles can and do happen, resolve today to be the miracle in someone else's' life. And, although it's been said many times, many ways, Merry Christmas to you.
-bill kenny

How About Some Good News?

I think we deserve it and feel free to pass it along. Yesterday, which marked the official beginning of winter (boo!), was also 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 (pandemic permitting) we'll be sick of all the sun (present company excluded). Or not. 

And, think of this as a Mr. Science BOGO (kinda) if you got up really early today or never went to bed last night you might have had a heaping helping a double-dollop if you wish, the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. I was sorely tempted to stay up as I missed the last one in 1226 but you can catch some part of it through Christmas Day. Perhaps it will help you think warm thoughts for winter.  

I'll need more than just warm thoughts, to be honest with you. Winter is the reason 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 and in the evening. We can treat the cold and the snow as read for purposes of this discussion. 

Osage Forest of Peace

So, as somber and sobering as much of this year has been we can start to sing the seasons through as of today with a less dark and deep note as we moderate the key and alter the tempo as the changes that make up our universe enfold and unfold around us.

-bill kenny

The Civility of Civil Discourse

Early on in the Era of the Trump Error, I stopped watching TV network evening news. Truth to tell, I'd been drifting for years as broadcast news became more a vehicle to sell me stuff than a means of telling me what was going on in the world and why it was happening. 

As I grew older and more set in my ways I was unwilling and unable to tolerate the shouting matches masquerading as panel discussions on cable TV news channels and since everything the Cheeto Cheater said and did was bullshit I concluded there was little to no point or gain in watching it on a nightly basis. Except for PBS...

I watched PBS news when it was the MacNeil-Lehrer Report and remained tuned. I was saddened when Gwen Ifill whose smile lit up my living room passed away too soon, leaving Judy Woodruff to soldier on, which she did, and does, to this day, brilliantly.  

There was, to my ears, more speaking with and less yelling at one another and more often a supposition that I, the viewer, might actually have a brain capable of entertaining competing notions on any given subject or that, maybe, just maybe, the telling of a tale might require more than fifty seconds and/or three camera shots with a fifteen-second stand-up lock-out and 'back to you in the studio' that left me dumber than when the report began. 

Most importantly I realized when I wandered around the dial that I missed the presentation and defense of original thoughts and ideas where you could disagree and not be disagreeable and so I came back to PBS as my first and often my only choice for TV news.

I looked forward to Fridays every week for the nine minutes or so of analysis by Shields and Brooks, usually wrangled by Judy Woodruff on the issues of the past week, and was fortunate to catch the very last installment of the pair's conversation this past Friday evening. 

Read David Brooks' NYT column from that morning first. My initial thought was 'wow.' But Shields' reaction to kick off their final session together was an observation so eloquent it took my breath away when I heard it and brings tears to my eye when I read it, "I just regretted that my parents weren't alive to read it and enjoy it, because my father would have enjoyed it, and my mother would have wanted to believe it." 

And there's no one on television news anywhere on the dial that will ever be Shields and Brooks and for that, we are and will be poorer as a nation. 
-bill kenny

The Love You Throw Away

This is the fourth Sunday of Advent, and for many (more importantly) the 'so many days until Christmas' countdown has dwindled down to less than a week. I'm not really here for that reminder.

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

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

For some of us, this is the best of the Season of Joy and for others, it's really nothing more than the next to last Sunday in 2020. 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

Making this Cold Harbor Now Home

Today is my father's 97th birthday. It's also probably a lot of other people's birthdays, too, but I don't know anything about them, which in many respects is also almost true for my father as well. I learned far more about him after he died than in all the years we shared the earth. He's been dead a very long time and the only things I've accomplished since his sudden end have been to have lived longer than he did and to realize how much alike we actually are.

My father filled up a room like no one else I have ever known-and my points of reference are rock stars, movie celebrities, and world leaders (yeah, I've done some $hit if I have to say so myself) but my father owned every room he set foot in. He wasn't physically imposing, standing about five and a half feet tall, fighting and usually losing a battle of the bulge with a headful of gray hair, he told us, from the time he was nineteen. He had a line he offered people who thought he was an old man because of the hair, 'just because there's snow on the roof doesn't mean there's not a fire in the chimney.' I suspect he said it in French and Latin, as well, because he could and that's how he was.

He was also someone whom, no matter how well I did, I could never please. It seems pathetic for a man of my advanced age to admit to something like that, but if you know me, you know I am pathetic and so aren't surprised at all. Being named for him didn't help and if I had a dollar for every time he told me growing up it wasn't his idea to name me after him, I would never have needed to go to work.

Where he always felt at home, a classroom

What I got from that, within eye blinks of learning Sigrid was pregnant with our son, was to vow we would NOT name that boy after me. Unlike so many other instances in our married life, that promise was something I did follow through on. Actually, the other thing I did was to work very hard to not be the father or husband that he had been. The jury's still out on the first part, as our children are 38 and 33, adults of their own but I would hope my wife thinks I'm a decent husband, maybe even a good man, who does the best he can with what he has. Ironically, that's actually a legacy of my father-one that for many years I wasn't willing to grant to him.

Maybe, in the decades since his death, I've come to better appreciate how much work it takes to be a man who's there for his family. You get up every day and do the best you can for you and yours and some days your road takes you places you hadn't planned on and you look up and realize you've lost your way. The trick, I think, is not so much in knowing that you are lost but more in being able to find your way back. Our children never met or knew their American Opa; nor he, them. That's a regret I'll have until the day I die.

And while I think my kids can talk to me about anything even when I hope they won't, there's a hole in my heart my pride won't acknowledge and a hollow sound that no amount of outside applause can cover. There's a grinding of gears in the tears between the generations that I remember from my own youth and knew then, as now, I am powerless to stop once it has started. Arms to shoulder, we'll leave our tracks untraceable now. I think you'd have liked them, Dad-our Pat and Mike, you'd have loved them, I know. Happy Birthday.

-bill kenny

Greater than the Sum of His Parts

Wendell Berry has been more successful at more endeavors than the total populations of some of our larger American cities, but if he were known for nothing else than this it would be more than enough for me.

Just the thing for wistfulness and melancholia. Not to dissipate or dispel them but to make them more bearable.
-bill kenny

Not Sure What's Changed

This may be a slight oversimplification.

But I don't think so. Sadly. 
-bill kenny

Good Deeds Are Better than Good Words

I want to share with you something that happened to me a couple of months ago and the memory of it has stayed with me so strongly it's as if it happened just this past weekend, because (between us) in some shape, size, or form it does happen on a regular and recurring basis and just because we don't see it, doesn't mean it's not real. 

With my apologies to my former neighbor, Reverend Cal Lord, and his inspiring insights every Friday, think of what follows as a blinding glimpse of the obvious by a sojourner further along on the road to Damascus. 

I was in New Haven as a follow-on to a clinical study I volunteered to be a part of by a world-famous healthcare provider exploring the possible links between diabetes (I have Type 2) and Alzheimer's. It's a drive from here, Norwich, where I live, to New Haven, where the research is conducted but I tell myself if the folks striving to learn something actually do learn something and that something can help someone else, it was worth the ride. 

Waiting at a red light in downtown New Haven to get to the clinicians' offices, I watched what I have to assume was a homeless man standing on the sidewalk during a lull in the traffic flow where he'd be holding up his cardboard begging sign to solicit change, or panhandling as so many of us call it (a story for another time is the origin of the term itself). 

In that moment as I watched he opened a bottle of water and emptied it over his head as a makeshift shower. Let me point out that the temperature was just south of fifty degrees Fahrenheit and there was a light but steady breeze which, in a city of concrete and steel buildings that turns streets into wind tunnels, was both cutting and intense especially for someone who was wet.

The truck driver behind me leaning on his horn brought me back into the now as our signal was already green and we all moved deeper into New Haven until all I could see of the man was a diminishing figure in my rear-view mirror, to be replaced at the next intersection by a woman of indeterminate age who was holding her own sign, and behind her on a different corner facing in the other direction another person and another sign. And so it went. 

Meanwhile, all around them on the sidewalk, people with purpose and destinations hurried past. Motorists like me stared at all of them out of the windows of our prisons on the road until all of it morphed into what Robert Hunter offered lyrically half a lifetime ago 'your typical city involved in a typical daydream.' 

It was a sobering moment that would have stayed with me even if it had only been happening in New Haven but we both know otherwise. There's not an intersection of state highways anywhere in Norwich that doesn't have someone seeking shelter from the storm in some manner. Even as the temperatures start to finally reflect the season we're in here in New England, there are people everywhere trying to get your attention because they're in need of help. 

We think of America as where 'God shed his grace on thee,' and there are all kinds of agencies with armies of volunteers, most especially now during the holiday season who are all doing God's work to try to make what little they have left after almost nine months of siege from the COVID pandemic and its economic and social impacts stretch just a little farther and help a little more. 

I was raised to believe we can do anything in this country if we put our minds to it. I cannot understand how so few of us can have so much when so many of us have so little but I have decided to no longer continue to accept what I have yet to understand. 

In eight days it will be Christmas Eve so we still have time to be the helpful, hopeful people we tell one another we are during the holidays. So stop saying Merry Christmas and start making it one for someone in need.
-bill kenny 

Still Believing in Stiff Lips and Stiff Collars

The United Kingdom gave me The Beatles, The Kinks, and The Rolling Stones among others, and I was hooked on All Things England before I was a teen and remain so to this day. 

I was still an Anglophile after being forced to read the collected works of William Shakespeare in countless high school English Literature classes and might have become an Anglo-phobe were it not for Dr. Richard Arthur George ('my mother named me for three kings' little did she know) who organized a field trip to New Hope, Pennsylvania, for their annual Shakespeare Festival where I had the opportunity to see the plays as Shakespeare had intended actually performed and was intoxicated by the intricacy and brilliance.

The United Kingdom, on which the sun never sets, is two weeks and two days from crashing out of the European Economic Union (we call it the Common Market, but aren't we all?) without an actual formalized agreement but that's not what concerns me today when pondering the fate of  'this royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.'

No. Instead I'm wondering how a nation of shopkeepers who stood alone after Dunkirk and withstood the Blitz without flinching somehow decided that World Chase Tag is what Vera Lynn might have wanted while selecting, twice, Boris Johnson to be their gladiator in the arena. I can't help but worry just how stale the bread at the circus will become before the birds get it. 
-bill kenny 

Another Dark Day on the Calendar

As the oldest child in my family, I spend a lot of time fretting over what is and what could have been, often failing badly to see my role and responsibility in moving from the former to the latter.

Today is an anniversary of sorts for something so many of us couldn't grasp when it happened, and, I confess, I still didn't "get" any better than when we observed its first anniversary. Here are words I offered some time ago-they remain as inadequate as they were then.

I cannot imagine how long this day is for a parent who suffered the loss of a child, a husband of a wife, a son or daughter of a parent, but I do know that today in Newtown, Connecticut, everyone trying to heal will hurt again.

Everywhere we turn today there will be news accounts recounting everything that everyone will ever know about an unthinkable tragedy that happened eight years ago today but there is one thing we, with all of our research and analysis, will never know.

For a small town whose residents will always have broken hearts that can never heal today is just the next day in the unending tragedy that will only end when all memory of what happened has gone. And that will never happen.

Even those of us who question the existence of God can have no doubt that evil is real and in the world, because it came to a place that offered safety and security, an elementary school filled with adults who gave the last and fullest measure of devotion to save those least able to save themselves, the children.

All I can offer is to hold the parents, siblings, and friends of those who were murdered in my thoughts as the survivors hold them in their hearts. I'd pray for better days for them and us but hope for better days may have been among the casualties at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Newtown should remind us to examine our lives and decide what is truly important. We see every incident of inchoate violence as an isolated singular event, rather than as larger and unending episodes of anger and rage so profound we still dare not speak of causes and solutions because our emotions are still too raw or ‘it’s too soon.’

Except, it's not soon; it's too late, much too late for six young teachers and twenty even younger children and grieving relatives who put very small coffins into the cold, cold earth, during the holiday season eight years ago and who will carry until their dying day a hole in their hearts that time will not ever heal.

Today is a day to pause and hold our loved ones closer and see in their eyes a reflection of who we must become the difference in the world, today and every day.

-bill kenny

Lights and Horns

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

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

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

This has been a year of ineffable pain for so many of us because of the coronavirus. There's hardly anyone any of us know who hasn't been affected by its impact as the souls of the faithful departed parade past us on all manner of screens, they risk losing their singularity and meaning. 

Each name was a life and a light and I'm reminded again that we have too many horns in the cacophony of life and can most certainly use another light, especially in this, the most hopeful of seasons.
-bill kenny

When Truth Is at a Premium

Benjamin Franklin, the only President of the United States who was never President of the United States is credited with first saying "honesty is the best policy." He's also credited with offering 'looks like a great night for kite-flying; take my key so you can let yourself back into the house,' but no one wants to talk about that one.   

But in regards to that first piece of advice, I suspect Steven P. Murphy would say 'hell yeah!' For me, the bonus to reading a-news-from-the-newsroom-floor story like this is that I know exactly where this place is, having driven past it one day near the latter part of last week, and not for the only time.

Visually. it always reminds me of something out of a Tonio K song, "'cept it was cleaner," so I'm hoping the damage wasn't too severe or at least too noticeable from the street.
-bill kenny

 

Redefining Definitions

Some days are diamonds and some days are dogs but ALL days are what we decide they are. Preceptions of reality AND reality are the same thing.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; just don't blink. 
-bill kenny 

The Limits of Her Pure Surprise

In the Sixties and Seventies, we wore blue jeans but we didn't call them that, we called them Levis, for Levi Strauss who made dungarees. Sort of like we didn't call it soda we called it Coke when you took a photo it was a Kodak or when you made a copy of a document it was a Xerox.

Levis' TV commercials were incredibly and consistently brilliant combinations of sight, sound, and narration that redefined the word cool.   

If you are waiting for a point to this meander down memory lane, sorry to disappoint you; there isn't one. I was thinking about Ken Nordine who voiced all those Levis commercials and whose identity I first learned of from my Rutgers friend, Nat, who is an artist in his own right, and now you have learned about both of them. By the way, how are things in your town?
-bill kenny 

Putting the Risk in Asterisk

I semi-gave you a bum steer last Wednesday and my apologies for that. 

I forget this time of year across large sections of the country anything and everything outdoors always needs to have that typographic symbol that looks sort of like a snowflake, the asterisk (*), because there's always a chance of some form of precipitation and this time of year, the smart bet is on snow.

That, as you know by now, was exactly what the Greater Norwich Area Chamber of Commerce, GNACC, was calculating when they checked out the forecast land saw what was heading our way last Saturday and rescheduled the Shop Local Holiday Market downtown for this Saturday from noon until four (* weather permitting (see, I'm catching on)).  

In years past (= before COVID-19) there'd be a holiday showcase in one of the ballrooms at the Holiday Inn on Route 82. That change is yet another instance of adapt and overcome in this year of the pandemic and for many artisans and vendors who used to flock to the showcase, the loss of that venue in some instances threatened their continuance not just as small businesses, but as businesses, period.

Everything for everyone on Saturday is outside, with vendors, crafters, and artists setting up in the parking lots on Broadway, Franklin, and Bath Streets. If you've ever attended any of the Global Norwich block festivals downtown, you'll be very familiar with the layout, highlighted by special appearances from Rudolph (I'm thinking Valentino, but maybe not) and holiday music from Franco and K-HITS 100.9.

Visitors and vendors will be required to be masked (I think Clayton Moore would be tickled with this homage), and to follow social distancing guidelines (think: six feet apart or six feet under). Aside from that, the only other thing to remember is to have fun and that should be pretty easy especially for those of us who've been keeping ourselves to ourselves in recent months.  

This new normal has meant a lot of change, and not all of it good for many and that includes the area's local merchants who were still working to make Down City and its surrounding neighborhoods and villages a great place to live and work in when times got a lot tougher. 

Still, the tentative listing of those turning up and turning out for the favor of your custom is quite impressive, and though it's a tired marketing cliche to suggest 'there's something for everyone' in this case, there really is. 

And, if it's been a while since you last made the time to stop and then shop downtown, I think, particularly in light of how we focus on 'what we don't have anymore,' you'll be more than pleased with the variety of opportunities you'll have to sample foods, books, apparel, home furnishings, and a plethora of 'what a great gift that would make!' items all around you that are right up your street, Literally and figuratively. 

All the restaurants, and then some, that you've been reading about in The Bulletin and in Norwich Magazine and have been telling yourself you really should try, you'll now have the perfect opportunity to taste for yourself what all the talk has been about. 

If you're shopping for someone hard to please, think about the gift that keeps on giving, gift cards. And by visiting GNACC Shop Local 2020, you can check out not just those who'll be in downtown on Saturday (* almost forgot), but so many others across the region who help make us a great place to come home to and who deserve your attention and support. 

So, barring *, this Saturday #shoplocal because we're #BetterTogether.
-bill kenny

Another Decade and Still No Rosary

I offered what follows exactly a decade ago and glanced at it in advance of this date because try as I might I cannot think of anything to add now to anything I wrote then.  

The Quartet Practiced in the Park

If I need more than a dozen words to explain the importance of John Lennon and the music he helped create, and the other music he made possible, I'm too old and you're too young to be having this conversation. And since, chronologically, I got here first, you'll have to leave.

I was born the year Dwight David Eisenhower was elected US President. Rock and roll was either very rhythm and blues-oriented (and called 'race music') or was so white it glowed in the dark with melodies from the Brill Building professionals as sung by any fresh face who showed up at the auditions. 

Little Richard's originals such as Good Golly, Miss Molly were covered and eclipsed by a variety of white artists and never enjoyed the success on pop radio station airwaves they should have, but the UK rockers had no way of knowing that.

People like Sam Phillips and Sun Records helped change all that with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and (of course) Elvis Presley. The seismic shock Elvis set off echoed halfway across the world where tub thumpers, literally, who were part of something the British called skiffle, attempted to emulate the American records they were hearing in the coffee bars and teen clubs.

The perspiring and aspiring musicians who spent hours trying to copy every chord change of every R&B song they heard had no idea that in the USA, the music to which they were so devoted had been co-opted and to a large extent castrated by safe-as-houses imitators. Their world then was so different from our world now that words fail, which is why (perhaps) so many of us who came of age in The Sixties turned to music in the first place as a replacement for language.

If all you know of John Lennon is what you've read, you cannot imagine the electricity late-night American Top 40 radio had when The Beatles were on. They built a bridge from the UK for every disaffected rocker to cross, and it mattered not if they could sing, Noel Harrison certainly couldn't, as long as they looked the part. 

The Liverpool lads stuck and stayed while so many others faded away because they had talent and the ear of a generation who sought a voice while they, themselves, searched for the sound they had heard years earlier. They may have never realized they had become the object for which they searched-we on other hand never cared and embraced them as the Soundtrack of the World to Be.

The Beatles 'broke big in America' in the aftermath of the murder of John F. Kennedy and I've never believed that was a coincidence. They were the standard by which all other pop music was measured. It felt, for someone in his teens for much of their public career, that The Beatles had been around forever but when they went dark in 1970, they had been a chart presence for far less than a decade.

Where there were four, only two are alive today. All of them spent, and continue to spend, their solo careers battling unreal expectations, measured by critics and fans alike against an impossible standard no one could match. With Lennon's murder forty years ago, the death of the public John overshadowed the personal tragedy his two sons, Julian and Sean, as well as the pain and grief his wife, Yoko Ono, and his late first spouse, Cynthia, felt and feel every day of their lives, but most especially today.

It's tempting when revisiting history to forget it can just as easily be written as his story because in this case, the bandmate, the father, the husband, were all walk-ons in the Beatlemania movie Mark David Chapman so abruptly and completely ended exactly four decades ago. 

For many who never knew the man, except through his music, today is a very long day. There's little we can do except enjoy what he gave us while watching the wheels go round and round and wonder what might have been.
-bill kenny

More than a Lifetime Ago

I've never, yet, had the opportunity to visit the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. I've spoken with the no-longer-young men who were on Arizona before it was part of the remembrance of December 7, 1941. 

There are so many memorials to those who sacrificed so much in so many wars, I sometimes forget that consciously, and perhaps unconsciously as well, those who fought and died (on all sides) helped shape who we are now, and how it is I am free to sit here and type semi-vacantly into the ether.

I'm told men and women will fight for their country, but will only die for one another, which is an act of such remarkable, selfless, love that it should require of all of us whose lives are made possible (and maybe a little too comfortable) by this act of sacrifice to live lives that truly matter.

As a kid, reading the accounts, I was struck by the ferocity of the attacks at Pearl Harbor. It was years later as a young adult that I first read of those who survived the attacks but who were hopelessly and helplessly trapped in the hulls of destroyed or partially-sunken vessels. I've read reports of survivors lost in twisted masses of metal who tapped, persistently and steadily in absolute and total darkness and probable terror, for days, hoping those 'outside' would find and free them.

I cannot imagine having that kind of courage. Instead, I've allowed my petty concerns and problems to absorb my attention. I've learned to flinch, as Warren Zevon used to sing and to spend my waking hours fearing footfalls that never come from those whom I'll never know. 

Instead of living life out loud, I've elevated 'playing it safe' to an art form without ever considering how those who made the hard choices that brought me here might feel about what I've made of the gift they've given me. 

Unless and until we start to repay the debt of unselfish sacrifice that is the foundation of our world, we'll never be able to build anything of our own to give to our children and their children. Nearly eight decades or eighty decades will be as the blink of an eye for all those who refuse to see.
-bill kenny

Some Second Thoughts on Second Advent Sunday

In less than thirty days we'll be talking about 2021 in the present and not future tense. How is that even possible? The last I looked, 2020 was just arriving, filled with challenge/fueled by hope and here we are with the remnants of those hopes tracked across the living room carpet like so much of so what.

You remember 2020, you have to. This was the year we were to do, we were to talk, we were to live large and to be. And what happened? And I don't just mean the pandemic though that certainly did NOT help. We allowed so many others, maybe too many others (who've already given up on their dreams) to creep in as poor players and poison what wells of hope we'd held for ourselves.

We've no lack of culprits for the politics of anger, though we know the reverse is just as easily as true. For my part, I'm exhausted, physically, and emotionally. It's like I'm running through soup and sand, my feet never quite lifting from and clearing the ground, each stride a broken parody of what it once was with my arms pushing through air I can taste rather than feel. 

And the harder I try the farther behind I fall. I started out beside you but have spent the year watching you disappear before me, long strides taking you over the horizon and when I get to where you were, you're gone with no trace, no track, and no regret. Sic transit humanitas.

This is the year I've been forced to concede the face in the mirror has aged and that the man behind the face hasn't nearly as many springs left as he thought he had and more on point, has squandered, rather than saved, those moments of meaning he thought would come along again as easily as they did the first time. I've actually felt the dullness of the ache in the pit of my stomach and the shocked realization of regret and realization the next time can be the last time always brings with it as a constant companion.

Like many these past months, I blinked at critical moments and lost sight of the important in the rush of the real as the latter became surreal and unreal before disappearing by the dawn's early light. The year in which I had vowed to sort myself out has nearly run its course and the next one will be over even faster than this one, with less to show for it as the distance already traveled never equals the distance yet to go. 

The sense of adventure is replaced by dread as the days draw down and the year ends. The toast we'll make for much success in the new year assumes both will exist but accepts the implication that neither is promised. But it's the what's next that will keep me awake.

-bill kenny 

When Edison Came to Stay

I grew up with rotary phones and rabbit ears on the backs of black and white televisions. I wanted you to have that frame of reference when I offer that, in the words of Paul Simon, these are the days of miracles and wonder.

By clicking here you can watch not only the lighting up of our city hall but see and meet a lot of the people who made the magic available. 

Here's a screengrab as best as I could do, because computers are hard for fossils like me. 

Not content to watch it on screen, I grabbed something a little larger than a screen at City Hall.

Enjoy.
-bill kenny

Swapping Out Cause and Effect

I'm keenly aware countering the testimony of roosters everywhere that, despite their crowing, the sun does NOT come up. I'm more than familiar with the confusion some of us have with cause and effect; some cynics might suggest I made a decent living counting on that confusion.

That said, I enjoyed the front-page article yesterday in our local newspaper on the holiday decorations downtown, concentrated at the harbor, as opposed to throughout, and across, Down City. 

I was sorry to read the snowflakes hanging from street lamps across downtown were worn out and beyond repair but having been called a snowflake myself many times in the course of the last four years during the siege of America I can fully understand and appreciate the stress they must have undergone.

If you want to see the lights at the Harbor, you can do so right here or here.     

As the newspaper explained, tonight's the night for the Virtual Lighting of City Hall, which will happen live on the city's website and I'll enjoy it nearly as much as walking down and standing in the courtyard and counting it down like every previous year but I have a confession to make.

Souvenir from last year

I hope I'm not putting anyone from the city on the spot (but don't really care if I do because as you know if you've stopped by this space at any time for the last dozen years, I'm pretty much an arse) if I hope that with so many things on the 'to-do list' even in a pandemic we still find the time for the Christmas Rose at Chelsea Parade.

Also a photo from last year

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note I do NOT help erect the display (that would be a calamity) but dedicate myself to coming out every evening when it's dark (even if it's cold) and admiring it until I lose the feeling in my extremities. This photo is from last year and is my effort to crow and cause the sun to come up and it will have to do me, I guess until the crews get to it this year which I hope they do because once it's up, the holiday season is literally and figuratively, truly lit.
-bill kenny