The Past as Prologue

This isn't on my desk calendar for today but I think it should be: the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. I don't think forty-five years down the road, we, as a country, have ever really made our peace with that war, the way we fought it, the way it ended, and most especially with how we treated those lucky enough to come home from it. 

Some have suggested Vietnam demonstrated the danger of trying to conduct a guns AND butter war, that is, we send people off to fight while back on the home front, very little changes. If that's the theory, then I guess it's true, since while we had sappers trying to clear mines from rice paddies in monsoons we also had half a million gather in the mud of Yasgur's Farm. And when all the toking and joking was over, the ages of everybody were practically identical, though I think the guys humping it through weeds were younger, but also older.

I lost a prep school classmate in that war and from what I've been told by long-time residents of Norwich, the city 'lost' twelve young men in the Vietnamese War. When I'm feeling angry and bitter at how survivors were treated, I'm tempted to offer that they weren't lost at all, but that's disrespectful to both their memories and to those who came home wounded in places that will never heal and were left to their own devices as the rest of us raced to forget what we never knew enough about in the first place.

Rex tremendae majestatis. Welcome home.

-bill kenny

Meandering in Mohegan

I don't know how you're fixed for diversions as we continue to strive to flatten the curve in combating COVID-19 in terms of puzzles, books, books on puzzles, puzzles you've created from taking scissors to books....you get the idea. (I was going to claim the previous sentence was sarcasm, but sarcasm has gotten a pretty bad name in recent days). 

Television is fine but also pretty finite after awhile so I try to go for a walk every day, weather permitting, and I use the time to regroup, rather than to decompress, as I don't feel put-upon by the protective measures we're all using because I keep my eye on the prize which, to me, is someday to not have to do any of this anymore. Besides, there are a lot of folks in a lot of different places and spaces smack in the middle of harm's way so that I'm not.

Like you, I've watched the news reports on TV with folks mostly unmasked who do not maintain anything close to the recommended social distance, demanding 'liberation' from their elected leaders' preventative policies and practices which they see as oppressive. 

To my eyes, the protestors seem to be mostly white men (takes one to know one) who are very unhappy that the government is telling them what they can do with their own bodies. I'd be curious to know what women watching them make of that reaction.  

On Saturday, wearing gloves and a mask (but carrying no trick or treat bag) I popped up to Mohegan Park because the day was maybe the nicest we'd had all April, and I wanted to stretch my legs hiking around Spaulding Pond and see how well springtime was progressing even as we were distracted by our health concerns. 

The two playscapes, one near the upper parking lot and the other near the beach, were police-taped off out of an abundance of caution but there were plenty of children with parents and caregivers taking the air and soaking up the sunshine. It's still April and between the weather we've had and for that same abundance of caution reason, the fountain near the flagpole is still wearing its winter protective wrap. 

There were a reasonable number of men and women fishing with a youngster or two holding a rod and reel. Fishing is serious relaxation and as I recall from my own earliest years as a child, both bait and patience are needed in large quantities. You can probably guess which one of those was in short supply. 

Billy Bass ain't got nothing on Tommy Trout

The adult fishermen were practicing excellent social distancing scattered along the pond's banks but judging from the lack of bobbins bobbing it seemed the trout were doing an excellent job of sheltering in place. 

Out just beyond one of the bubblers near the beach at the pond was a skewer of egrets doing their own fishing. Insert your own 'egrets, I've had a few but then again too few to mention' joke here. The egrets seemed to be enjoying their diving as much as their catching and I was enjoying all of it.

I had a pocket full of peanuts for squirrels and (hopefully) chipmunks I'd encounter as I made my circuit around the pond but it wasn't until the third lap, from under the enclosed pavilion that hosts so many summer barbecues, that a solitary chipmunk made an appearance. 

It took a few steps towards me, waited while I fumbled with the bag in my pocket and tossed it a peanut which it grabbed on the first bounce and disappeared underneath the building to pop out again some thirty seconds later with a second chipmunk. I smiled under my mask at this twofer as I realized it's not just us who are in this together.
-bill kenny

(Nearly a) View from a Bridge

I like to inspect our neighborhood on a daily basis. 

I always maintain the appropriate social distancing and wear the requisite protective mask and gloves while out and about. More often than not, and for no other reason than it's breathtakingly beautiful, I manage to find a reason to wander past the Lower Falls of the Yantic River at the Uncas Leap.

It's only a six-minute or so walk from our house and if it's longer than that from yours, I have some good news! Here's a video for you to enjoy.

Talk about a pause that refreshes.
-bill kenny 

Birthday Buddies!

I observed another natal anniversary yesterday, my 68th, without getting a pony ride, and yet somehow my heart will carry on. 

I take some solace in knowing that I shared my birthday with Melania Trump who should be in the dictionary as the illustration for "the hunter gets captured by the game" but isn't. 

I don't really care. Do you?

Maybe I could trade her a palomino pony for a kidney procedure which as I understand it is what she got for her birthday last year. That way then she could try riding bareback sort of like her husband allegedly did. 
-bill kenny

Hung One More Year on the Line

Today is my birthday. I mention this because family and friends (you might assume they are one and the same, in a very small number and somewhat reluctant to be considered either. You may also kiss my grits) have congratulated me which is something we all do on birthdays but I've always felt we do it to the wrong person.

I always thanked my Mom when she called, and she always did, referring to her as 'without whom none of this would be possible' because she really was, together with my dad, the person who made it all possible. I didn't have a plan then and I still don't have a clue. I'm not yet used to the idea that she will not be calling, not just this year again but ever again but I suppose I have the rest of my life to get used to it.. 

I am one of six and the first draft of a child so to speak. Each of us has run pretty much the same race, if on different courses and in different circumstances than those our parents had, and their parents before them.

I traveled halfway across the earth a lifetime ago and found someone who loves me to this day despite myself, which is leichter gesagt als getan (believe me). We have two beautiful children who are themselves, adults, though one of their parents tends to forget that, a lot (and it's not their mother).

When I was a child, I desperately wanted to be a grown-up. I hurried through childhood as if there were a prize somewhere for being first without ever knowing what first felt like or why it was so important. It wasn't, and it never will be, and I've only recently discovered that which would have been very useful to that little boy of eight standing in the big backyard on Bloomfield Avenue in Somerset, NJ. Too late smart, nothing new there.

It's taken me all this time and all those years to realize just how much I don't know and to accept that the list of things I will never know continues to expand exponentially into infinity. I could waste what's left of my life yearning for what can never be or be gracefully grateful for that which I have. The latter feels like a good choice at this point.

"It takes a long time to grow young," said Picasso and none of us have as long a time left as we think or hope. But it's what we do with what we have that defines us and how we live and who we love. Happy birthday to me. says the calendar but happy birthday to you as well, be it today or whenever it is.

-bill kenny

With a Bleach Chaser

We spend a little more time everyday punting on decisions and events, it seems to me. The times being what they are with certainty in short supply everything and everyone becomes subject to change. 

Transoceanic contrasts can be startling. The Governor of Georgia has reopened parts of his state to include bowling alleys and tattoo parlors though I'm not sure how the concept of social distancing with the latter is supposed to work unless the tats are being spray-painted. 

Across the ocean, in Munich, Germany, the 2020 Oktoberfest has already been canceled, which is probably just as well since watching those who've over-imbibed try to yak through a face mask is not my idea of a great visual.

And while beaches in Jacksonville, Florida, are filling up with hopefully many of the same folks who couldn't understand the intricacies of hanging chads a generation ago (it's a fine line between herd immunity and thinning the herd), the Passion Play in Oberammergau, Germany, that began in 1633 in thanksgiving for a miracle that spared the village from the ravages of the Bubonic Plague has been postponed because of the current plague.  

16th-century plague doctor mask at the German Museum of Medical History

And now comes word that the Insane Clown Posse (not to be confused with the Apricot Asshole's COVID-19 Response Team) has decided to cancel this year's Gathering of the Juggalos. 

Some day we'll have tall tales of stark deprivation and brave sacrifice to share with our grandchildren, assuming we haven't killed ourselves drinking Lysol.
-bill kenny

No Words Can Do This Justice

This story was in one of the two local newspapers in my part of the world yesterday. My sense of whimsy was severely strained by some of the comments from online readers who have decided that believing is just a lot easier than thinking. It helps me understand why we are the way we are.

Maybe the flyover will include unicorns, rainbows, and most especially COVID-19 tests, though I'm thinking maybe not. Elect an asshole and expect a shitshow. November 3rd cannot get here fast enough. 
-bill kenny

Is It In My Head?

I've done a lot more telemedicine appointments in recent weeks than I ever did before the COVID-19 pandemic though I suspect when on the calendar we get to the prostate exam there will be another strategy deployed. At least I hope so.

This is a mini-memoir of a memory from a decade ago; at the time I called it:  

I Hear the Music of a Heartbeat

Yesterday afternoon I went for my semi-annual carotid stenosis. It's another reminder that there are just so many sunrises and so many Springs. At some point next week, though for his last time it turns out, I'll sit with my vascular surgeon, as he explains the next step in continuing to battle my heredity and lifestyle to a draw in making sure the arteries in my neck when I'm tired I call them veins and he frowns at me and glares a little, don't get any more gunked up than they are (I don't imagine he'd appreciate my use of gunked up, but he's retiring in a couple of weeks, so now it's my turn to talk).

We, meaning me and some very clever person with a wonderfully complex machine from Siemens and warm gel to smear on my neck, measure I have no idea what. I listen to the sounds of my own blood rushing through my arteries (I do know the difference, you know) and hope it continues to sound like the ocean crashing onto the shore and watch the monitor for waveforms and splotches of color, sometimes dark blue and other times bright yellow and vivid red, knowing no matter how keen I am to know what the colors mean, I'm too afraid to ever ask.

In all these sessions with all the watching, waiting, and conferring is the awareness that there's no medication I can take to reverse the process. (That's a joke, actually. After I had had four Transient Ischemic Attacks, I was so terrified the surgeon could have told me to drink my own bathwater and I'd have asked if I could use a straw. Fear of death is probably the most powerful reason to live there can ever be). 

I remember him carefully explaining that to me at our very first session back in, wow-seems like in another life-but there's always the "hope" of surgery, he said. I've seen enough surgery in the last four years to last me a lifetime (it has, so far), so 'hope' is a word I use guardedly.

My surgeon doesn't know I know he's retiring. I only see him every six months which, in his line of work and with my health concerns, is okay with both of us. I looked forward to meeting him the first time, based on his name, as I secretly hoped he was the architect of TSOP, The Sound of Philadelphia, and could give me the inside story on Gamble and Huff. 

Nope, a little closer to Stiller and Meara truth be told, but he does always have the pop music radio station on in his office. I'd hoped we'd collaborate a while longer, but you can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain forever.

Our local hospital has Diagnostic Medicine, and other out-patient services tucked away across town in a renovated failed Ames Department Store near the interstate. Seated across from me was a young woman in what looked like hospital scrubs, holding a small child, a baby actually, of perhaps six months or so on her lap. He, not she, was the customer for whatever other imaging equipment now is sprawled across what once was the hardware and ready-to-wear departments. Adds new meaning to clean-up in aisle seven.

He was extremely well-behaved as if I am an expert with my babies getting ready to celebrate a 38th as well as a 33rd birthday in the coming days, for one, and weeks, for the other. He stared at the world, bounded by the waiting room walls and ceiling with an eagerness and intensity I no longer remember but truly admire. It was a moment for rubber-necking, his, and reflection, mine. 

He, even if he lives to be one hundred, will never remember me, and I, should the same await me, shall never forget him. I see a man without a problem.

-bill kenny

Happy Birthday Earth Day!

I'm writing this in observance of Earth Day 2020, which is today, April 22nd. The writing, not necessarily the celebration, may surprise some who believe I create this by opening a dictionary over a blank piece of paper and shaking it vigorously and then gathering up the words that have fallen out. I wish it were that easy. 

We've all spent more time to ourselves and with ourselves in recent weeks so it's possible you might have lost sight of Earth Day on the calendar this year. Let's face it we certainly have had enough 'other stuff' on our plates, right? But with all that's been changing in our lives these past few weeks, Earth Day is as good a time as any to recognize our place in the world and to acknowledge that our world is so much more than just us.

Not that you asked but I accidentally ended up in the first-ever Earth Day Parade in New York City back in 1970 as a pimply prep school know-it-all. And now, a half-century later, don't know about you but I have clear skin and not only still know it all but now think I know it all better. Kidding with the last part of the previous sentence but you knew that.

Probably like you, I've used a fair amount more technology recently as we work our way across this new normal and have taken part in public meetings via Zoom on my smartphone and with my desktop and the city's website, not forgetting, of course, the telephone (the classics never go out of style). 

I was inspired by Saturday's "One World: Together at Home" special and with today being Earth Day, I thought I'd organize a virtual walk for all of us from Chelsea Parade to the Norwich Harbor, undeterred that the Committee Who Runs the Internet has banned my face from ever being part of Face Time at the request of computer screen manufacturers. 

So I hope you're wearing sensible shoes and other items of comfortable clothing because we have some ground to cover.  

Actually, I stole a march on celebrating Earth Day by taking advantage of the sunny Sunday and strolled, face mask in place, down Washington Street towards Howard T. Brown Park. On days like we had Sunday, gorgeous blue skies, plenty of sunshine, and a light breeze, just a few steps up from Maple Street, across from the Eliza Huntington Home, you can see a slim ribbon of blue glistening in the sun that is the Norwich Harbor.

I always use the Shoreline Access that heads down to the Yantic River behind the Christ Episcopal Church as I make my way along the Heritage Trail under the Sweeney Bridge, with Thayer's Marine on the opposite shore over on Hollyhock Island, passing under the spur of Route 82 that takes traffic past the Intermodal Transportation Center to Chelsea Harbor Drive. 

Mother Nature has reclaimed a lot of where the Putts Up Dock mini-golf course used to be facing the Marina at American Wharf with where I remember the volcano being most especially overgrown. The Norwich Harbor stretches out to our right as we walk towards Howard T. Brown Park. 

On Sunday, as is the case most days, no matter the weather, there's a large gaggle of seagulls, ducks, swans, and geese near the boat launch, hoping none of us know how to read the signs posted by the CT DEEP to not feed any of the waterfowl. The gulls sail overhead on the wind currents from the harbor and all the other birds do that paddle in place thing while waiting for a dropped french fry or random piece of bread.

As you stand near the Chelsea Landing sign beyond the gazebo you can almost see forever down the Thames River, or at least as far as the Thermos Condominiums over on Laurel Hill as the river continues into the Long Island Sound and, in turn, the Atlantic Ocean. 

I like to think that perhaps someone somewhere on a European shore is gazing upon that same Atlantic at the very moment we are so that in a way we're still all together, no matter how far apart we are. Be it today, Earth Day, and every day.
-bill kenny

We Remember Thee, Zion

Today is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed as a day of commemoration for all those who perished in the Holocaust and marking the anniversary of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. 

Considering the unspeakable brutality we, as a species, have visited upon one another since the dawn of time and we started to walk upright, you can be forgiven for wondering why commemorating the Shoah is only a week.

While living in (West) Germany long ago when the world was round and things often appeared more black and white than they actually were, I went to Bergen-Belsen (there was a huge NATO tank competition range near there at Fallingbostel) where, even decades after the horror, the summer sky never seemed as blue overhead as it did on the Landstrasse leading to Celle and where I never saw an insect of any kind or heard the song of any bird.

Science dictates they had to be there, in this place where Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, died of typhus, two of the over one hundred thousand people who perished in captivity for the crime of being different. I felt foolish offering you a link on Anne Frank as you know who she is, unless you don't, which then beggars all logic for the establishment of a Holocaust Remembrance Week in the first place.

Intolerance and hatred of the other has a long history within the human race. Some have speculated the first tool fashioned by the earliest man was a weapon to kill his neighbor. I'd suggest the Shoah marked the successful combining of primitive, superstitious and mindless hatred with the unfeeling, uncaring and antiseptic precision of the Industrial Revolution. In a perverse, and reverse, triumph we had, ourselves, out machined the machines in dispatching those unlike us with a uniformity and consistency never before seen in our history on this planet.

That it continues to happen across our actually very small planet on a daily basis in a variety of ways so numerous and subtle we often don't actually feel the hate, can bring you to the brink of tears if you think about it. So perhaps it's a small mercy so few of us think at all. 

To have come as far as we have-we, the self-anointed Crown of Creation, and still be able to stoop so low. To be so willing to harness the ingenuity and intelligence of millions of years of evolution and education in the service of the most venal and loathsome of all of our emotions is to stand naked before a world whose judgment we have chosen to disregard.

"There on the poplars, we hung our harps; for there, our captors asked us for songs. Our tormentors demanded songs of joy. They said, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!' O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us. He who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks." 
And thus begins the cycle again, never to end. 
-bill kenny

One and Twenty Years Later

Cassie Bernall, 17; 

Steven Curnow, 14; 

Corey DePooter, 17; 

Kelly Fleming, 16; 

Matthew Kechter, 16; 

Daniel Mauser, 15;

Daniel Rohrbough, 15;

William "Dave" Sanders, 47; 

Rachel Scott, 17; 

Isaiah Shoels, 18; 

John Tomlin, 16; 

Lauren Townsend, 18,

and Kyle Velasquez, 16.

-bill kenny

Subject to Your Questions

Sitting up here in the Northeast, just above New York, to the left of Rhode Island, on the way to Massachusetts, I was puzzled to read Some Florida beaches are already starting to reopen after officials were criticized for not closing them right away during spring break.

I told myself there had to be a logical explanation and because I'm such a good liar (admittedly not in the same league as the Apricot Asshole, but pretty good), I calmed myself down and moved on to more tranquil thoughts. 

And then I read about another occurrence in Florida where professional wrestling was declared to be 'an essential service' by the state's governor (but his explanation makes it all make sense).

And the scales fell from my eyes.

DeSantis can be seen putting one ear strap around his head

Ahh, Florida. Remember when hanging chads were scandalous? Yep, good times...
-bill kenny

What Is the Truth and Where Did It Go?

The music of Bob Dylan and his Blood on the Tracks album got me through the fevered last days of the Richard Nixon Presidency which was as bleak a moment in our nation's history to my memory as we have ever had up and including the carnage and destruction of the attacks of 9/11/01.

Until now, that is. 

Fueled by the manifest ineptitude and incompetence of the Apricot Asshole, a man devoid of intelligence, lacking empathy for those around him (or even acknowledging their existence), mistrustful of anyone he sees as smarter than himself and so insecure he sees everyone as a threat, whose dithering and delay compounded what would have been a horrible health threat elevating it into something catastrophic that has killed over thirty-thousand of us with no end in sight and little agreement of what 'getting better' afterward from it will look like. 

Into all of this unrelenting cheerlessness for those of us who are sheltering in place, contrasted with the dry-mouthed horror of those in public health and safety positions supported by literally millions whose compensation even in the best of times is barely minimum wage but who are working every day to make life for the rest of us bearable, into all of this, comes incredible new music from Bob Dylan.

Just when we needed it the most.
-bill kenny

Normal or Bust

There was a bar, Olde Queens Tavern, steps from the Rutgers College campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, that had been a hangout for decades when we wide-eyed wonders arrived in the fall of 1970 (when the drinking age in NJ was 21 and we were not) and we adopted it as our own. Maybe it's the fog of war or the haze of alcohol but I don't remember ever seeing people in there who didn't look like me when I went in there.

I suspect we drove the previous crowd out and, in turn, were succeeded by I don't know how many generations of student-scholars (if wet tee-shirt contests and dropping shots of whiskey into beer glasses is on the syllabus). The folks who ran Olde Queens, and probably still do, were always very patient with us, and much more kind than they needed to be (in light of our age and the terrible fake IDs we all had) in moving us out when it was to close up buy hollering "you don't have to go home but you do have to go.". Some of us, I imagine, probably didn't go home then or ever, or have homes to go to, but leave we did.

Long before Joseph Heller, Closing Time was a state of mind and an attitude check. I'm grateful I don't remember more of some of those nights and the state I was in and I am grateful beyond words for somehow not succumbing as a result of behavior that went well beyond 'youthful indiscretion' without harming myself or anyone else. 

The old man I've been sentenced to become never existed in the fevered fantasies of the young me and I am still amazed how I well I survived that person's excess as if that were, itself, a success. What I do recall makes me shudder and I strive to recall as little as possible for as long as possible.

I was thinking about that yesterday watching news clips of what I understood to be a "Pro-Coronavirus Rally" in Lansing, Michigan, protesting Governor Gretchen Whitmer's efforts to keep the residents of her state alive through self-quarantining, social distancing and deciding who is an essential worker in an essential industry or business.  

Judging from the reports a lot of them (the ones without the Trump/Pence 2020 banners and the Confederate flags (because if you're gonna 'own the libs' then go all the way)) looked like one another and looked like me at the same time. I suspect we have more in common than what separates us, but I'd be surprised if we were going to make any serious effort to bridge whatever the gap may be between us anytime soon.

We used to joke as little kids that 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me' but that is, as we all know, an absurdity and a lie. Words can and do hurt, wounding in a way unlike any other weapon ever can, without leaving a visible scar. And after the echo of the last of the words has died, all we have to do is go on living with ourselves and the consequences of what we have done to one another. 

"When the old men do the fighting and the young men all look on. And the young girls eat their mothers' meat from tubes of plasticon. Beware of these, my gentle friends, and all the skins you breed. They have a tasty habit - they eat the hands that bleed."

-bill kenny

Her Profession's Her Religion

The only way this year is heading in terms of emotional wear and tear is more and faster. The pandemic with which we are struggling has shown us sides of ourselves I think many would have preferred to pretend did not exist. And yet here we are, socially-distanced, sheltered-in-place, masked and muzzled and even uglier underneath than at any point in my memories of nearly sixty-eight years.

We've spent spring so far under siege with minimal prospects for improvement across the summer and into the autumn and in addition to that we have a presidential election campaign to endure and it is absolutely impossible to overstate the importance of your vote, should you choose to cast it. As a nation, we are on a knife's edge, with an apricot asshole at the helm.  

"Praise be to Nero’s Neptune. The Titanic sails at dawn. 
"And everybody’s shouting, 'Which Side Are You On?'"
-bill kenny

Rose City Ruminations

We are a little more than knee-deep in the budget formulation process in Norwich and the quickest way to get a feel for what's important is to see where spending and investment priorities are. 

If you've purchased a budget book in years past, you already know you'll have to do that by mail this year but why not go to the city's website, and download the City Manager's proposed budget along with the supporting slides and the schedule of hearings.

City departmental budget hearings are ongoing and the ones held so far are also on the website with the first public budget hearing tomorrow night at seven-thirty.

There's a lot of moving parts to public participation that could benefit from some technical tweaking, based on recent weeks' experiences, but this I know in times where desires outnumber dollars, we should agree the budget is our money and its creation should reflect our choices. We should never confuse what we need with what we want now. 

Opinions, my mom once told me, are a lot like noses; everybody has one and they all smell (my Dad’s version used a different body part), so here’s what I “nose” about the proposed budget and my opinion will not make me many, if any, friends.

I am most concerned that how we plan, deliver and pay for public education is in desperate need of reinvention. Not just here in Norwich, but throughout our state and, to the best of my experiences, across the country.

If there's one takeaway from the protective prophylaxis we've had for our schools and children, it should be that a lot more emphasis (and money) is needed for the tools, talents, and technologies we will need to deploy to support our teachers and children not just for next year but for the rest of this century.

What we're doing, in my less than expert opinion, is a fine Industrial Age answer that has grown more obsolete with every day since Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990, ushering in the Knowledge Age. 

Quite frankly, we need to stop thinking about schools as strictly brick and mortar buildings, intending no disrespect to the recently created School Building Committee, whose members have an important role in shaping tomorrow. 

But also, a part of that tomorrow and beyond are the efforts being made today by our Norwich Public Schools leadership to overcome the digital divide so many in our community face when we try to use tools and technologies such as distance learning and virtual classrooms, because business as usual in this, the third decade of the 21st Century has less and less to do with places and spaces and more to do with opportunities and innovations. 

I don’t pretend to know where the money we’ll need to do all of this comes from (hint: it will have more to do with hard choices and less to do with GoFundMe pages) but not talking about its inevitability doesn’t diminish its necessity. 

Education is our best tool as a society to create solutions we don't yet even know we need, and if you think education is too expensive wait until we calculate the cost of ignorance. 

-bill kenny

If You're Looking for a Sign

And even if you weren't...

Up to and including gas station sushi

Not all who wander are lost but let's keep this forty-year wandering round the desert business to just four, ending in November, because enough is more than enough, okay?
-bill kenny

Some Days Are Easy

If you stand still long enough, the universe may speak to you.

The trick is to be listening.
-bill kenny

An Easter We'll Remember

Whether you celebrate today as a religious person, a chocoholic, a bunny fetishist or a pagan, Happy Easter. Talk about convergence! I meant between the Christian liturgical calendar and the pagan seasonal passages-I still don't understand the relation of chocolate or rabbits to either side of that equation but that's the great thing about Livin' in the USA, tolerance.

Went for an early morning walk yesterday in and around my neighborhood, Washington and Lafayette Streets, near NFA in Norwich, Connecticut.  One of the things all the rain earlier in the week distracted us from, or at least me, was how much farther along the trees, bushes, and grasses are now than a week or so ago. Where there were lots of redbuds, and at a distance, you could also see light red glow on the tips of branches, there are now light green, tiny leaves pushing their way into the day.

And where there were brown and matted patches of grass at Chelsea Parade (the cut across from Lincoln Avenue to NFA; Sachem has a light and Williams has a crosswalk), there's green because the waves of NFA students shortcutting to school across the green have disappeared because NFA, like almost everywhere and everything else, is closed because of The Plague. 

For weeks it's felt like the Spring That Wasn't because this hasn't been the kindest time in our history and non-weather has overshadowed everything else. I'm not sure that means a whole lot to the baby birds hiding in the brambles on Grosvenor Place, and who grow very quiet when you walk by but begin squawking again the moment you pass. 

I'm pretty sure, based on prolonged observation, the grey squirrels have no opinion on the state of the world, as long as you fling a handful of peanuts their way once an hour or so. I was going to ask the young nurse in scrubs smoking a cigarette while sitting on the rock wall at the first (but closed) entrance to the Yantic Cemetery, which is around the corner from the W. W. Backus Hospital but the irony of her attempting to get a head start into the next life made me giggle too much to speak.

And we put on our best and bravest faces (even if under masks) while reassuring one another that we'll be alright though I'm not sure how any of us could know that because I certainly don't, but despite that, or perhaps because of it, life goes on even as the seasons shift and the heavens smile. Change is really the only constant in our existence and it's the desire to know what's around that next corner that keeps us running up that hill.

-bill kenny