Somewhere The Scooter Smiles

My timing doesn't leave much of a margin for error but it worked out again in my favor so I'm grateful. The DFB season played before empty stadia across Germany for the last eight weeks or so, concluded this past Saturday. 

At least the First Division did, with their little brothers the Second Division concluding on Sunday, leaving only the two-game playoff between the first division absteiger, the sixteenth-place finisher, SV Werder Bremen, who will meet the second division's aufsteiger, the third-place finisher, 1 FC Heidenheim, to see who either stays or joins the first division.

And then there will be silence on the soccer pitch for me for a while but luckily, perhaps, The Lords of Baseball have graciously agreed with their labor force to conduct a truncated sort of season, without fans in the stands, that will set the stage for some kind of a post-season, at least that's what we're being told. And it should all happen lickety-splitly. I can barely contain my enthusiasm.

On the other hand as the old saying goes (at least as I've heard it), bad baseball is a lot like bad sex; at least you can have bad pizza afterward. Or words to that effect. While out shopping yesterday, face-masked and appropriately social-distanced, I came across another beverage just in time for Opening Day, and all I could say was Holy Cow!

Talk about signs and wonders. I still miss listening to him as he shared birthdays greetings and anniversary wishes between batters while glowing like the metal on the edge of the knife. 
-bill kenny 

  

If Goren and Eames Could See Us Now

I spend a lot of time sitting at the computer and monitor I have in what my wife calls my "man cave" but I think of it more as a treehouse without a tree in the front part of our house (a year and a half after closing on the purchase I still get a charge out of typing 'our house') where I can hear the sounds of traffic passing on the street there at the end of our front lawn about twenty-odd feet from my chair and keyboard.  

One of the sounds I enjoy listening to and for is the chiming of the hours from the clock at the Park Congregational Church up the street from where we live on the far side of the Chelsea Parade, facing the Teel House that borders Broadway (or as some of us say around here, 'the other Broadway').

When we moved the clocks forward for Daylight Saving Time, however it gets accomplished for churches and all manner of other buildings with chimes across the country, the clock on the church now chimes to mark the passing of each hour about eight minutes after the rest of us have noted its actual passing. 

I'm not complaining. I have no idea what all is involved in the forth and back of setting clocks on buildings and I find it reassuring in a way that we're not all marching in lockstep around the clock, trying to catch its hands while it covers its face. I've actually started to hope, when it's my turn to shuffle off this mortal coil, that my passing can be marked by that clock thus guaranteeing me an extra eight or so minutes here on the ant farm with beepers. Such are the small things that make up a life.

Speaking of which when I awaken in the morning these days (I've become a slugabed in the two years since retiring so no more middle of the night rising and shining) usually at some point around seven, I open our backdoor for my sneak preview of the day ahead, weather or not (I've been working on my puns of steel, can you tell?). 

I usually get to enjoy the song of a solitary wren perched on a wire that runs high above the crumbling brick wall that separates our yard from the side yard of the house on Chelsea Court behind us (I think it's their wall as I know it's not mine). Our daughter, Michelle, told my wife the other day she believes it to be a Carolina Wren singing to attract a mate but all I know (and care about) is that it's very tuneful and I'm glad there isn't a Tinder for small birds as I very much enjoy the song and certainly wish him the best in his search for happiness, or what passes for it among birds.

While typing this I had a random memory of someone I hold in high regard and whom I ended up meeting long ago for, of all reasons, because we were/are fans of the television series, Law & Order: Criminal Intent. I made her acquaintance when she was an editor at a local daily newspaper who didn't know what they had and allowed her to take flight just as the digital frontier was blossoming into its full promise.

She now paints with a palette of so many brilliant colors she's had to build her own stop among the ether's one's and zero's to have someplace to rest and catch her breath. I think, if memory serves me well enough this is one of her favorites, and I hope Dick Wolf would approve.
-bill kenny 

   

What Does Time Do When You're NOT Having Fun?

It can't be just me. We still have MORE THAN six months left in this year.

For many, this has been the longest year of their lives and for nearly one hundred and thirty thousand of us, it has been the last year of their lives. 
-bill kenny

A Pause that Refreshes

I encountered Sir Charles Barkley yesterday afternoon while out walking. We've had a run of warm and sometimes humid days that have filled much of June with sunshine to the point that here in Southeastern Connecticut we have a rainfall deficit of about six inches, making for brown (and crunchy) front lawns when you walk on them. 

I didn't meet the real Charles Barkley, of course, but rather, a large and quite beautiful black Great Dane whose head came to a little higher than my waist and who was quite content to stand in the shade of a tree while his person and I conversed and exchanged pleasantries about the weather and, of course, what a good boy Sir Charles was being.

I was hiking back towards my house after having detoured on my walk to take in the Lower Falls of the Yantic River, in particular, the rock shelf facing the falls, as I very much enjoy the view any time of the year. 

With the rainfall deficit being the way it is, the Yantic didn't so much roar on its way through Norwich to the Harbor as it did murmur, almost getting lost in the hum of the insects and the calls of the birds all of whom share the lower falls with those of us who wander.
-bill kenny

Better That Abner's Gone

When you're not physically gifted or coordinated, you get choosy about your sports and mine are pretty much soccer (football, not US football) and baseball. I have the sinking feeling I'll be expending a lot more of my passion for soccer as the pending return of Major League Baseball leaves me shaking my head and wondering why bother? 

The answer (of course) is money. 
Bags full of it, with more than enough for the billionaires who own the teams and the millionaires who play for them. The folks selling hot dogs, soda, beer, programs, peanuts, popcorn, crackerjack, and all manner of souvenirs inside the stadium and the ones on the outside who help you park the car, all of those folks get screwed. 

Don't feel bad for them, though. A lot of them got those $600 checks from the Federal government back in March so they're pretty much still farting through silk, I'm sure. Unless of course, they were considered 'at will' employees or concessionaires then they got just about nothing at all. But let's face it, there won't be any spectators, no bleacher creatures of any kind so who will miss them.

Sixty games instead of a full season and ten teams total making the playoffs. Why can't the MLB be more like the NHL where, after the season, almost everyone goes to the playoffs? I don't actually pay attention to hockey but apparently, those who do don't seem to mind so why not baseball as well?

Looks like the National League will have the designated hitter (I loathe the designated hitter and its evil little brother, the designated runner) to 'save pitchers from getting injured on the basepaths' even though baseball went about one hundred years or more without ANY designated hitters and we still had pitchers who got hits, ran bases, and didn't die while doing either. 

Here's how we can save pitchers from getting injured and further incorporate that stupid Minor League Baseball innovation of having games that go into extra innings have each inning start with a runner on second base: take a page out of the little league (actually the teeny-weeny league or PeeWees. maybe), and have batters hit off a tee. Yep NO pitchers at all, just sluggers! HOORAY! 

And maybe if the score gets out of hand at some mid-way point in the contest, the players could swap uniforms and continue on. It's not like there are fans paying attention as our once great national pastime transforms itself into something that the Boomers think the Zoomers will want to watch as they wait for their avocado toast to cool. 
-bill kenny

The Covidiot Strikes Again

All this talk about 'phases' of the COVID-19 pandemic is an intellectual exercise because all we can ever know is the here and now and in that here and now we are up to our keisters in COVID-19 and with stories like this, you don't need Madam Cleo to realize there's no happy ending up around the next bend.

We have an incompetent know-nothing leading us as our "War Time President" against the "invisible enemy" and we are losing because we're not showing up. 

We are better than this and we all need to start proving that today.
-bill kenny

Buckle Up, Buttercup

Sometimes even as I sit down at the keyboard to start writing these things, I don't have any idea where my words are heading, which seems only fair since I assume for you that happens even more often than I care to think about. That's my way of warning you that today is one of those days.

Summer started, says the calendar, this past Saturday, though we'd had warm and dry weather for prolonged periods of time before anything officially became anything else. And between us, in light of how unsettling in so many ways that so much of Spring 2020 proved to be, I think we should be glad to be rid of it and face the next season with optimism and hope (and masks and at a proper socially distanced interval). 

Speaking of which, as a kid who always loved Halloween, and whose less than attractive facial features (and too many acquired-taste personality traits) made both masks and quarantining a preferred coping strategy from an early age, we could and should care enough about ourselves and one another to cover our faces when sharing public places, per Governor Lamont's directive back on April 20th. 

I don't mean to nag (but as the oldest child I've had a lot of practice and I'm really good at it) but watch me do it anyway: we've all encountered unmasked folks in a variety of public spaces who are behaving as if the COVID-19 threat has vanished and precautions can be relaxed if not outright ignored. 

As a life-long (so far) pessimist who is only (rarely) surprised and seldom disappointed by the shenanigans that go around here on our ant farm, I'm dismayed (but not really) that so many of us who've ignored the hands-free cell phone and distracted driving laws we had the legislature enact continue to so blithely ignore them. And the same holds true with masks and social distancing.

We've had nearly 125,000 deaths attributed nationwide to COVID-19, and are still trending at over 100 new fatalities every day, so I don't understand where this belief in personal invincibility comes from, or even more on point, why so many of us seem to think that it can't happen to us when every statistic I've seen says it most certainly can.    

Masks aren't a symbol of a political belief or ideology; they are a sign of how much we could and should care about and for one another. I'm considered to be in a high-risk for infection category and am grateful to every person who chooses to mask up when shopping, just as I hope they appreciate my efforts to do likewise perhaps for their someone special they have at home who might be at risk. 

We've viewed our lives for so long as sprints to see who could be fastest to have the best and/or the most, be it cars, houses, jobs, etc. And now, we're faced with acknowledging we are engaged in a marathon and that far too many of us, because of race, skin color, sex, sexual preference or a hundred other synthetic barriers have different starting and ending points on the path that we must run. 

We'll get through this and move forward with the continuing challenges we have as a nation of neighbors and citizens continuing to strive 'to form a more perfect union' but only when we are together and united
-bill kenny.  

Somewhere G. Gordon Liddy Is Smiling

Having been a young(ish) adult in the waning days of the Richard M. Nixon presidency, a lot of what's happening in the clown car of our national government situated in DC right now smells disturbingly familiar.

The parade of rats leaving the ship, peddling books about their own and others' perfidy and incompetence as they run to the exits, while the Big Fool continues to be knee-deep in Big Muddy; it's all hauntingly reminiscent of a time in our history I'd have hoped we would never see again.

But what can I say? Elect an asshole, expect a shitshow.

Perfect for Summer!

-bill kenny

Added to the Bucket List

I never get lost, no matter where I am. Something about me (or my personality) just encourages everyone I encounter to tell me where to go. 

Here's someplace I'd hope to visit before shuffling off this mortal coil.  

"Open your heart, open your mind. A train is leaving all day. 
A wonderful trip through our time. And laughter is all you pay."
-bill kenny

The Stone Gods Did Not Make a Sound

A postcard from my own past that too often I forget to read. At the time I called it: 

When My Father Was a Hero and Not a Human

When I was in the US Air Force after I was married but before we had children (actually before Sigrid had children) back then shortly after Easter in 1980 I happened across a tremendous card that was pitch-perfect for my dad for Father's Day.

I was in the Rhein-Main Base Exchange and the thing you have to know about US military overseas shopping opportunities, be they the exchanges (like department stores) or the commissaries (like groceries) when you see it on the shelf, buy it. There's no 'look in the backroom for more' no 'we're expecting another order in a  week.' It really is a case of 'he who hesitates is lunch.'

When I saw the card, I knew it was ideal for two people who had long ago come to the realization they had nothing to say to one other but neither wanted to be the first to admit that because an admission such as that would be giving up and these two Thick Micks never gave up, ever.

Our relationship, and as I discovered, that of my brothers and sisters as well, to varying degrees, frequently had more turbulence than tranquility. I used to say my father was the angriest man I ever knew until I caught a glance of myself one morning in the mirror. I then stopped saying that.

The card captured all of that and when I got home I signed it, wrote a note whose every word I still remember, addressed the envelope, put a stamp on it and put it in the hand tooled leather carrying bag Sigrid had gotten me for our first wedding anniversary and into which I dropped any number and manner of objects as I went about my life.

I next saw the card some six months later when Sigrid, Frau Ordnung Muss Sein, was cleaning out my bag and held it out to me in soft and silent reproach as we sat in our living room. She pursed her lips and waited for her spaetzen-hirnn husband to grasp what the object in her hand was and then, realizing he did, slowly shook her head.

For my part, chagrined as I was, I insisted it wasn't that big a deal as I could save the card for next Father's Day and thought no more of it. Sadly, the universe did. My father was to die in his sleep of an attacking heart the following May. The words I'd always meant to say but needed thousands of miles of ocean to actually write were never shared.

I became an adult when I bought my first beer legally. I became a man when I took a wife (or more exactly, when she married me). I became a father with the birth of our children. When I looked at my dad 'back in the day' I saw him differently than I do now, shaped and formed by a crucible of events beyond our control each of our lives has contained.

I've learned not very much in nearly seven decades here on the ant farm except, tell the people you love that you love them when they and you are here so they know it and don't be surprised that they already did know and that in their own way they love you too.

To my brothers and my brothers-in-law (on earth and in heaven), fathers all, and to you and yours as well and always, Happy Father's Day.
-bill kenny

Maybe Cursing the Darkness Is Preferable....

The rich, as famously explained by F. Scott Fitzgerald, are not like you and me, and never having been rich, I've always assumed he probably knew what he was writing about and left it at that. The same, I suspect, goes for the famous (and/or infamous) and probably for about the same reason. 

Gwyneth Paltrow is, for me, one of those folks who prove any and all assertions about wealth, fame, and intelligence especially how they are often not apportioned in anything resembling a fair distribution. How else to explain this incredible example of SERIOUSLY?

Talk about a compelling argument for cursing the darkness.
-bill kenny

This. Right Here. Right Now.

I grew up listening to the music of Bob Dylan. 

I don't make any distinction about all the flavors and colors he's offered in a career that has spanned half a century. I listen to ALL of him because ANY of him is usually a lot better than MOST anybody else.

His Blood on the Tracks album got me through Richard Nixon and the turmoil and turbulence that followed and today, just in time, to combat COVID-19, the Mango Mussolini, the screams of pain on every street in America and so much more comes Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Stop what you're reading (this) and listen to this.
-bill kenny

Wait Until You See the Merch Concession

Talk about Flinker Igel! All I can say is hellyah!

Move over Sonic and make way for Pepper and Tuck!
-bill kenny

Money Doesn't Talk, It Swears

Desperate times call for desperate measures, I'm told. We are fond of telling one another that COVID-19 has stressed 'our system,' be it healthcare, education, governance, business, among others but what we really mean is that the pandemic has laid bare the shortcomings of what we've built that benefits some without ever benefiting all so extensively that our weaknesses are visible from space. 

If ever there was a moment to look at what we are and how we’ve gotten here, this would be that time and maybe it’s also when we should assess where we should go from here and how we should get there. As is so often the case, there are too many home fires burning and not enough trees.  

And lest we forget, it wasn't the easiest of times around here in pre-COVID-19 days (sounds quaint doesn’t it?) as many, if not too many, private and public initiatives were postponed and delayed until we had ‘better days.’ Now, our calendars don't seem to have any sign that those better days will be arriving any time soon, and nowhere will this be felt harder and more severely than in our schools.  

Too many years of kicking the can down the road on addressing the financial needs of public education have left us with a school system that literally cannot afford any more bumps in the road, even though much of our future would seem to be unpaved. 

If you think this year's budget deliberations were difficult and the proposed way forward the Board of Education has created will be painful when, and/or, if, the new school year starts, you may need to rethink your definition of pain once that next year unfolds.  

Some of us have learned to say 'distance learning ' as if it were 'abracadabra' or some other magic phrase but it's not and we'd need more than one fairy godmother to make it happen here. 

We don't have the dollars to invest in developing the curriculum needed to support distance learning, to train the teachers to deliver that instruction, the infrastructure to connect our households to those distance learning opportunities, and the computers to put in all those homes and apartments where our children live, much less support the existing classrooms to which our children hope to return.  

In a school system in a poor city such as ours, with so many families struggling to make ends meet (even as the ends keep moving farther apart) and many of our children relying on free or reduced breakfasts and lunches, making sure they have juice boxes takes priority over assuring access to Chromebooks. 

If you think that the impact of our current crisis is greater and more damaging on Main Street than Wall Street purely by coincidence, you're either naive or stupid. Or both. We’ve postponed the heart to heart conversation we’ve needed to have on the importance and value of public education for all the decades I’ve lived here. Let’s finally face the facts, own the obligation to change, and do what we know we must if we are to fulfill the promise of greatness that those before us knew we were capable of. 
-bill kenny

Sometimes Literacy Is a Curse

Imagine being behind someone like this at a traffic signal. An Equal Opportunity Offender.

Of course, I could blur the license plate but attention is what this driver seeks.
I keep hoping this is photo-shopped but fear it isn't 

This is why come November 3rd, I'm voting blue no matter who.

I Officially Call Bullshit

If you're one of those MAGA Muttonheadsed Minions who tells me you support the Mango Mussolini's re-election to the Presidency because of your 401K, feel free to move along because otherwise, you can kiss my grits. 

Here's your guy, the same guy who insisted in February thanks to his own best brain, that COVID-19 would 'just go away as the weather warmed', like some kind of a miracle.

And yet there's this. o ye of stupidly excessive amounts of faith in a moron.


Proving his stunt with the upside-down Bible in front of the DC church was just that, a stunt because he knows absolutely nothing about miracles, which shouldn't surprise any of you 401KKK Trumpers because he knows just about nothing about just about everything.
-bill kenny 

A Quick Word (or Two) on Flag Day

As Dylan once offered, 'Nothing is Revealed' and in the current times in which we live, that is tantamount to tragedy. It's not too late to learn from history, I hope. 

Today is Flag Day. On military posts and bases across the country, ships at sea on the oceans of the world and in absolute armpit hellholes in far-flung places whose names none of us can remember or pronounce, the men and women who wear our country's uniform are according appropriate honors to our flag today, as they do every day. Feel free to join them.

One of the honors I know they render, having been one of them, be it standing at attention, saluting or kneeling to acknowledge our need to do better by all of us, is the conviction that every one of us is entitled to no less than the dignity and respect we would want for one another and anyone who feels otherwise isn't actually an American and they need to stop pretending they are.

-bill kenny  

Carefully Taught

A tradition and cultural inheritance we can all live without.

Starting today.
-bill kenny

Racism Is Bigger than Racing

I don't follow as many sports now as I did when I was younger and I didn't follow all that many when I was a wee slip of a lad. I drive an automobile but not competitively (that's been proven in traffic court, by the way) so I'm not a devotee of either the Formula One style of racing or the NASCAR-just keep-making-left-turns-for-five-hundred-miles-racing. 

All that counter-clockwise scratching makes me itch. But there are many folks around the world who are fans of auto racing though in this country the NASCAR variety seems to be more popular. I'm not sure how that will work out in the wake of the announced ban on the display and use of Confederate flags at NASCAR races.      

I could be wrong about this, but I don't think since 1946 they have ever flown the Blutfahne while conducting the German Grand Prix, not even when they raced at AVUS in Berlin, so I'm not sure I can grasp the anger reflected in the reaction of Ray Ciccarelli, who is a NASCAR Truck Series racer (learn something new every day) who has seemingly spent his career so far watching the exhausts of every other racer disappear around the next (left turn bend) in front of him.

I'm from the swamps of Jersey and have my own prejudices and stereotypes, and to be honest, Ray seems to check all the boxes for me especially when his outrage mangles his syntax as he announces he's quitting the sport after this season precisely because of the flag ban "and I ain't spend the money we are to participate in any political BS!!" (I ran that through my spellchecker on the computer and the CPU threw up and then blew up).

Ray, and all the other Rays out there (and Rayettes I guess, too): the Confederate flag is hatred, not heritage and celebrates not only losers of a war against the United States (that killed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers) but also a war they started against the United States, making them traitors. Learn some history before you become it.
-bill kenny   

Any Relation to Ozzy Is Purely Coincidental

Every organized religion, and a couple of the somewhat disorganized ones, have sacred writings, scriptures if you will. No matter the region, or the religion, it's part of our human genome, the need to be a part of something bigger. 

Be it the Koran, the Old Testament, the New Testament, or the latest roman a clef by Danielle Steel, there's a narrative-a place to go look for details. I like to think of them as a form of Cliff's Notes for How You Should Live. When you argue a matter of theology and someone says, 'you can look it up!' the texts are what they're referring to.

There's the blood of the Lamb, the descent of the dove, the tongues of fire, the burning bush, and an almost unending number of symbols and signs that The Lord (however you perceive S/He to be) uses in less than mysterious ways to get our attention and pass along the Word.

What if we're the first generation of people on this planet who had a Deity? I don't pretend to know what all of those before us had, I'm just saying we're the first and Our God uses the tools we have today in much the way as in the days of old we've read about. Someone I encountered the other day speculated as to how would God communicate the Ten Commandments if S/He had to use text.

Perhaps:
1. no1 b4 me. srsly.
2. dnt wrshp pix/idols
3. no omg's
4. no wrk on w/end (sat 4 now; sun l8r)
5. pos ok - ur m&d r cool
6. dnt kill ppl
7. :-X only w/ m8
8. dnt steal
9. dnt lie re: bf
10. dnt ogle ur bf's m8. or ox. or dnkey. myob.

M, pls rite on tabs & giv 2 ppl. 
ttyl, JHWH.
ps. wwjd?
-bill kenny

Same Movie, Different Cast

Monday night the City Council completed the most important job it has and for which we chose them in last fall's election: approving our municipal budget. I've followed this process for almost three decades and it never gets any easier or less pain-filled and Monday night's deliberations and discussions proved that point again.  

The COVID-19 pandemic and its repercussions made (and will continue to make) every aspect of our lives much more difficult and the impact on the city's services, expenses, and revenues elevated the degree of this year's budget difficulties. If you don't have time to read the rest of this column, I’ll cut to the chase: no one is happy with the final results. 

That said, and stop me when you’ve read this before, despite our unhappiness at the moment we will repeat the same contentious conflicts on spending and services every year because all we do is talk about change without actually changing (and yes, it’s easy for me to say that as I don’t have to do it).

When you’re on the City Council, the buck, or what’s left of it, stops there. Whether we elected Republicans or Democrats last November, everyone is a Norwich neighbor when they sit at a desk in the front of Council Chambers. And all have to ask themselves ‘how do I make Norwich a place to come home to?’

That’s not a hypothetical question, and it’s certainly not an easy one to answer when posed to a property owner, a parent with school-age children, a small business operator and all the other people with whom we share our city. Reconciling those answers and developing a fair and equitable path forward is the goal but it involves heavy lifting.

People prefer a problem that's familiar to a solution that’s not. We are and should be, concerned at what we pay in taxes for what we receive in services, but after we've said we're angry about one or the other (we rarely if ever complain about one and the other), we seem to resign ourselves to whatever is about to unfold and leave our protests at that, until the next year.

The City Council and the Board of Education created an Ad Hoc Committee to start building a bridge of communication to replace the wall of mistrust and I’d like to see that process formalized so that it continues and grows.

But there’s a lot more work to be done to make ourselves more transparent and responsive with better-defined responsibilities and accountability from public safety through infrastructure and it takes all of us. When we finger-point as part of the blame-game instead of rolling up a sleeve and extending a helping hand, we cannot be surprised that we continue to have the same situations and the same challenges.

Norwich isn’t just the grand list, number of schools or fire engines, and taxes though all of those are part of who we are. It’s about opportunity and quality of life for every resident. So, let’s stop talking about how much we need to change and actually do it. There can be no greater need nor better time than now.

-bill kenny

Revealing at the End of the Day

I have had in the course of my sojourn on this orb a vivid imagination but no matter how much I strain and struggle I cannot imagine life as a person of color. I need a word between empathy and sympathy to describe my emotional state for the life and times of too many of my fellow Americans right now, but I don't have that word.  

I do, however, have this marvelous comic (to use the word loosely) from Nathan W. Pyle whose observations always get a reaction from me. Today not so much a smile as a furrow.

When absolutely everyone is treated with dignity and respect we all win. 
-bill kenny

Time to Slip into Something More Comfortable

I would never pretend that one size fits all and will concede that some might prefer a turtleneck or a hoodie but let's face it, we've reached that point in time when you just know that what you have in the wardrobe is not what you need. It's time for a change.

Limited Edition

It'd recommend short sleeves especially for this time of year because sun's out, guns out. And that, Pantload45, rhymes with time to move out. Start packing. November 3rd will be here before you know it.
-bill kenny

A Far Too Deep Breath

Despite everyone's shadow being the same color, we are a species in love with finding differences between ourselves and wielding those differences like cudgels against one another. While we here in the Land of the Round Doorknobs like to speak about equality, far too often the subtext of that equality is Orwell's Animal Farm.

Everyone, regardless of race, religion, sex, sexual preference, color, creed, temperament, or any other artificial artifice our minds can create is entitled to respect, opportunity, and a life of their own choosing. You're, of course, welcome to disagree but you'd be wrong.

Equality like gravity doesn't need or require your consent.
-bill kenny 

A Different Kind of Beach Day

There's an expression attributed to George Santayana, that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. I'm not sure where that places us, with what at times appears to be a nation-sized dose of attention deficit disorder. I offered these words eleven years ago and they're probably more true now than they were then. At the time I called it:

It Only Feels Like It Was Only Yesterday

I remember the two days we were there in the late spring of 1984, how blue the sky and the ocean were. That hadn't been the case, the historians assured me, forty years earlier. It was soothing to see how the sand seemed to go on forever along the shoreline but, when you turned to face inland from the beaches, how quickly the landscape changed to thick bushes, scrub trees, rocky terrain. I found it hard to imagine what it all must have looked like as the landing craft lowered their ramps and men and machines poured from them struggling to cross the water to the beach all in the face of murderous counter-fire.

I was traveling with a US Army Helicopter Company from Hanau, Germany, to walk the beaches of Normandy, France. I had come with a young enlisted US Army videographer, Specialist Four Bob (the Human Sachtler) Garvin. Bobby G was over six feet tall and had, it seemed, enough upper body strength to crush an automobile like a beer can. We called him the Human Sachtler because there wasn't a shot where he needed the camera tripod-between the arms of steel and the ability to control his breathing, he was as steady as a rock.

Walking, as we did for hours in the sand, can wear you out and the fatigue is profound. I could only wonder what, on D-Day, a GI with a seventy-pound rucksack, and all hell in front of and around him, was feeling on what we now call the longest day. We had done interviews earlier that morning with elderly Frenchmen who, as men our present ages and sometimes only boys, had been inadvertent witnesses to history, triangulating linguistically, as they spoke no English and we, no French. 

One of them, to the undisguised scorn of the others, admitted he understood 'some German' and so I would ask him auf Deutsch a question that he would rephrase into French and ask of a neighbor who would reply to him and which he'd relay to me in German and which I'd translate into English.

When you read about Normandy and all the planning and staging that lead up to it, it feels very different when you can walk the beaches you've read about. There's a taste in your mouth from the salt air and a breeze coming off the water that helps the screams of gulls carry even farther. I wonder if those struggling ashore, from the landing craft or parachuting down onto those maintaining their watch on the Atlantic Wall had a moment in which to take any of that in--on a day when so many would die, was there a split second to savor life? There was no one to ask except those we visited the next day, friend and foe alike, at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.

When you can struggle to climb to Pointe du Hoc (up the stairs carved into the soft stone and NOT the way the Rangers had to, directly vertical), you can almost, but not quite, grasp what it was like for the soldiers of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, first to seize this emplacement (actually to capture artillery that had already been moved) and then, as the Nazi High Command realized, finally, the invasion wasn't a ruse but the real thing and threw itself at the Rangers trying to drive them over the cliffs and into the sea, how they held their positions for two days.

Today, June 6, we mark the 76th anniversary of D-Day, the beginning of the liberation of Europe from the tyrannical, homicidal terror of the Nazi's Third Reich. Young American men had been in Europe thirty years earlier, in the War to End All Wars that, as it turned out, didn't. And what they couldn't know as they waded ashore and struggled to stay alive long enough to shoot back at those shooting at them, in less than a year, all the shooting in Europe would be over.

How much we've learned as a species all those years on is a matter of debate and discussion (and for some, despair) as the young men, of all sides, who survived D-Day pass from our earth at a rate of thousands every day, taking with them every memory and meaning we might have shared, assuming we had cared enough to ask. 

Indeed, as Santayana noted 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' but those who remember it was Santayana who said this are sadly also few and far between. "Say a prayer for the common foot soldier. Spare a thought for his back-breaking work."
-bill kenny

Ancient Rome Had Bread and Circuses

A lot within our lives has changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and some have argued that it has altered and impacted every aspect of our lives and that may well be true.

It hasn't kept our President from being a feckless and reckless asshole, emboldened and enabled by Supine Senators of the Republican Party who regard the public trust as a private trough in which to stick their snouts and gorge themselves, but I digress...

Politics as unusual isn't the only facet of our lives in lockdown to have changed. Shopping, socializing, attending religious services, and going to school all look different now because they are different now. 

Even the world of sports, live and televised, has been transformed if not improved. Where once we chanted for Jordan or Jeter now we cheer for Pepper (?). 

Great big feeds of sunflower seeds. 
-bill kenny

Good While It Lasted

"We thank thee, Lord for all we've got, 
While the multi-nationals call the shots.
So scrape them hides and clean that slate,
Dancin' in the ruins of the nation-state."

Our Lady of the Blessed Photo Opportunity

"Dancin' in the ruins of the realm.
A fool and a mad man at the helm.
Dancin' in the ruins of the right.
Down in the bunker on a hunger strike."

-bill kenny

Citizens NOT Suspects

I was born in the spring of 1952. That autumn, Dwight Eisenhower, who'd led Allied forces to victory from the beaches of Normandy to the fall of Berlin during World War II was elected President of the United States. 

Neither he nor any of those of us alive at that moment could have realized the old world order was rapidly giving way (even if not always as rapidly as many wanted it to) nor could we know or guess what was to come.

But before "I Like Ike" carried the day that November election, in September of 1950, Oliver Brown was denied a place for his daughter, Linda, in the third-grade of a Topeka, Kansas, public school, and in 1954 the US Supreme Court ended the lie of 'separate but equal' educational opportunities for all children. 

Meanwhile, in December of 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a municipal bus in Montgomery, Alabama. On the 1st of February 1960, the lunch counter at the Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, became famous for something other than its egg-salad sandwiches cherry cola sodas and in October 1962, Air Force veteran James Meredith became the first black student to enroll in the University of Mississippi.  

These incidents and events and tens of thousands (and more) just like them, both great and small make up the pages of our collective and shared history of the struggle for Civil Rights, with lessons we, for reasons surpassing both my understanding and comprehension, seem to be fated to relive, but never learn.  

I grew up and then old in the Sixties when there were moments that many of us disagreed, violently and otherwise, with one another on just about any and every aspect of what being 'an American' meant or should mean. We went to the moon, we got lost in the jungles of southeast Asia and we took to the streets of major cities across the country trying to repair and redeem the soul of our nation.

Fast forward half a century (yeah, I still have trouble processing that so much time has flowed to the sea), and when I look at this past weekend, I wonder what's gone on, but more importantly what's gone wrong. As you may have watched on Saturday, we returned to manned space flight and while Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken slipped the surly bonds of earth, many of the rest of us were trying and failing to maintain a consequential conversation about something as basic and fundamental as what's right and what's wrong. 

Whether you were watching on television, reading about it in local newspapers, or witnessing and/or participating in protests Saturday at the Chelsea Parade War Memorials or elsewhere in the wake of yet another murder of a person of color, you cannot help but fear we are no longer as united a country as our name might suggest and that perhaps this time we have lost our way.

And so that we're very clear, there aren't two sides to that 'discussion of race' that we keep postponing. There is only what is right. If the protests and anger upset you, you're looking in the wrong place and need to ask about cause rather than effect. The space between us is too great for me to offer you a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and hope somehow we'll all feel better in the morning especially when I recall his warning that "lightning makes no sound until it strikes." 

Ka

-bill kenny

(Still) Unbowed and Unbroken

Three years ago tomorrow, as my wife and I were preparing to travel to New London to help our son, Patrick, and his love, Jena, celebrate the announcement of their engagement, our phone rang and my world changed forever. Again. 

I made my living for nearly five decades with words, spoken and written, and yet almost three years later I cannot say any differently and certainly not any better what I wrote at the time and then called: 

Unbowed, Unbroken

I knew my mother, Joan Marie (Kelly) Kenny, every day of my life. She died yesterday afternoon after being briefly hospitalized for an infection in an artificial heart valve that slowly overwhelmed her body.

Mom's high school graduation photo

Through the miracle of technology, I was able to speak to her on a phone held to her ear while I said goodbye if by goodbye I'm allowed to include sobbing uncontrollably while apologizing for crying and being comforted by the woman who gave birth to me and my brothers and sisters.  

Mom died very much as she lived, with quiet determination on her own terms and with her eyes wide open, rarely blinking because she knew losing sight of where the bastards of this planet are, even for a moment, could be catastrophic. There was nothing she would not and could not do for her children as I know all too well.

There was, in the end, too little, I, as her oldest could do for her. Kara, my sister who was with her in the hospital, told me Mom's heart was slowing down and she was sleeping more than she was awake so I was grateful she was awake when I called so she could hear me tell her how much I loved her one last time in this life.

On her wedding day to Dad in June 1951

Mom believed in heaven and I have no doubt that after her sometimes hellish almost nine decades here on earth that is where she is. Mitch Albom wrote, "when death takes your mother, it steals that word forever." The only solace I take in that thought is that forever is only my lifetime and no longer.
-bill kenny