Waited All Year for this Night

Not just me, I'm sure, but this has been a difficult couple of years for so many of us. 

I remember, sort of, last New Year's Eve, hoping the then-just-deployed vaccines for COVID-19 would prove successful enough to be shared among all of us, never dreaming that so many would choose, for reasons I will never understand or comprehend, to believe innuendo and jibber-jabber from podcastholes and elsewhere and decide to NOT get vaccinated. 

Leaving us, here on the threshold of the new year to be in pretty much the same place we were as last year ended. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. <Sigh>

See you next year, with a heart full of hope for something better, not bitter.
-bill kenny  

Not Just Time in a Bottle

I admired when it was a craze some time ago, the whole chutzpah behind 'pet rocks.' It took a set of, well, pet rocks, to not only come up with the idea but to market them with a degree of singular intensity not seen since the Jehovah's Witnesses first encountered storm doors. 

So, I'm guessing that same process went into Stephanie Matto's breakthrough hustle. But please remember, Steph, a fart is a lot like true love: if you have to force it, it's probably shit. 
-bill kenny  

Cogito Ergo Doleo Revisited

Saturday starts next year. Seriously. When I look at all the year-in-review retrospectives across the various media platforms, I'm struggling to keep track of where one year ended and the next began. Maybe just me, for most of 2021 I felt a little like the second dog in the sled team; I presumed we were making progress but quite frankly my view didn't seem to change much. 

And now 2021 is almost over, and all I can muster is 'now what?' I long since stopped making New Year's resolutions because I know myself too well and don't pay any attention to them after they're spoken/written. Instead, I strive (not always successfully) to identify habits I do have that produce positive outcomes and/or make me feel better and perform them more often.

As I have probably mentioned in this space more than a few times (I saw that eye roll, by the way), I do a great deal of walking. I love the entirely different feel to the city I get while walking as opposed to driving and the topography is such that on a decent weather day (anything with daylight with less than driving rain, snow, and/or wind), I can get in a pretty decent hike, be it around Chelsea Parade until I get dizzy (bad example, actually) or to City Hall or the Harbor, clear my head and offer my family and neighbors a well-deserved respite by being somewhere else in our zip code.

The last week has been pretty much your standard New England-Getting-Its-Winter-Weather on and I'm sorry if you got a sled for Christmas that you haven't had a chance to use (yet), but you will, and meanwhile, even though it was a bit brisk for my tastes, the walks, as long as you kept moving, were pleasant.

I do some of my best thinking while walking (and again with the eye roll?!?) and I got thinking about some points I made, in place of resolutions a number of years ago, and when I dusted them off I was surprised that they didn't really seem any worse for the wear, so I'm hoping maybe this time they'll resonate (ideally reverberate).

As I crisscrossed the Consolidated City District and hiked up and then down Church Street to City Hall and towards downtown, I passed a parked car with a bumper sticker "Cogito ergo doleo" (I think, therefore I am depressed). I'm wondering if it was intended more as a warning or a challenge. I'm more a "Selume proferre" (towards the light) kind of guy but I'm concerned about the lights in our downtown, both keeping them on and getting them to multiply.

Our elected leaders worry about 'feet in the street,' but on most walks across downtown whether I'm trekking to the Burnham Bridge or up/down Franklin Street to the roundabout, or from the Viaduct towards Union Street and onto Broadway I hardly ever pass more than a dozen people, even on workdays.

Maybe I'm just walking at the wrong time (daylight, and/or sometimes evening), or maybe everyone is inside or otherwise engaged. Maybe. Perhaps folks are just shy and don't wish to be seen in public. In that case, mission accomplished.

They certainly don't seem to be frequenting anywhere I walked, making any discussion about creating and sustaining incentives for retail development that much more difficult when the customer portion of  "a downtown business" is more absent than present. And it's NOT for lack of effort on the part of all different kinds of entrepreneurs who are putting their money where their sales counters are but whose risks are barely being recognized to say nothing of rewarded.

We talk about revitalizing downtown, but far too few of us seem to feel any responsibility for helping make it happen; that is somebody else's job. If you don't think so, just ask us, in the readers' comments of online news stories or the social media pages, and boy will we tell you. We may not know exactly who should do it, but it ain't us. 

Except, of course, it is. Money doesn't talk, it swears and a few carefully-placed swears at the coffee place, juice bar, one of the restaurants or pubs, or the clothing and other shops would be nice to hear. And that's on all of us, and each of us. 

Or we can keep doing what we do and avoid shopping local. It'll teach those who've opened small businesses and who struggle to keep them going that we are all talk and no action. And later when we drive to other spaces and places to recreate and retail, we can ask one another why we're surrounded by so many destination locations, and yet we, ourselves, never seem to be one. 

And that would be because "Sine labore nihil" (Nothing without Work).
Perhaps that could be our New Year's Resolution.

-bill kenny

Oh, the Weather Outside Is Frightful

Think of something about which it can be said, 'no two are the same.'

I was actually looking for 'people,' but the judges have determined that 'snowflake' is also an acceptable answer.

Sounds like a Soros' plot, doesn't it? 
-bill kenny   

Is This the Real Life?

Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality.

Open your eyes. Look up to the skies and see.

Any way the wind blows doesn't really matter to me...
-bill kenny

Sorta Sisqoish

Perhaps with two pieces of carry-on luggage, and no free hand, Adam Jenne thought putting his boarding pass between his teeth was a viable option and just got confused. 

When I read his excuse masquerading as a reason for his behavior, it seems (to me) he's already confused but my patience for folks who invoke mentions of Mengele, compare masks to Yellow Stars, and all manner of historical persecutions about which they have no understanding to defend puerile, self-centered behavior in the face of the greatest public health threat to life on this planet in centuries is (not surprisingly) less than infinite. 

I chose to use the word 'history' deliberately as that's the word Adam used (I'm curious as to who shot the video the NBC folks were using, and the tee-shirt was a nice touch, btw)) even though he has close to zero comprehension of history, his and/or anyone else's, and the comparison of his position to that of Rosa Parks almost caused me to lose my lunch. 

Adam could be the icon that the Me-First, Let-Me-Talk-To-Your-Manager Brigade has been desperately searching for, and if I may say so, they truly deserve one another. After all, it takes a lot of cheek to wear a thong. 
-bill kenny

From Adam for Saint Nick

I have a brother who is a highly successful attorney at law (not sure why we always say at law or what adverb I'd use in its place but there you go), who has what I'd describe as a puckish sense of humor, being extra careful to articulate that first syllable lest someone mishears. 

Margaret, who, along with Linda (my brother Kelly's spouse), and Sigrid, my heart's delight, is also a charter member of the Spouses of Kenny Men Club shared this gem not that long ago to which I can add little to nothing but a low whistle of admiration. 

Between us, I wouldn't be surprised to see Mickey D offer a seasonal special value meal next Yuletide in his honor (lookin' atchu, Mariah)
-bill kenny 

A Little Christmas

In much the same manner as a rabbit who distributes chocolate eggs has replaced the original meaning of Easter, we've grown old in a culture that has a Jolly Old Elf flying around the world in one night handing out presents that look just like the stuff you can buy for the kids in the store or online. Funny how art imitates life and then again when it doesn't.

I'm a fossil who grew up in the Fifties where we had air raid warnings that involved hiding under our school desks and facing away from the windows (to avoid the flash of atomic incineration), three (if we had a good antenna) TV stations, all black and white all the time, fathers that got up early and went far away to work and moms who made sure we got to school, came home, put on play clothes before we went outside (every time I see either droopy drawers or tattered-knee jeans, I try to imagine the reaction of my mother or, more especially, my father, and smile as I shake my head), had dinner, did our homework and got ready for bed where we'd get up and do it all again. 

Mine was a nuclear family--now most of us live in an unclear society-anything goes and nobody knows. Back in the day, we had Sister Rose, Sister Thomas Anne and Sister Mary Jean and this time of year, our heads were not filled with thoughts of sugar plum fairies (never did get that line or what they were supposed to be. Fruitcake, I've had; sugar plums, not quite), but we were experts on The Nativity Scene (I felt compelled to backspace and capitalize the "T", because I was taught NO other way to write it). 

We learned all the hymns, often in what Sister Mary Jean called 'the original Latin' which I realized years later was a private joke she and my father shared and while there's a certain happiness in Jingle Bell Rock, for hard-core jollies, try Adeste Fideles (sung by someone who thought the Wise Men had given The Child the gift of Frankenstein since I had no idea what frankincense could possibly be).

We've become people who are more familiar with the returns policy at the online sites from whom we purchase gifts than the hours during which confessions are heard at the local church, or as I heard it called the other day by someone too young to be facetious, "The God Store." Many of us are exhausted from the search to find that special present for that certain someone and I wish those of us in that situation a rapid recovery. 

I've been 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 it is, after all, Christmas, when miracles can and do happen, resolve to start today to be the miracle in someone else's' life. And, although it's been said many times, many ways, Merry Christmas.
-bill kenny

Just This

Music speaks when words fail. 

Enjoy. 

And Merry Christmas.
-bill kenny 

Sorta Like Tik-Tok, But Even More Pointless

So much of this Brave New World in which we live defies my comprehension. But that's not the worst of it, as far as I'm concerned. 

A not inconsiderable amount of it that I do get, I still don't like, such as this. 

Three and half minutes we'll never get back. You're welcome.
-bill kenny 

My Version of the Christmas Story

As you know, this Saturday is Christmas, meaning I'm running out of opportunities to say something profoundly or even profanely Christmassy before it's too late. 

Fair enough, but I'd argue, based on my own life, that nothing is ever too late to include my telling you about the most wonderful Christmas of my life and I am neither deterred nor discouraged by the deafening silence with which my recounting of the following story is always greeted within the walls of my own house by my spouse and children. 

I had been in (West) Germany only about two months, arriving shortly before Halloween, which, back in the day, wasn't a holiday of any kind in Germany at all-it was strictly a Yank Prank like Thanksgiving only harder to explain to people who weren't American. 

My friend, Chris, and I had started out imbibing and feeling very sorry for ourselves, me in the lead on that count (for being stuck in Germany for the holidays, boo-hoo), earlier in the day in the Frankfurt am Main club district, Sachsenhausen, where what seemed like millions of people made the passage from anywhere to anywhere else almost impossible (you thought I was going to type impassable, didn't you? I was tempted).

Eventually, though I have no recollection how, we came to be in a less crowded mid-town pub, near Eschenheimer Tor. Because I am relentlessly competitive, I had consumed a great deal more alcohol much more rapidly than Chris who did a very good job looking out for me since, family tradition, I have a nose for trouble, either finding it or making it. 

He and I were seated at a booth around a table with room for plenty of others though they would have to move in as we had decided to remain anchored on the opposing ends, facing one another. As the evening went on, our table filled up with all manner of revelers. When the most beautiful woman in the world arrived, there was only one place left to sit, and that was beside me.

I had seen her before but had never worked up the nerve to dare speak to her. And then, there she was. As we made small talk that night, I suddenly blurted out, ‘You look like someone I could fall in love with forever.’ And she smiled as she asked, ‘then, why don’t you?’ We would marry that autumn.

In the four and a half decades (almost to the very day) since all that happened, I've tried to calculate the number of actions and activities that had to take place, just so and in their particular order, so she and I could and would meet but since, luckily for all of us, I chose to be a liberal arts major avoiding contact with any and all math in my life, I am unable to execute those calculations.

I've long since given up trying to make sense of the world as it was then and more especially as it is now. I will tell you that I believe because that's how I was raised and habit is often more lasting than logic, there is a reason for everything we do, and everything that's left undone.

As attractive as I find the 'we're all victims of circumstance/we're all bozos on this bus' lamentations to questions about divinity, humanity, and the universe at large, I can't really leave it there.

If Christmas is a time of love, and Christmas night is when I found mine, how can I not encourage you to be of good cheer during this holiday season and to renew your faith even if you've yet to meet the person who completes you?

A more luckless loser than I could you not have ever imagined, but a Christmas miracle was still mine. So, keep your eyes wide and your heart open. There's magic in the air if and when you want it. Merry Christmas!
-bill kenny 

Through the Darkness to Get to the Light

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

Winter is why I don't enjoy Autumn, (<= understatement alert!) because I know what's coming next and the fact that it's been getting darker for months, and even more so and faster after we fell back at the end of Daylight Saving Time, just makes it harder to see both in the morning when I awaken and when I look out the window in the late afternoon and it's already pitch black. 

As far as I'm concerned, we can treat the cold and the snow as read for purposes of this discussion. 

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

Wiedersehen Macht Freude

That's a rough translation of  'it's a pleasure to see you again,' which is what I first felt when I stumbled across a nearly-prehistoric rambling of mine as it first appeared on a cave wall from way back in the day. 

At the time I called it: 

And One to Grow On

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

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

It was of her I thought yesterday morning when reading the saga of Nicholas Trabakoulos versus Sue Handy, actually Judge Susan B. Handy, in a courtroom in New London, Connecticut, Thursday. 

Grandma had, when her children were our ages, she told us, started a birthday tradition of gently smacking the birthday child on the bottom once for every natal anniversary topped at the conclusion by a pinch, 'to grow an inch' by your next birthday. 

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

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

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

Back to Grandma. 

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

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

The judge ordered Nicholas removed from the courtroom, gave him two hours to mull over his actions, and then brought him back to ask him if he wished to apologize. Nicholas had a number of wishes, but apologizing apparently didn't make the list. Judge Handy, like Grandma, then gave him six additional months on top of the fourteen years, for contempt of court. 

It would have been too much, I suppose, had Nicholas also been sentenced to be transported to the pokey on the handlebars of a bicycle pedaled by a corrections officer, though I'm unsure the officer could have reached the bell.
-bill kenny

If I Am Alone and Silent Long Enough...

"You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular." -- Robert Frost

I'm still working on that, as it turns out. This is from longer ago than I'd like to admit and at the time I called it: 

Older than my Old Man Now

Today is my father's birthday. He would be 98 years old but he didn't live to see it.
I added that sentence because if you knew him ( = he allowed you to see some part of his life) you might be more surprised than those who shared his hearth and home about the abruptness of the ending of his life story. And if you visit this space on anything other than a sporadic schedule you would realize from the way I write and reference him that he is and will always be a presence in my life.

Probably not surprisingly our father-son relationship was strained. I smiled as I typed that word and I hope he would have as well. If I were to be honest and he taught me that if little else, I grimaced, but from a distance, they look very close. They aren't of course or this entry would be much shorter.

I was the oldest of six children. As near as I can tell, he never was comfortable in his own skin with any of us. I assumed, ignorantly and arrogantly, that he and I clashed throughout the years I lived under his roof because we were so different. 

It took a photograph my wife captured of him lost in a moment on the only visit to America she was to know him for me to realize, decades afterward looking at a photo of myself with my head cocked exactly like his, that we were too much of the same kind. 

Dad was 28 years old when I, his son, was born. I was thirty when Patrick, our son, and thirty-five when Michelle, our daughter, was born. I think I learned a lot about life from life itself but I chose to forget who had prepared me to be ready to learn at all. 

I'd like to believe had Dad lived he'd have enjoyed meeting our two children as much if not more than I would have enjoyed introducing them to him. It's part of the movie of my life as it might have been that I'm an expert at making (scoring the soundtrack has proven to be difficult, so far). As long as I don't have to script an ending yet, this should be cake, though I'm not looking forward to casting. 

Dad was the smartest person I will ever know though not smart enough to figure out the inchoate rage at life he carried with him every waking moment and that I inherited is both toxic and fatal. He found that out too late to help himself but in his passing, he helped me to see it and, I'd like to think, make some adjustments, though not as many as I should/could, to better catch the second act of our children's lives. I'm smiling again as I type this time because I have an appointment with my cardiologist later this week that helps me prove to myself just how much I have learned. 

Loudon Wainwright, to whom I bore a striking resemblance when we were younger (though I suspect no one ever told him he looked like me) offered an album and song some time back, "Older Than My Old Man Now", and for the third time since sitting down to type this, I have to smile. My facial muscles hurt, seriously. 

Christine Rice once wrote, "(T) purpose of life is to live, laugh and love." I'd like to think we are to light a match against the darkness without being consumed by it on our way to where we need to be. 

Happy birthday, Dad.
-bill kenny

Fine Line between Surreal and Cereal

"Fiction," offered Mark Twain, "is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." 

Indeed. 

How else to explain that this is not a satirical article but an actual news dispatch from The Beeb.

Amazed? Don't be. 

As Twain once noted, "Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." Perhaps Eddie and the guys captured it better, "Far and wide, Far as you ramble, Trust in Allah, But tie up your camel."

Stay frosty.
-bill kenny

Returning to Shakespeare's Larger Point

Disclaimer: I lived in Germany for over fifteen years and I'm married to a Deutsche Mädel. 

I love many (more aspects) of her country and culture, as I remember it from thirty years ago, than I sometimes do my own, however, that's not always the case, especially in terms of litigiousness (assuming that is even a word).  

We've seen the world change within and without us because of COVID-19, and no one I fear is completely comfortable with how much more (or little) change may still be in store for us. Not just me, I'm sure, but the definition of normal seems to change on an hourly basis. 

I'm retired now but before I was I had the opportunity, thanks to my employer, on more than one occasion (knee replacements, heart valve stents, and the like) to be able to work from home.

Cynic that I am, I suspect everyone on the top floor of the building where my office was used to pray that I would work from home just for the peace and quiet they enjoyed. And to this day those assholes are still surprised they don't get Christmas cards from me. Tangent over. 

Meanwhile in Deutschland, Ich arbeite heute von zu Hause hat jetzt eine ganz andere Bedeutung, wenn jemand verletzt wird. 

Vorbehaltlich Ihrer Fragen ist endet hiermit mein Briefing.
-bill kenny

The Grift of Christmas

Twas the week before Christmas when what showed up in my mail? 

A classic con from The Don offering something for sale.  

I find his chutzpah is just beyond the pale. 

Especially since his fat ass should be in jail.

That he keeps conning the mugs isn't really his fault. 

He could dip dogshit in sugar and they'd still think it's salt.

If you want to Make Christmas Great Again, put this asshole, his grafting family members, and no-load enablers in jail for attempted insurrection. Eleven and half months after the storming of The Capitol, someone other than the QAnon Shaman needs to be eating prison food. 
-bill kenny 

A Pause in the Holiday Rush

It happens every year right around this time. Too much to do and not enough time to do it all in. Competing priorities or just the rush and crush of life here on the ant farm. You know, I can’t really tell, and I’ve reached an age where I’m not sure knowing would provide anything aside from small solace.

Anyway, I should be used to it but I keep losing track of the days of the week. I used to say I’m 'getting old' but that doesn't really capture since, like you, I've been living through each of them, and yet I don’t seem to get any of them on me.

My wife and I have two children who are, in every sense of the word, adults themselves, though I have a vision problem that precludes my successfully seeing them with my heart as anything other than as they once were. We were fortunate to have our daughter and her beau travel up from Virginia to visit both sets of parents for the Thanksgiving holiday, join us for a meal of turkey with all the fixings on the day afterward, which, I think, helped make Thanksgiving last even longer. Our son and his wife celebrated with her parents in Florida where they all now reside as witnesses in the Snowplow Protection Program.

During those Thanksgiving preparations, I tried hard to not look too much farther forward than to the end of this sentence as opposed to where we are on the calendar right now, less than two weeks to Christmas, because this Christmas will be the first that only my wife and I will celebrate since arriving on these shores in November of 1991.

You live so much of your life through your children, and it sometimes comes as a surprise, at least to me (if not more like a shock) that while you think you’re teaching them about life as they grow up, they’re really teaching you as you grow old. And I’m chastened to admit that while I’ve always seen myself as someone willing to learn I’m not always happy with being taught or the lessons that come with the teaching.

I’m thinking back to years of after-school soccer matches in parts of the state I’d never heard of (before or ever again), school PTO fund-raisers (so many holiday pies!), marching band competitions in places, not even the soccer games were held, and the first part-time jobs (at Linda’s on Lafayette Street, making grinders, for Michelle, and the Candy Corner of Suburban Stationery in the old Norwichtown Mall, for Patrick), all while watching them become their own persons, and struggling to accept that no matter how hard or how many worked to make Norwich a place to come home to, for so many of our children, the only choice after graduation from Norwich Free Academy was, and too often still is, how far from here they’ll be living.

Politics I’m told is the art of the possible, so, despite the quarrels Tuesday night in Council chambers, I’ll remain optimistic about Norwich because the days of miracles and wonder I'll remember all my life all involve those I love and revolve around our days here in The Rose of New England.
-bill kenny

So Much Never-Ending Pain

It's been nine years since the murder of innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I've lived here since November of 1991 and confess to never having been there prior to the tragic events of that day. 

I can remember harboring, in the hours and immediate days following the carnage, a belief, more of a hope, really, that this time something would change in how we Americans come to grips with our fascination bordering on addiction with guns. Events in Detroit are just a more recent confirmation that saying we have to change isn't enough, especially if we never change. 

I wrote what follows as parents were still making arrangements to bury their children almost a decade ago. I called it:    

Putting Names to the Souls of the Departed

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

I suspect you've been doing what I've been doing: watching television and reading rafts of online commentary and analysis (a three-dollar word for what on my block we called a WAG) nearly non-stop assuming, persisting in the belief might be a better phrase, that at some point a penny is going to drop, a light is going to go on and someone, somewhere will say or write something that causes us each to have an 'aha!' moment and understand what has gone on.

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

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

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

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

So, No Film at Eleven?

I purposefully strive to NOT spend a lot of time worrying about things I cannot control. I'm grateful we have an autonomic nervous system to handle things like respiration because that's definitely something I'd lose track of and end up going to sleep and not waking up. Hold your applause.

I live in a house with all the electricity (I think) that I could ever need but have only a cursory understanding of Faraday's Theory of Transmission to serve as the foundation for why when I flip the switch the lights come on in the house. It has served me well and I'm fine with what I already know and have no desire to expand my college of knowledge in this area. 

I have a greater appreciation for, though an even smaller understanding of, aerodynamics that enables craft much larger and longer (and heavier) than school buses to fly tens of thousands of feet above the ground and through the air. Until a moment ago when I came across this, I'd never even pondered/worried about colliding with birds.  

Somewhere, I sense Dick Orkin is smiling while enjoying a bucket of chicken.
-bill kenny

Press-Ganged into Selling PlayStations and Beer

Despite what feels like unending days of malevolence and hate-filled utterances throughout 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 our 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.
-bill kenny

Not Endorsed by Slash

Some days this stuff just writes itself. Like today. 

Axl Rose must be glowing right now and practicing to improve his own walking/dancing.
-bill kenny 

Living a Lie

If reading this doesn't break your heart, we should stop meeting here right now.
-bill kenny

Lilies of the Field

I was told 'the Lord helps those who help themselves.' I've also read where the Lord gave us two pockets to put all His blessings in. I'm not suggesting either expression is related to one another or to any organized religion or theology with which you may be familiar, but Jeepers, Wally.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I will admit to having a more than jaundiced view of preachers and teachers who operate mega-churches. I wanted you to know that before I also note that it looks to me like the Right Reverend Joel Osteen, he of the 'People So White We Glow in the Dark Church' may have decided to help himself. 

I cannot wait to read the origins story on this money, although I won't be surprised if I never do. Just another part of that 'moves in mysterious ways' about which I've read so much. 

As for that render unto Caesar dictum, don't even get me started. 
-bill kenny

Longer Gone than Here

Peter Jackson’s three-part re-examination of The Beatles, Get Back, aired on Disney+ this Thanksgiving weekend. As hard as it is to believe the events depicted happened 52 years ago, it was 41 years ago, today that John Lennon was murdered. 

For those of us who came of age (and maybe just a little more alive) when The Beatles first performed on The Ed Sullivan Show when Sunday night television was the electric fire in every living room, we need no reminder., 

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. There was only AM radio and streaming was a half-century away.

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 rock and roll kids in the United Kingdom had no way of knowing that.

People like Sam Phillips and Sun Records helped change what youngsters around the world heard 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-one years ago, the death of the public John overshadowed the personal tragedy of 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 forty-one years ago. 

For many who never knew Lennon, 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

If We Make It Through the Night

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 the ship 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. Eight or eighty decades will be as the blink of an eye for those who refuse to see.
-bill kenny

Take My Money!!

I have no idea where in the countdown to Christmas we are in terms of days left but, and feel free to thank me now, I have found the gift you can give to that complete tosser of a human being for whom no words have yet been found that adequately capture their degree of uselessness. 

Of course, and this is the downside of your grand gesture, the gift that will not only keep on giving but will also live on in infamy for at least a half-hour or so is kinda pricey. Wanted to tell you that before telling you what it is, but decided instead of telling you, to let the folks hawking it make their appeal directly to you and your wallet. 

And there's so much more where that comes from you'll wish it could be Christmas every day, but your bank balance will be grateful that it's not.
-bill kenny

So I Will Light a Candle for You

In twenty-six days, 2021 ends. 

I'm not sure I'm fully grasping that realization even as I type that line. This has been another 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 felt a little more keenly the dullness of the ache in the pit of my stomach and shocked realization of regret that the next time can be the last time always brings with it as a constant companion. Like so many over these past twelve months, I've blinked at critical moments and lost sight of the important ones in the rush of the real as the latter became surreal and unreal before disappearing by the dawn's early light. 

This was another year I made a lot of changes and vowed to sort myself out. And here it is, having nearly run its course and my still-to-do list looks a lot like what it was when I started on it as the year was beginning. 

I find no solace or consolation in the realization that the next year will be over even faster than this one, with, I fear, even less to show for it as the distance already traveled never equals the distance yet to go. I'm exhausted, physically and emotionally, and feel like I'm running through soup and sand, my feet never quite lifting from and clearing the ground, as each stride is a broken parody of what it once was with my arms pushing through chilling air I can taste rather than feel. 

Sic transit humanitas.

This was to be the year we were to do, we were to talk, we were to live large, and to just be. And what happened? 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.

Our sense of adventure and excited curiosity has been replaced by dread as the days draw down and the year nears its end. 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 what's next that will keep me awake.

-bill kenny

Thinking 'bout Joanie's Kid Sister

My mom came from a big family. There was an older sister, Ann, and then there was my mom, and then John, and Jim and much later Paul and finally Clare.  

Ann was an artist, a painter, and a good one. John was a Korean War hero. Jim was my hero growing up. Paul was far away in California and Clare was bold, brassy, and larger than life and, before she met her husband, John, our family's equivalent of a celebrity when she was a Radio City Music Hall Rockette. 

This made me think of her and smile, and I think she would've liked that. A lot.
-bill kenny

Supertramp Were So Close, Yet So Far

 "Could we have kippers for breakfast

Mummy dear, Mummy dear.

They got to have 'em in Texas

'Cos everyone's a millionaire."

Adds a whole new meaning to Grand Slam, now doesn't it, Brad?
-bill kenny

Walt Was Not Amused

When you wander around online unsupervised for the amount of time every day that I do, you stumble across things that make you go 'I did not know that.' 

This does a little more than just that. 

I should've suggested that you might want to cover your eyes. Sorry.
-bill kenny 

A Different Theory of Relativity

Today is my oldest younger sister's birthday. 

I sometimes find it hard to keep track of all of my siblings' birthdays but it happens most especially with hers because I, myself, was so young when she was born. Of course, I concede she, too, was young at that time, and has probably remembered it just fine, thank you.

When we were very small (heads at about the height that whacked dining room tables when you cut corners too closely as you ran around the house) I used to call her "Boss in charge of the Dog." I don't think I ever actually did that in front of the dog, or better phrased, dogs, as from the earliest age, she was an animal lover while I only liked them at mealtime usually with mustard and pickle relish.

It's been a long time since we were that small (though emotionally I've reminded one of the tinier people you'll ever meet) and changes, both good and bad have happened as they do along the way and sometimes even in the way in the journey from there to right here and now. 

Evan has a lot on her plate these days (indeed, who doesn't, right?) and enough wishes and worries, hopefully in equal number to allow her to sail through the holiday season all the way into the next and New Year. 

Where (and when), fingers crossed, even better days await. Happy Birthday, Evan!
-bill kenny

A Chance to Light Up More than City Hall

As of midnight, this is the last month of 2021. Considering how hopeful so many were at its start, perhaps most will neither mourn nor miss it when it’s over. Sometimes we're in such a rush to get to what's next and new, we overlook or undervalue moments we could and should savor. 

We had just such a moment this past holiday weekend which I hope you had a chance to enjoy. Hopefully, no one was so busy with all the details of the Thanksgiving Day meal, the football games, and the frenzied shopping rush afterward to not appreciate the efforts of friends and neighbors from across the city for Sunday's Winterfest Parade. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: best parade ever (because it was).

But as the late-night TV commercials insist, ‘Wait! There’s more!’ As indeed there is, the return of another holiday tradition suspended last year because of COVID-19 and precautions, this Friday’s Light Up City Hall, beginning at five. 

We may not agree on any aspect of government in Norwich, and that's our good right, but I'm sure we would agree that our City Hall is a gem, and when it's dressed up for the winter holidays, surrounded by throngs of happy faces and singers of seasonal songs, it's absolute magic and that's what we should have this Friday. If you’ve stopped by City Hall after dark during holidays past, you know there are no words to capture how lovely it looks this time of year. So get ready to enjoy.  

As seen last year

The great thing about our holiday celebrations is they are very much community events in every sense of the word. People just like the ones who live on your street or on my block band together months and more in advance to work on the hundreds and thousands of individual threads that, when woven together, create the colorful and memorable tapestries we'll tell our children and grandchildren about  

Memories are moments such as these and we are fortunate to have so many selfless and kindhearted friends and neighbors willing to share of themselves for all of us to enjoy. Whether you marched in Sunday's parade or were part of the sidewalk cheerleading crew; are planning to help countdown the light-up of City Hall (or vice versa) or helped to make any of it possible, thank you! You’re why Norwich is a great place to live.

There's so much holiday happiness right now that I feel kinda-Grinchy pointing out both happiness and hunger start with "h" and one in eight people living in our state struggle with hunger every day. Here in Norwich, a little more than 15% of us live at or below the poverty level, which means for those of us who aren't, we probably have family or friends who are.

And for those struggling, and often failing, to get by, hunger doesn't take a holiday, but we can each help those whom it affects. There are agencies and outreaches we all know who will welcome any donation of time, talent, or treasure we make. 

You could visit www.ctfoodbank.org and not only make a difference but be the difference between another December and a real holiday season for someone in need.
-bill kenny