Past (Im)perfect

We're fond of history around here, but we're in danger of who we once were preventing us from becoming who we could be.

I've lived here for nearly thirty years (and, yes, I did hear that 'too long' all the way in the back) which, for many people I meet, is no more than an eye blink and I've heard a lot of the 'back in the day' stories about Franklin Square, the sea captains who built houses on Laurel Hill, the Sears and Roebuck store  and those halcyon downtown Thursday nights so hectic that small children clung tightly to a parent's hand lest they find themselves in the street and swept away possibly forever. 

These stories, I like to think of them as parables, always have a sepia tinge to them and a soft-focus in terms of detail. They always bring a smile to the face of the person telling me the tale, which doesn't so much conclude as just stop. Leaving us in the here and now and present-day where not one of those storytellers seems to know what happened, how, or why to Norwich.

In their reckoning, people woke up and suddenly downtown was a ghost town-the stores were all gone and so, too, were the people who shopped in them. We seem to forget that adapt and overcome is as true for cities as it is for individuals and the alternative is never pleasant.

I bring this up because we're days away from the next installment of back-in-the-day nostalgia starting mere moments after the City Manager unveils his proposed municipal budget at Monday night's City Council meeting. 

Almost two decades ago we modified our charter and redesigned and reconfigured our City Council and as one of the folks who helped make that happen, I'm still proud of what we did and for what I believe all that change has helped lead us to. 

The goal was, and is, progress, not perfection, and when I walk the same streets that were dead and dusted thirty years ago, I encounter plenty of people who, like me, weren’t born here but have chosen to be here now and who are getting on with their lives.

We didn't live in Norwich in the 1960s (or whatever decade you're most fond of) and at the risk of upsetting those unhappy with where we are, most of us don’t mourn or miss it. Because we didn’t live it then doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be mindful of and respect Norwich’s history but it's 2021 and time to stop using a memory of what we think we once were as an excuse to keep us from becoming who we need to be. 

The City Council and Manager are working to invest our finite tax dollars to provide the best opportunity for each of us and if they're doing it right there's going to be some stress and some strain as we grow up and into what we need for the Norwich we keep telling one another we want to build.

The first step towards that next Norwich starts Monday night at 7:30, when, as a city, we'll continue to make history. What kind, as always, is up to us. 
-bill kenny

The Wheel Turns Slowly, but Still Turns

One of the most pronounced feelings of relief I have experienced in my whole life was early last Friday afternoon in a Wesleyan University parking lot near the sports complex on the far side of the campus in Middletown. Connecticut. 

My wife and I received the second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination. A rolled up (in my case) left sleeve a quick pinch and Specialist 4 in the Connecticut National Guard who've been making this process work as seamlessly as it has handed me my vaccination card and a metal button so I could tell the world. 

On that very same day, 69,486 new cases across our country were reported and 1,000 people died. I suspect nearly every person had someone they loved and who loved them, plans not yet fulfilled and dreams still waiting to take wing. And now, for too many for so long, no salvation because indolence and ignorance ruled the day at a time when attention and action were needed. 

Life is a limited-time offer.
Make the most of what you're given because it won't pass this way again.
-bill kenny

The Time Has Come for Changes

As a nation, we celebrate rugged individualism and take any and every manifestation of weakness as an admission or harbinger of failure. We tell ourselves we need to sink or swim on our merits and while Jesus died for someone's sins, it most certainly wasn't me, Lord. 

We are again at the intersection of an absence of effective and sufficient mental health care and a surfeit of guns of all kinds, calibers, and descriptions. The inevitable conclusion when the two collide always seems to surprise us. 

2017.

2018. 

2019.

2020 *
(*Pandemic shortened hunting season, apparently)

2021.

Tell me I'm wrong, but bring receipts: when the gun violence is perpetrated by a Muslim, we are told to hate the religion; when a perpetrator is a person of color, we are directed to blame the race but when the shooter is white, we're told he had a bad day.

Fuck Thoughts and Prayers; we'd be better off with Tots & Pears. 

For those clamoring to 'fix the problem!' Don't you get it? WE are the problem.
-bill kenny

Revisiting Palm Sunday, Revisited

I like the world in which I live to make sense, for there to be an order and purpose for everything and a reason no matter the season and then I stumble across today, Palm Sunday, and thrash about creating a lot of churn with the keyboard but little clarity in the cranium.

These are some thoughts I had on it from a number of years ago and despite strenuous exertions, little to nothing has changed I'm saddened to report. At the time I called it: 

Palm Sunday Revisited

Raised in the faith of my fathers, I know that today, Palm Sunday, begins the most important week in the Christian calendar-even if you lost your faith along the way to here and now as I have done. 

What follows is as close to contemplation as I may have gotten in recent years (or decades). It may not make sense to you; that wasn’t my intent. I needed to hold the world still for one moment so that it made sense to me-your mileage may vary in ways neither of us can contemplate.

Karl Glogauer was the wrong man at the right time.

The protagonist in Michael Moorcock's novel who travels from the future to the time of Christ, Glogauer, instead, meets a profoundly retarded child of Mary who is, in Moorcock's account, most definitely NOT the Son of God. 

Glogauer then assumes the personae of Jesus of Nazareth, based on his recollection and knowledge of the accounts in the Gospels of the New Testament, culminating in his crucifixion to fulfill those accounts which shaped history to the moment in the future in which he journeyed into the past to complete the story.

Perhaps the most simultaneously unsettling and reassuring aspect of Behold the Man is not the death of someone else in place of the Son of God but its emphasis and reaffirmation of the importance of the belief that He lived at all. 

For you today for whom this is an Ecce Homo experience, my sincere congratulations is tinged with more than just a little jealousy and envy.

Not everyone has the comfort of your beliefs and the reassurance of your faith. Some may not wish to have it while others who once did are forced to realize again the distance traveled from then to now which involved a bridge of faith that, once abandoned, has been destroyed and which can very possibly never be rebuilt.

As even Mark reported, help for one's unbelief is not easily achieved, and perhaps the realization that such assistance can only be given and never earned is part of why pride becomes the greater of the sins especially for those with so little reason to be proud. 

Perhaps it's the shadow of doubt that creates the chink of vulnerability in an armor of faith that condemns a wanderer to know the path but refuses to walk it again.

Sometimes it's the belief, and sometimes, the believer.

-bill kenny  

Bloom Where You're Planted, Orlando

I went for a quick walk at mid-morning yesterday before Sigrid and I headed to Middletown for Phase Two of the Pfizer Fauci Ouchy. The skies threatened rain but they threaten a lot of things this time of year, often simultaneously but it held off during my wandering.

I cheated because I didn't do a long walk but hiked down Washington Avenue, hanging the left on Lafayette Street across from the William W. Backus Hospital, striding past the Yantic Cemetery and remembering again how disquieting I found that view from my hospital window on the various occasions I've volunteered there to be an orange Jell-O tester.  

I then made another left onto Sachem Street and crossed again at the intersection on Washington Street to walk around the perimeter of Chelsea Parade and then back to my house. The warmth of the weather we've had combined with the rain I'm thinking has caused a lot of the shrubs and bushes I pass to transform from nearly-shapeless sticks to budding and blooming bushes. 

The reddish hue on the buds and the small young green leaves that unfold from them within days is a good look for them and makes me feel better as well. I passed a house on Williams Street at the intersection with Washington (where it splits into 'and Broadway') and its hedges have green leaves that really pop on a misty morning like we had yesterday. Steps later and farther down the street, seemingly to my eyes the same hedges in front of a different house still appear morose and lifeless.

They'll catch up soon enough I hope with their arboreal competitors up the street because nature runs on its schedule and not ours. I appreciate the timely reminder.
-bill kenny 

Jean-Paul Sartre to the Courtesy Desk

One of our local supermarkets, feeling the competitive pressure no doubt of an Arkansas retail chain in a business where profit margins often disappear, has gone to a form of shopping I find fascinating. 

You've probably have had it for a while but here in the woods of Southeastern Connecticut where men are men and sheep are nervous (I offered that as a slogan to the tourism board and was turned down cold. Humor-it's in the ear of the beholder, I guess), we have a bar-coded rewards card we sweep across a reader/scanner that releases for our use a handheld device that's tied to our card. 

You wander the aisles, grabbing stuff you want, scanning it, and putting it in bags. When you're done shopping, you head to a checkout and scan one final bar code that tells your handheld sidekick you're past tense, and which transfers your order to the register with the total amount in the display. You pay and out the door you go.

I feel so brave new worldish every time I do it, assuming I can get it to work at all. I don't have performance anxiety, but I can be a little slow in getting the master scanner to release into my care one of the handheld devices and as other shoppers start to pile up behind me, I have to do my best Coolhand Luke impersonation to compensate for the failure to communicate.

This whole process is a bit like Tom Sawyer getting people to paint his fence for him. It's not that the groceries cost less if we do all the heavy lifting, they don't. But this system isn't designed to make our lives easier though we're told it saves us time (and to some degree that's true); it saves the grocer money on salaries and benefits for employees whose number is now reduced.

Once upon a time in grocery stores of a bygone era, there were actual employees who took the items a colleague was ringing up, placed them in bags (eggs and loaves of bread on the bottom, canned goods, and automotive supplies on top of them) and placed those bags in your shopping cart and, if asked, would help you get that cart to your mode of transportation and then back to your abode where the unloading and putting away were your job.

Here in the new now, we've still got cashiers, baggers, courtesy desk employees, the whole kit, and caboodle, though in fewer numbers, who watch as we wander the store with what seem to be Star Trek weapons at the ready. All we need are the communicators over our left breast pockets. And pointy ears, I suppose (check aisle four behind the breath fresheners).

The only part still lacking, but it's probably coming soon enough, are announcements over the store PA system that the Metamucil truck has arrived at loading dock two and twenty-of-those-of-us-formerly-known-as-customers-but-now-called-morons, are needed to unload it, and to stock the shelves in aisle eleven. Don't laugh-that day is dawning. We'll end up playing rock, paper, scissors to decide who's unloading the home pregnancy tests (they go at the header in aisle twelve beside the KY jelly display).

Yesterday, underscoring the perfect beast isn't quite yet where the Grocer in Charge would like it, I grabbed and scanned (in one motion; I've gotten quite proficient at this) a jar of lightly salted (with sea salt, no less) dry-roasted peanuts but, instead of a little peep and a small green light, I got an electronic squonk and a near zen message in the device display: "The item you have scanned does not exist within your order." Oh, really? Hell is, indeed, other people, JP. Will that be paper or plastic?

-bill kenny

Breakfast of Champions

Every time I move, I'm channeling a breakfast cereal as 'snap, crackle, and pop!' seems to emanate from every joint and bone in my body reminding me of some words from long ago that, at the time, I called: 

Kurt Would Probably Use Rice Milk

I am not a big fan of experimentation and plod along for the most part with one foot in front of the other in travel and travail from Point A to something like Point B. I've found that it fills up the day and makes the time go fast.

In the morning I have a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast. I knew someone who called them bagel seeds-suspect the Big G folks wouldn't have been too happy about that but it makes me smile and I repeat it to myself every morning and crack myself up. 

I never tire of saying it or laughing at it. If I had but a million or so folks with my delightful sense of humor (someone had to say it, and it didn't look like you were about to) I could have my own cable news show-and oh, how we'd all laugh then. I have Cheerios in the next to last of the red plastic bowls we had when we lived in Germany and used for cereal there.

Some years ago, Sigrid finally (endlich!) found very nice and (actually) quite pretty replacement bowls and the red plastic ones went to the land(fill) of their ancestors on trash day. As the oldest thing remaining still in our house, I get VERY nervous when anything is pitched out 'because it's really old.' You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows on that equation (at least I don't).

I eat Cheerios and none of the generic brands (which all taste like cardboard and don't even feel like Cheerios) without sugar or milk. Actually, and I don't eat a lot of cereals, I NEVER eat dry cereal with anything other than a spoon and my mouth. Why do you think they call it DRY cereal?

What am I supposed to do with the milk? Drop little tiny people in the bowl, so they can be rescued? Perhaps I should get a recording of Nearer My God to Thee, and using sugar cubes to construct a fake iceberg, reenact the sinking of the Titanic. Of course, with that much sugar in my system, I'd be crayoning all the walls of the house, from the outside in, until sedated with a croquet mallet.

I used to eat Wheaties, back when Bob Richards was on the cover (I don't how old I was before discovering he didn't invent them but was the first endorser of a cereal. I never count the Quaker guy on the oats). I guess if you had a box with Michael Phelps, using milk would make sense, but for that collector's edition, I guess you'd have to use the ultra-high temperature stuff that looks to me more like white water.

Between us, I've never understood how they get the cows to stand still while they heat 'em up. I just assume they catch them by surprise very early in the morning.
-bill kenny

No One Wins Unless Everybody Wins

Call it serendipity or with apologies to Bob Dylan, a simple twist of fate. We’ve put over one hundred million doses of anti-COVID vaccine into arms across the country and, right on time against all odds, it looks and feels like spring has arrived. Moments like this I recall an oft-quoted Albert Einstein observation, “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” 

Without attempting to channel Cal Lord whose Friday Bulletin columns I read religiously (and yes, I went there), I am always caught up short when the bubble I’ve been living in and mistaking for ‘the world’ reveals itself to just be my private Idaho and that life’s big and little moments happen whether I can recognize and/or acknowledge them at all. 

So often, so many of us (present company included) confuse cause and effect in much the same way a rooster might think that because he crows the sun comes up. For a lot of us, the world has been rather dark for over a year so I think we can be forgiven for hoping we are turning a corner and stepping back into the light. 

As a professional oldest child (in a big family) I must try to pull the euphoria handbrake at least a little bit while warning that things may be looking up, but we have got a long way to go to get back to pre-COVID and pandemic life. Yes, there are bright spots, nationally as well as locally but times remain tough all over-, we feel it in our households, throughout the city, and across our nation. In this instance, perceptions of reality and reality are very much one and the same. 

Money, its presence, and more especially its absence, drives every discussion and the easiest way to silence someone’s advocacy in support of a program, policy, initiative, idea or ideal is to ask them 'and how will you pay for this?' The silence is deafening. 

And while we just marked the start of Spring over the weekend, a more immediate concern on our collective calendar will be approaching hard and soon, involving the development and adoption of our municipal budget. The budget always involves painfully hard decisions that those of us who do not have to make them invariably find infuriating when made by those who must. 

Municipal budgets have been hard to construct in my memory for decades. I seem to remember hearing the phrase ‘a particularly challenging task’ to describe the annual formulation process just about every year since very nearly forever.  

The annual budget is the hardest part of the job that our neighbors who volunteered for the Board of Education and the City Council must do each year; not that the rest of their calendar is a picnic. And I suspect they are not helped by folks like me in the cheap seats sniping at them in print or at public hearings, but they persist, and we should all be grateful that they do. 

Again, this year, our city is facing ‘a particularly challenging task,’ so before it gets too much farther along let’s promise one another to hear each other out and keep an open mind when weighing wants and needs. No one wins unless everybody wins, so let's find a way to win.
-bill kenny

The Goldfish Memory Trick

We humans are kind of funny in terms of what we choose to remember and for how long. I think sometimes we write things down because we don't trust our memories of events to remain true as our lives roll on (and that we're probably correct about that). 

Things are tough all over right now, but, I believe, they won't be tough forever. But my larger point is that in each of our lives there are peaks and valleys and it's what we do when the former becomes the latter that determines how well we adapt and overcome. 

This is from a very long time ago when times were tough for just about everyone and that I had more or less forgotten about as the years rushed on. I called it: 

The Stick Stays

I'm smiling today partially from the controlled substance pain-killers I'm taking to manage the knee noise, and fear (if you've ever had limb replacement surgery, the adjective you NEVER want to hear is 'spoiled'). 

The pills make my sense of whimsy towards the foibles of others a little deeper so the clown princess in the oversized and soon-to-be-extinct SUV who looked me straight in the eye as she backed out across two lanes of traffic on Washington by the bank, and kept coming anyway, gets no more than a shake of the head from me because it's all I can muster. I'm feeling sorry for myself and I do it well.

In the fast-food place, standing behind a dad and his young daughter, based on the time of day and their clothes possibly on their way home from Mass (Holy Communion and a McGriddle, who could ask for anything more) I realize from the way he's speaking to the counter person about employment that he doesn't have a job. There's a discussion of shift availabilities (all of them) and pay differentials (doesn't sound like many) and he's nodding as she's talking while scribbling names and numbers down on a McNapkin.

It's funny, I think, as we age, it takes us longer to bounce back from the knocks and bruises of everyday life. I remember a coarse witticism that involves endurance at a specific activity for the course of a night and how you know you're getting old, and how I laughed when I first heard it. 

Same with the rest of our lives, too. In our twenties, we went from position to position with nary a thought--as the decades advanced, each job started to look more like a career until the tsunami we're enduring at the moment swept away savings, self-respect, and maybe home.

The child at his feet was no more than five and had a tiara on and a pink fairy-dress that parents think every daughter at that age loves, and maybe some do. He's making sure he understands the sequence in which to call the numbers, because 'if you call region before district, they'll tell you there aren't any vacancies,' when the child squeals in delight and holds up her prize.

She's found a dime on the floor-perhaps someone dropped their change from a purchase, or, more likely, it didn't quite make it through the slot in the counter collection box for the supportive housing of parents of children with cancer the franchise has constructed across the USA and around the world.

I'm not alone in this latter supposition as the father bends to pick his daughter up and explains to her where the dime really came from and, by inference, where it really belongs. Without hesitation, safe in his arms, the child leans across her father and drops the dime through the slot in the top of the box. He smiles as his order is given to him and both dad and daughter head for the parking lot and home with breakfast and, perhaps, a new hope. 

For just a moment, a bright Spring morning brightens even more. The past is gone, it's all been said. So here's to what the future brings, I know tomorrow you'll find better things.

-bill kenny

 

And a Chicken (of Sorts) in Every Pot

In light of the self-inflicted wounds I've given myself over the decades, it's a miracle I'm still here, even if that's not always the word other people use. Here's an historical example from back in the day that I called at that time:

Limited Time Offer, Seemingly

I'm typing as fast as I can and only hope that spell check saves me from the ignominy of reading like a Hottentot at a Hootenanny. It's my own fault really-I like to live on the edge, walk on the wild side, sail too close to the wind, hang on by just a thread and as many other cliches and bromides as I can get on a 24-hour loan from Billy Bob's Emporium of Previously Used Sentence Components located in Del Rio, Texas.

Went to make myself a little pick-me-up and decided to skip the Java jive and the tea leaves and made a cup of chicken bouillon from those cubes that are so dense I've always suspected they are actually made from the matter that comprises a black hole in space. 

I especially like how there's always one piece of the foil wrap you cannot get off until you're reduced to trying to scrape it off with a fingernail and then, uh-oh, there are bouillon fragments under the nail. Do NOT put that fingertip in your mouth. Ever. If you have to ask why it's too late.

So here I am, struggling with eight fingers (the foil was really hard to get off), putting the cube container back in the pantry, and checking out the label (thank goodness for that Literacy Volunteer!). There's some disquieting news all the way around, starting on the front that tells me there's chicken 'with other natural flavors.' Sure wish we'd be more forthcoming detail on that. 

And what about the LARGE yellow letters that brag NO MSG ADDED ('contains naturally occurring glutamates' Huh?) or the nutritional information that ONE cube provides 45% of your daily intake of sodium. Let the Morton Salt girl put that in her umbrella and smoke it.

And then atop the screw cap, I saw the fateful advisory, 'Best by August 2007'. OMG. I'm lousy at math (and English as we both know) but I knew there was trouble. The light grew dim and my life started flashing before my eyes. It's been so unremarkable, mine was replaced by the Jimmy Dugan Story and since that's so short, the second reel was the Song of Bernadette (Peters, which was disconcerting especially the excised dance of a thousand veils scene from Barney's Great Adventure).

And then, just before the darkness enveloped me, I tried to figure out how anyone, even the manufacturer (yeah, Hormel, I'm talkin' 'bout you) would distinguish among good, better, or best in chicken bouillon cubes. Turns out it was getting dark because I was dozing, not because the mortal coil was assuming the shuffle-off position. Talk about relief! Of course, I'm still a little peckish-perhaps a slice of fruit cake will hit the spot.
-bill kenny
:  

A Decade Down and Still No Rosary

Since the declaration of the pandemic and preventatives to mitigate it over a year ago the days, weeks, and months seem to run together, at least for me. This story and others like it from across the country on the ongoing tussle about the information generated and tabulated from the 2020 US Census reminded me of a blast from my past on a previous nose-counting expedition from another time. I called it: 

Taking Leave of My Census

It came in the afternoon mail earlier this week, and truth to tell I thought it was the auto club, looking for a renewal on a membership (I already have a lifetime membership but I can never remember if it's mine or the car's). 

Once I figured out it wasn't that, I assumed it was probably a statement from Usury International Bank explaining, in accordance with the new Credit Cards R UR Friend Act (reminiscent of the warnings Big Tobacco put on their products), that at the minimum monthly payment level, I'll need to believe in reincarnation to get their Plutonium Card off my back.

It wasn't either of those things, of course. After all the weeks and months of screaming and yelling on the THNs (Talking Heads Networks), it was only the US Census. Anyway, since it was paper, I decided that opening the envelope under running water was counter-intuitive, not that we didn't have enough running water on the Eastern Seaboard in the last few days.

But, to minimize the chances of Demon Spawn escaping the envelope, (of course) I opened it outside, behind the sandbags in the bunker where I watch both Glenn Beck as well as Keith Olbermann. Together, they're like a cranial colonic, though refreshed is never what they leave me.

I've been around these parts for close to sixty-nine years, and maybe there was a lot MORE brown acid at Yasgur's Farm than previously advertised, but I don't remember filling out a census form, ever. My evil twin, Skippy, 'blue or black pen' in hand, wondered if we should be living in a barn and if you can sell myrrh on e-bay. You have to offer it as a bonus for purchasing frankincense, I think. And cows contribute to global warming, especially when you drive to the store and buy pieces of them for cook-outs.

I've been eyeballing the whole form for a while and if there's a lyrical conspiracy behind it (Sorry, what? a liberal conspiracy! That makes even less sense), it's pretty slick, since even when I hold it up to the light I cannot see any aspect of it. Although, come to think of it (and maybe this is the clever-by-a-half part), the ballpoint pen manufacturers might be up to something since no #2 pencils are needed (or even wanted) at all. 

And what the heck are The Duggars supposed to do when they run out blanks before children's names to put in 'em? Move?!?
-bill kenny

"I Have Slipped the Surly Bounds of Underwear..."

Remember the old Burger King TV jingle? 

"Hold the pickle,

Hold the lettuce

Special orders don't upset us

All we ask is that you let us serve it your way." 

Here's the sad part, I can remember that jingle and thousands of lines of doggerel, sketches, catch-phrases, tv dialogue, et al, from well over sixty-plus years of existence here on the ant farm but I can't keep track of my youngest brother's birthdate and confuse the day and month of our son's birth.

But I digress.

The New York Daily News, a tabloid before we ever used that word, had what I thought was an attention-grabbing headline on a 'news from the newsroom floor kind of story' Florida Man Arrested for Masturbating with Pickle on Private Property. 

Imagine my chagrin to learn the NYDN don't even know the half of it because when you trace the story back to its origins you have an exercise in assertive alliteration as a headline that throws some large shade at the Daily News' effort, Pickle-Packing Perv Popped on Private Premise.  

Here's what I'm trying to understand (among a myriad of things): the smile on Eric's face in his mug shot. Is he auditioning to be one of the Campbell Soup Kids? According to the warrant, to my profound disappointment, the arresting officer offered no 'aggravating/mitigating factors.' And as the news account reports, there was NO word on the disposition of the pickle. 

I think someone needs to contact the Vlasic Stork for comment, and, perhaps, recipe ideas.
-bill kenny

Not a Moveable Feast

I offer these words in this space on this date every year. Consider yourself warned. 

The difference, I've read, between a rut and a grave is the depth of the habit. As I've aged the humor of that observation has grown rather thin (more so than I) and, despite that, I look forward to it growing thinner with every passing day. 

I first offered the following over a decade ago and if I'm still above ground a decade from now, I'll offer them then as well. What you do is entirely up to you; just as you may be whomever you wish to be. Back then I called it: 

Scared that He'll Be Caught

This ends a tough week for anyone who's ever picked up, owned, or been named for, anyone in Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints. The main event, of course, was Saint Patrick's Day. 

I'm not sure every place on earth paints the median strips on Main Street green as part of the parade or adds food coloring to the beer (or gets into fist-fights in New York's forgotten borough over matters of ethnicity and sexual preference) but let's face it, Saint Patrick is the 800-pound gorilla in the room for the month of March.

Which is too bad in my opinion, because today is the Feast of Saint Joseph, husband of Mary (Mother of God) and (to my way of thinking) Jesus' step-dad. I've always imagined an at-the-dinner-table exchange between the Son of Man (when still small) and Joseph that has Joe ending an argument with the lad with something like "then go right ahead and ask your 'real dad' for a new bike and let's see what happens." 

And then The Curia or the Legion of Decency (or both) shows up at my house and slaps the rosary bead handcuffs on me while The Pope reads me my rights ('you have none, just free will.'). 

As a grade-school child, I missed the subtlety that went into the talk-around as the Sisters of Charity explained 'the Annunciation' and when I got older and it smacked me right between the eyes, I admired, even more, the cool, collected response Joseph seemed to have had to all of that. 

Talk about Rainy Day Women #12 and 35. It's a pity we don't roll the Apocrypha into the Bible (sort of like a VH-1 Behind the Book) and let Max Von Sydow have another crack at the Greatest Story Ever Told (as soon as legal gets the rights clearances squared away).

Today, the Feast of Saint Joseph is when the swallows come back to Capistrano. I wonder if the village fathers paint the center stripe of their main street a shade of bird droppings white and grey or if they even have a parade. 

As urbane and world-wise as I like to think of myself, I love the story as much now as I did hearing it as a child. I find it reassuring and, while my belief in a Divine Being fluctuates wildly (and how screwed am I if Her/His belief in me reflects my faith in Her/Him?), I hope (in a faint-hearted, wimpy sort of way) that Paley is right about the Great Watchmaker.

I say that, mindful (with apologies to Jackson Browne) that 'I don't know what happens when people die.' And in keeping with that point, I have known two very dear people who shared the Feast of Saint Joseph as their birthday. 

They are both from long ago, at the time when I knew everything (and everything better) while I worked for American Forces (Europe) Network and Bob was my first (and very best) boss in Radio Command Information (together with Brian, Marge, Norm, and Sara) while Gisela was the record librarian of the most amazing (and amazingly organized) collection of vinyl in the world.

Bob was married to 'local color' as I was to be as well (GI's who married citizens from the country in which they were stationed; usually guys marrying women but NOT always). He and his wife, Erika, had no children but loved as if she were one, a stray dog they took in and kept all its life, Sandy. 

Erika and Sandy passed away pretty close to one another, leaving a hole in Bob's heart that never healed, filled with a pain of which he never spoke. Bob himself passed a number of years ago and I see him at this very moment in my mind's eye in a beaten beige long coat with a beret he wore in every kind of weather.

Gisela was my translator when the letter of permission from the Standesamt of Offenbach am Main (where Sigrid and I hoped to marry) arrived and I raced frantically from office to office trying to find someone to be my eyes (I was illiterate auf deutsch and vowed to never be that guy again). 

Gisela put her glasses on near the edge of her nose and would read a line and then look over the tops to give me the English translation. I still recall the shine in her eyes and her warm smile as she reached the conclusion granting us permission and she clasped both of my shoulders and hugged me in congratulations.

I remember both of them today, maybe more so than Saint Joseph, perhaps because I don't know how many others remember them and I'm sad when I think about what happens to you when the last person on earth to know you and of you has died. 

So today I told a little of the story of their lives, as I knew them, to remind me to celebrate them and hope the day comes when we can laugh together about all of that and so much more.

Happy Birthday, Bob und Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Gisela.
-bill kenny

Tuning Up

Spring, says my desk calendar, begins this Saturday morning. My heart is surely not alone in shouting "welcome!" as it's been a long, cold, lonely winter.

But here comes the sun. 

An early morning at Chelsea Parade

Here comes the sun, doo da doo doo doo.

Here comes the sun, and I say, It's all right.
-bill kenny

Remembering the Green Fields of America

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

History is often the same movie with a different cast. Watching and reading news reports over the weekend about ‘Rising Migrant Apprehensions’ at Texas’ border with Mexico is a variation on a theme that has been the American tune from before the beginning of our nation. I am a verse of that song.

The Irish's arrival in America was, for its time, the largest and most prolonged migration of one ethnic group since the nations of the world began keeping track of such things. Those fleeing Ireland for America were not only family members, but extended families, whole neighborhoods, and, in many instances, entire villages and townships. All were half a step ahead of starvation and destitution.

To remain in Ireland was to die but fleeing to America was often death of another kind, only more slowly. Having already been made into outcasts in our own country, immigrants hardly noticed how our treatment in the New World often resembled our handling in the old.

And still, we came, by the thousands every month, by the tens of thousands and into the millions. At one point, very nearly twenty percent of all Americans were of Irish ancestry which is a statistic offered today, Saint Patrick's Day, to help not just those of us who are and were part of the Irish Diaspora to remember where we came from but to remind all of us how far we have yet to go.

Let me offer words from SineyCrotty's "The Green Fields of America," a song I hope each of us in our own voice can someday sing in our own time, 

"Fare thee well to the groves of the shillelagh and shamrock;
Farewell to the girls of this country around.
May their hearts be as merry as ever I would wish them
When far, across this ocean I’m bound.

"But what matter to me where my bones they are buried,
If in peace and contentment I spend the rest of my life.
Oh the green fields of Canada, are daily blooming,
And it's there I'll put an end to my misery and strife.

"But my father is old and my mother quite feeble,
To leave their dear country, it would grieve their heart sore.
Whilst the tears down their cheeks, in big drops are rolling,
To think they should die on a far distant shore.

"So pack up your seashores, consider it no longer,
Ten dollars a week is not very bad pay.
With no taxes or tithes to devour up your wages,
All in the green fields of America.

"Now the sheep run unsheared, and the land's gone to rushes,
The journeyman’s gone, and the mender of reels.
So it’s cross the Atlantic, you journeymen and tailors
And your fiddlers who flaked out the old mountain reels.

"I remember the time when old Ireland was flourishing,
And most of the tradesmen, they worked for fine pay.
But since the manufactories have crossed the Atlantic,
It’s then we must go on to Americay.

 “And now to conclude and to finish my ditty
If e'er a friendless Irishman in chance to meet
With the best in the house I will treat them and greet them,
Home from the green fields of America."
-bill kenny

"Distracted by Bad Boys and Good Dope"

A year plus into this Corona 500 or whatever NASCAR event this actually is, I'm getting a little worn and frayed around the edges. Not helping is a resumption, not a return, of winter with both unkind temperatures and winds that scream more than mutter.  

Here's a photo I grabbed the other day while out walking on what proved to be a true start to our False Spring, not that I am having any hard feelings about it (as they would change nothing if I were). 

I like the hint of red on the very tips of the tree's branches and tell myself it means buds are preparing for what's to come and that I should do likewise. If I say it forcefully enough aloud maybe it will come true. 

Maybe.

Anyway, here's a quote from someone I enjoy in small doses and I hope you will too.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?'
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so other people won't feel insecure around you."

Just a reminder for today, be an exclamation and NOT an explanation.

-bill kenny

Don't Let Landon Be Your Wing Man

An unsolicited true story (hint: on the interwebz, everything is unsolicited).

When I arrived (back) in the United States from Germany in the fall of 1991, the plane landed at JFK in New York City, and through the miracle, I am assuming of deregulation, the shortest distance to my final destination of Groton, Connecticut, was to and through Philadelphia. 

So I frog marched sort of from the international arrivals lounge in JFK to a domestic departures area where I boarded a slightly smaller plane than the one I flew over the Atlantic Ocean and landed in a very dark Philadelphia International Airport where I changed planes to one so small I had both an aisle and window seat at the same time. 

The pilot walked up the (center and only) aisle in the plane to the nose, opened what looked like a dutch door, and hopped up into the cockpit. I couldn't help noticing from my window seat after take-off that we were heading north by following the New Jersey Turnpike and I fretted about the Vince Lombardi rest stop at Exit 16 and hoped we had enough fuel in case we had to circle while whatever truck we were shadowing battled its way north through the congestion. 

I remember at some point the hostess bringing around a wicker basket with hard candies in it as our snack, and I asked since regular size aircraft had movies if we should expect a puppet show.

I don't recall the answer, but I guess, almost thirty years on I should be glad I didn't have to share a row with Landon Grier. With him on-board I can only imagine there's no need to feel bad about not having a movie, though the verdict's still out on how good an idea having a rodeo is.   
-bill kenny

Ticking Away

Good morning to you slightly earlier. 

In some parts of the world this time yesterday was the day before and now in these parts, it's already light. This is the time of the year when I'm never sure if it's better to believe the calendar or my own eyes. Today is the beginning of daylight saving time and many of us are already counting down the days to spring (I guess so we can then count down the days until Summer) which is actually this coming Saturday but when I look out the window there are more than enough reminders everywhere that winter's last word hasn't yet been spoken.   

Don't know about your house, but in mine, there's always one clock we forgot to move forward on Saturday night and then didn't see it at all Sunday so it's actually Monday or Tuesday when we finally get caught up on all the watches and clocks. 

I hate the clock on the microwave and it shows because I never get it set correctly. You can hear the sounds of my struggling with it as it beeps and bleats in frustration while I manage to do everything but get it to move forward and eventually my wife resets it in what seems to be one fluid motion leaving me to wonder as I always do why we have the forward and back thing with the clocks in the first place. 

As someone raised a Catholic I guess I should find familiar solace in a ritual that we do whether we understand why we do it or not. And while I'd like to hope the spring ahead means winter is now finally in retreat in the Northeast what we will have is more daylight in the afternoons. As a kid, I thought it made the days longer and gave us more time and the elderly adult in me now hopes that the kid was right on both counts.   
-bill kenny