Don't Worry Your Life Away

"Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of much more value than they?"
- Matthew 6:25

All things considered, he does make a fair point. 
-bill kenny

As We Near the First Hundred Days

The President spoke to a disjointed joint session of Congress yesterday evening and I couldn't be more pleased to have not had to worry he might inadvertently divulge the nuclear launch codes or reverse a decades-old alliance with a NATO partner, unlike The Former Guy. 

Senator Tim Scott offered a response that was tepid and I'm being kind.

My problem is the GQP, of whom he is a member, surrendered itself to a sideshow clown and a cult of the personality that he created and still is in charge of. Here's a snapshot of where they and I are with one another: 

Kevin, Mitch. Suck it. 
-bill kenny

The Price of Education

Despite what you may read here from time to time (okay, perhaps more often than just ‘from time to time’) I have a great deal of regard for those who volunteer to serve on our Board of Education and on City Council especially this time of year when good intentions and fine words get reduced to a balance sheet as decisions are made, or left unmade, about budgets. 

We residents rely a lot on the decisions about structure and funding by a handful of dedicated people but then often become unhappy at the decisions they make, no matter what those decisions are. 

And nothing seems to bring out the passion like any and all decisions about public education funding, which in Norwich has two components: Norwich Free Academy, NFA, costs which are presented to the Board of Education (Norwich is one of their sending towns) as a bill that must be paid, an immovable object, that’s also included as part of the overall operating budget for Norwich Public Schools, whose bottom line is approved by the City Council, the irresistible force. 

The Board of Education’s budget generates a great deal of comment as well it should, not all of it kind and not all of it reasoned or reasonable, because of the number of dollars involved; but many of those dollars are for NFA over which the Board has no control or input.

When (not if) NFA costs increase annually those increases must be paid by the Board of Education; rarely does the Board's approved overall budget increase by even that same amount or percentage. Instead 'economies' are created impacting, directly and indirectly, the classroom experiences of all of our children at the grade-school level. This arithmetical sleight of hand has gone on for decades and we all feel bad about it and promise to do better next year. But don’t.  

I am a child of a schoolteacher, so I'm a little more intractable and implacable (and maybe irrational) when well-meaning and hard-working people, facing the toughest economic times since the Great Depression of 19129 coupled with the greatest public health threat since the Spanish Flu of 1918, attempt to persuade me that we can or should buy education for our children as if we were buying ground beef or bananas.  

I always hear 'in my day we didn't have...' computers, paraprofessionals, guidance counselors, (insert your favorite childhood memory here). We tend to forget the world we are giving our children is very different from the one we had. 

I was a Cold War Kid who drilled to duck under his desk and turn away from windows. Now we have Windows on computers in every classroom and more computers in our schools than NASA had for the Space Race. But we also have more metal detectors in schools than in penitentiaries. Each day our schools and teachers struggle to find a balance that’s being constantly redefined and refined. 

Every day our schools are, for many, surrogate parents, offering breakfast and lunch for hungry minds with stomachs to match. And many times, our schools are the venue for before and after school services desperately needed by stressed and distressed families across Norwich many of whom bear little resemblance to the Waltons or Cleavers. No one chose to have this happen, but it’s part of who we are now.

We choose to build a city reflecting our beliefs, values, and hopes for everyone in our community, and nowhere are all of those more present than in how we fund our schools. As parents we want our children to have roots and wings. Our schools help provide both. 

Frankly, education is not an expense; it is an investment we make in our own future. 

We are building a city that reflects our beliefs, values, and hopes for every one of us, and nowhere are all of those more present than in how we fund our schools. As parents we want our children to have roots and wings. Norwich schools help provide both. 
-bill kenny

Don't Blink

Life seems to come at us at about 10,000 WTFs a second, so look sharp!

Well! Will you look at the time?!.
-bill kenny 

I've Already Exceeded the Posted Limit

I'm sixty-nine years old today. No need to congratulate me as I really didn't have a lot to do with events back on this date in 1952 except just show up, literally. As I've aged, more like milk than wine, I've accumulated medical maladies and mysteries that employ a larger and greater number of specialists as the years go by. 

In addition to a Primary Care Physician, I have a cardiologist, endocrinologist, nephrologist, oncologist, pulmonologist, rheumatologist, and urologist. Technically, we could get in a mini-van and use the HOV lane (instead of turning on the siren) to rush to the hospital. 

Earlier this month I went for my semi-annual vascular scan, the book-end to my other semi-annual whole-body exploration, the carotid stenosis. They are not especially subtle reminders that there are just so many sunrises and so many Springs left on the odometer. (As if I didn't have a mirror that told the face in it every morning the very same thing). 

We, meaning me and some very clever person with a wonderfully complex machine from Siemens and warm gel to smear on my legs and chest and elsewhere, listen to the sounds of my blood coursing through my arteries and veins and hope it continues to sound like the ocean crashing onto the shore. I peer over the specialist's shoulder to watch the monitor for waveforms and splotches of color, sometimes dark blue and other times bright yellow and vivid red, knowing no matter how keen I am to know what the colors mean, I'm too afraid to ever ask.

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

I remember one of my doctors (now retired) early on explaining that to me at our very first session and adding 'but there's always a hope someday of surgery.' In the ensuing years, I've seen enough surgery to last me a lifetime (it has, so far), so 'hope' is a word I use guardedly.

The facility I visited is brand-new and has floors of doctors (some of them mine) and other out-patient services. In the waiting room, properly distanced, was a young woman in what looked like hospital scrubs, holding a small child, a baby actually, of perhaps six months or so on her lap. He, not she, I learned was a customer for some other kind of imaging equipment. 

He was extremely well-behaved as if I am an expert with my own babies getting ready to celebrate a 39th as well as a 34th birthday in the coming days, for one, and weeks, for the other. The child on her lap stared at the world, bounded by the waiting room walls and ceiling with an eagerness and intensity I no longer remember but truly admire.

It was a moment for rubber-necking, his, and reflection, mine. He, even if he lives to be one hundred, could never remember me, and I, should the same fate await me, shall never forget him. Another traveler on Spaceship Earth.

-bill kenny

Virtue Is Its Own Reward

I had a wonderful friend, Stuart, a thousand or so years ago while an undergraduate at Rutgers College who was an orthodox Jew in a very unorthodox world. We've lost sight of one another and I hope very seriously and sincerely that he is well and as happy as anyone can be a half-century onwards. 

He was very devout in terms of following his religion's dietary customs and observing the holidays, precepts, et al but I loved him because he was a big teddy bear of a man who was always willing to help anyone at any time with anything. 

The expression 'gives you the shirt off his back' was coined to describe his kindness and commitment and yet whenever he was asked about what was his reward for his generosity he would turn the question back on you and offer that the reward for doing a mitzvah, a good deed, should be the knowledge you have done one. No other reward was expected or required.  

I thought of Stuart when I read about Louis Goffinet's situation with the Internal Revenue Service and the penalty/punishment he faces for efforts to help his neighbors most in need of assistance with no thought of personal reward or benefit. Somehow, there must be a way to resolve this; a mitzvah, if you will, to complement and somehow complete Louis' mitzvah.
-bill kenny 

Requiem Aeternum

I think we in Norwich have had an annual Vietnam Veterans Day in some form since the start of the 21st Century. This year's observance is this afternoon, at one, at Chelsea Parade. The day itself, if not our remembrances of it here, is linked to the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975.

I grew up in an era where history was reduced to the memorization of dates and events to be parroted back on test days, but even in today's world of alt-facts and fake news, I'm confident too many years down memory lane that we, as a country, have never really made our peace with that war, the way we fought it and the way it ended and most especially with how we treated those who came back though never home from it.

And again this year to me proof again that the present is often a future we ignored from our past, we still have large numbers of young and not-so-young men and women, deployed across the globe, many in southwest Asia, serving our national strategic interests and furthering our foreign policy objectives while I sit in front of my big screen and bitch about the two hundred channels of cable I get.

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

But the Vietnam War, as all wars are, was less geopolitics and more personal loss and grief across a generation. I was still finding buildings and classrooms as a wide-eyed freshman at Rutgers when I lost forever a Manhattan prep school classmate, Roy O., in Vietnam.

I was grateful so many years later as part of the events surrounding the Norwich Sesquicentennial when the American VeteransTraveling Tribute to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial stopped at Howard T. Brown Park, giving me a moment to say thank you and farewell to my friend.

From what I know from long-time residents of Norwich, the city lost twelve young men in the Vietnamese War. When I read accounts of that war and its aftermath, I'm angry, bitter, and more than a little guilty at how so many of those who survived were treated, Those fortunate enough to come home returned to us often wounded in places that will never, ever heal and were left to their own devices while the rest of us raced to forget what we never knew enough about in the first place.

In years previous on Saturdays passed, we've had skies so deep and blue you could get lost looking into them with just enough of a breeze that the large flag at the war memorial on Chelsea Parade was fully unfurled (you could hear a slight snapping of the cloth). I hope the weather will cooperate because a nice day attracts more participants, but the weather will not matter to those who will be there, rain or shine, so you should dress accordingly. And on behalf of those Norwich sons, and the other fifty-eight thousand plus casualties, thank you.

I will hope for sunshine because a sunny day provides me the perfect reason to wear my big, very dark sunglasses since, by the time the ceremonies conclude, like many I'm struggling to keep from crying. I have spent too much of my life being too cool to care and to cry because I fear if I do, I might never stop.

Praise we great men and women I know, but the sacrifices made by those with whom we live and love make me wonder if we praise and remember the right people.
Thank you and Welcome Home.
-bill kenny

We Promised to Remember

It was twenty-two years ago Tuesday when the unthinkable became the unimaginable. 

On April 20, 1999, the world ended for Cassie Bernall, 17; Steven Curnow, 14; Corey DePooter, 17; Kelly Fleming, 16; Matthew Kechter, 16; Daniel Mauser, 15; Daniel Rohrbough, 15; William "Dave" Sanders, 47; Rachel Scott, 17; Isaiah Shoels, 18; John Tomlin, 16; Lauren Townsend, 18, and Kyle Velasquez, 16. 

And today all we do is shrug and sigh when the news of the casualties from the latest carnage reaches us on a near-daily basis.
-bill kenny

 

Rhymes with Mirth

According to my desk calendar, yesterday was 'Administrative Professionals Day' (no idea when the amateurs are honored) but there's nothing about today, Earth Day. I think somebody has a lobby group and somebody else needs one and I think that has to be us. 

Anyway, Happy Earth Day 2021. I would have gotten you a card but I always worry about where it might end up, recycling bin or landfill, and saw no need to take that risk, especially with a corporate captive like the current Postmaster General overseeing delivery and making sure to kneecap Mr. Zip as often as he can. Besides, who reads anymore? Or any less? 

This is all the planet there is, as far as I am concerned. I was almost eighteen when I and a contingent of classmates from the Carteret Academy in West Orange, New Jersey, marched down NYC's Fifth Avenue in the first Earth Day celebration in 1970. Okay, we'd gotten lost while in The City for the day (a senior trip of sorts, class not citizens having moments). Not quite sure who it was, but someone figured the parade would be a great chance to meet girls. Who cares why we were there! Still.

I thought then and think now that if we work to make the place on the planet upon which we stand and live the very best we can, each of us can rescue all of us. So not just today, but every day, when you see something, environmental or otherwise that causes you to say 'somebody should do something!' please remember you are that somebody.

Me?  I just do my bewildered best and some folks even see the bear in me.

-bill kenny  

Letting Go

I saw a posting the other day on the water-cooler of the Internet, Instagram, "Many people never get what they deserve because they're too busy holding on to what they should they let go." 

Based on an informal survey of the streets I walk on a regular basis, I'm assuming we must have a lot of truly deserving (if not needy) neighbors because the mountains of discarded household items are impressive (or would be if they came with their own Sherpas and base camps, which might be another attraction for Norwich, 'Adventures in Recycling,' admittedly not quite the level of appeal that the disc golf course that opened last week in Mohegan Park has, but every little bit helps unless it actually is litter, then not so much).   

The monthly street sweeps by the volunteers of Reliance Health and Saint Vincent de Paul Place supported by The Last Green Valley gather up tons of stuff at a time in targeted neighborhoods, while other outreaches,like WasteFree Connecticut, are more organic and individual in both scale and scope when it comes to helping put the bloom back into The Rose of New England. But clutter is everywhere.

The hardest place to reach in any cleaning, reorganization, or rightsizing I've found, is the space between my two ears. The late comedian and social observer, George Carlin, used to say the whole function of a house was someplace to keep all your 'stuff' and suggested we were each very partial to our own while holding other people's in far lower regard (he called it 'hits' but he put the S on the front). What he didn't say, and didn't need to, was that 'stuff' comes in all shapes, sizes, and varieties and is always in infinite supply

This time of year, especially because we empathize with fresh starts, each of us could do with a spring clean that's just as much focused on our mindset as it is on our basement. I've made the unhappy discovery (that's actually a lie; I knew it long ago but didn't want to admit it) that as I've aged I'm less agile and more fragile when it comes to trying new things, listening to new ideas, or starting on new projects. 

Many of us set out to change the world but would never consider starting with ourselves. We like change as a concept just not as a process; that whole holding on when we should be letting go thing tends to trip us up.It can be hard to adopt new ways of doing things when we've gotten comfortable with what we've always done. It's painful to realize that sometimes  the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth (of the habit).

We don't really have the desire to think about what Norwich ten (or twenty or more) years from now could, or should, look like because we're too busy holding grudges about events that happened in the past which can no longer be changed. 

Many of us use the past as a reason to keep from embracing the present instead of as a fulcrum to move us into the future. Sometimes you have to let go to go forward.
-bill kenny 

Cosmic Coincidence?

Today as anyone with a calendar knows is 4/20. 

And everyone with a sense of history and geography knows what that is all about. 

Today is also Taco Tuesday. This is it folks; this is what we've been training our whole lives for. 

Go team!

-bill kenny

Still in Training

When I was a wee slip of a lad in the '50s, American railroads had a billboard campaign with the slogan, 'Take the train, it's Cooler." 

I suspect this is not what they meant, but could have. 

Say what you will, sometimes models are more fun than the real thing.
-bill kenny

My Sunday Sermon

 Going to Church on Sundays makes you a Christian...

..,in the same way, that standing in a garage makes you a car.
-bill kenny

A Penny for Your Thoughts

Thank you, Internet. 

This has been a long and somewhat harrowing week and I was in desperate need of some whimsy and here you are, offering it with both hands.  

There's a sucker born every minute, analog or digital; makes no difference.
-bill kenny

The Ear of the Beholder

I don't play a musical instrument and have always lacked the discipline to learn how to. Our daughter can pick up just about any instrument and get music out of it and there are few things I have enjoyed more in my life than those times I had the opportunity to hear her play either in an ensemble or just by herself. 

I was thinking about music this morning after reading in a local newspaper that the school district where I live is hoping to reinstate a full music program for primary grade students in their next budget. 

Music and art, and the planetarium and field trips all went the way of the dodo bird over the last decade and a half as too many of us locally thought education was something you purchased by the pound like ground beef.   

Anyway. That was not where I wanted to end up.

I started by mentioning music and that's because of this incredible news article. And all I can think about is David Bowie. 
-bill kenny

Echoing John Sebastian

I've decided to continue my Don't Mask, I'll Yell policy. It gives me something to do and let's face it, it's a target-rich environment.  Honestly, it's not that hard. Remember:

Wash your hands, keep your distance, and get your shot.
-bill kenny

Same Movie, Different Actors

Don’t let the physical separation in City Council chambers or the long-distance participation by citizens via telephone line be anything more than a distraction during this Annual Municipal Budget Creation Season (I like giving things capital letters; it makes them seem important and costs me nothing).

While many aspects of our circumstances have changed, at its essence, the budget creation process, the reasons for the requests, the reactions by many of us to those requests and a thousand tiny conversations and discussions are actually all the same. 

It’s been suggested the best thing about City Manager’s proposed budget was that it wasn't worse. Sort of like ‘the good news is there’s no more bad news.’ Except, in this case, his presentation was a statement of where we are. We decide what happens next.

The budget is the result of discussions we, the residents of Norwich, will have with one another, with our municipal department heads, and our elected officials as we (and they) craft a document by which we determine the amount and variety of municipal services, from public education and public safety through road resurfacing and everything in between, and what we are willing to pay for those goods and services. Our city budget is a compact we make with one another, for one another.

It's okay to have had a reaction to what was offered-but, it’s more important to have engagement and informed suggestions as part of the remaining process. A great place to start is by having a copy of the proposed budget (‘you can’t tell the players without a scorecard’) and you’ll find that on the city’s website. It’s deserving of your time and attention but while it tells us what things cost-only we can decide what they are worth.

Our first opportunity to comment on the record is the first public hearing tomorrow night at seven-thirty in City Council chambers (and you can follow along at home as well). And at the risk of boring you, let me note again this is OUR budget. We should each be prepared to speak as well as be willing to listen to others when they speak because that's how reasonable people develop solutions, not by scapegoating and searching for the guilty.

Many of us have never been faced with the conditions we are confronting right now, but as a nation, we were here eighty-eight years ago as President Franklin Roosevelt led us out of the Great Depression with passionate, precise, and thoughtful words filled neither with alarm nor anger. 

"Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment. Yet ...(c)ompared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for.

“This Nation asks for action, and action now...It can be helped by insistence that the Federal, State, and local governments act on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced. (I)t can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act and act quickly."

We are each called upon in our way to act wisely and well for ourselves, our families, and our city.
-bill kenny

Why Put It Off Another Day?

We've spent over a year praying decades of the rosary, holding out hope while holding our breath, and maybe, just maybe, the dawn's early light is just over the horizon.

For many that light will never come so if you're alive and waiting for your life to return to normal to start living again, you'll never have the opportunity you have at this moment, so seize it and never let go.
-bill kenny

The Caterpillar Sheds His Skin

 "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is."

"Oh, The snow will be a blinding sight to see as it lies on yonder hillside."
-bill kenny

Who Were Those Masked Men (and Women)?

Yeah. I preach to the point of screech about hand-washing, vaccinating, social distancing, and masking up. This is sort of more the same but with a swing beat from some terribly talented people, one of whom I consider an acquaintance.

Sometimes the purpose of art is to conceal art. And sometimes its whole function is to make you smile while telling you something that might just save your life. 
-bill kenny

Faith Is Cold as Ice

Nature knows things at which we bi-peds with our computers and big brains can only guess. On March 19, the Feast of Saint Joseph, as they always do, the swallows came back to Capistrano. From everything I've ever read, they've been doing this for quite a bit longer than it took us hairless apes to even notice. I refuse to buy in on the party line, 'no one knows why or how they know...' because I sincerely believe someone does and chooses to NOT tell the rest of us.

I was thinking of them last night waiting for the bees who show up every spring to live under the wooden banisters of our front porch to do so. They are late, it seems, this year. I'm not sure if a bumblebee is a real type of bee or just a made-up name but that's the way they look. They're black, with what appears to be a yellow pullover and they hover about eight to ten inches off the steps when you come out on the porch and dart away, right after they zoom in, directly at you (as if scanning their sector).

I'm not an entomologist, but I find it interesting they seem to drill or eat through the underside of the railing, leaving little piles of sawdust as they go and live, I suppose, snug in the holes they create. At the end of the season, they disappear as suddenly as they arrived, and Sigrid goes out with wood patching goop and fills in their holes which then dries and hardens and in the next spring, the cycle begins again.

We (or I, at least) have no idea what the bees are doing aside from playing what looks like chicken with one another on the porch during most of the daylight hours. Sometimes, someone going up or down the three stairs from the porch to the sidewalk will attract their interest and they'll hover practically in the person's face, undaunted by waving hands (even if they get hit) until curiosity sated, they go back to Ollie, Ollie Oxen Free or whatever they're playing.

I'm not sure I'm not just a little jealous since they don't spend anywhere near as much of their time pondering me as I do them. They seem to be untroubled by questions such as Why are we here? Because we're here. Roll the bones. Why does it happen? Because it happens. Roll the bones.

-bill kenny

Following the Footsteps

The first full summer we lived at Pole 274 (no Lakeside Drive stuff in those days) on Harveys Lake in Pennsylvania, on just about every day to include the ones with some rain and some other meteorological gunk I would run around the shore perimeter of the lake which is in excess of eight miles (I didn't know that at the time, among the universe of things I didn't know). 

I'd take off down our driveway and when I say down I mean gravitationally, hang the left (rehearsing for my days in NASCAR) and continue past where Uncle Jim, Aunt Dot, and our cousins, Patsy (we were trying to call her Trish and I was terrible at it), Michele (just one L) and Dori lived, then past Sandy Beach where Mr. and Mrs. Sam had a drive-through until Hurricane Agnes knocked it over. 

Still farther around the lake was Hanson's Amusement Park where the Avanti Waterbugs used to stage their early water-skiing shows. We didn't have a boat our first summer so we did odd jobs to help the show; I even got to be the show announcer. 

The rest of the way around is kind of fuzzy in terms of memory though I think I used to pass a pizza place near the intersection where traffic from Dallas ('The Big D) hit the road around the lake which was close to the last quarter of the route. 

Like very nearly everything else in my life, there was no purpose to the running. I wasn't trying out for the high school track team (there was none) or serving as Gump's precursor. I just ran and I mention it now because, for much of the succeeding almost-fifty years, the only thing I've run is my mouth.

My brother-in-law, Russ, runs, or at least ran, marathons even after he and Kara moved to Florida for the joy of running while my brother Adam, pre-pandemic, ran in the New York City (among others) marathon as well as in many shorter Jersey Shore distance efforts to keep himself in shape and because he loved running.

A number of years ago he started participating in the Tunnel to Towers 5K Run and Walk, joining with thousands of runners and non-runners alike to honor the memory of firefighter Steven Siller's sacrifice and have something of lasting good and hope come from one of the most tragic of days in our history.

The #Tunnel2Towers Foundation raises money to support innumerable good causes and projects and every little bit helps. Adam used to use his annual participation as an opportunity for those of us willing and able to donate to so do. 

The Run/Walk was canceled last year as we descended into the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, but planning and preparation for a full calendar of commemorative events in observance of the 20th Anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center are well along. 

So far along in fact that earlier this week, because I'm on their mailing list, I received a solicitation from the #Tunnel2Towers Foundation to contribute again this year. I did and in much the same way as Adam brought me to them, I'm introducing them to you.

Sometimes we are in danger of being overwhelmed and paralyzed by the horror and evil of so many villainous bastards in the world which is a tragedy because our world can and should be a beautiful and loving place. Every good deed is a candle lighting the way to making where we are and go just a little bit better and brighter. 

Today might be a good day for you to strike your own match against the darkness.
-bill kenny      

Elevating Social Distance to a Fine Art

I've received both phases of the Pfizer Phauci Ouchy but have every intention of keeping a large swath of humanity as far from me as my bony little arms will allow me to do. I've been around this ant farm with beepers for a lot longer than a lot of folks think is merited and I fear anything more intense than a passing acquaintanceship is probably cruising for a bruising. 

As things start a slow return to what we seem to have decided is to be our new normalcy it will be up to people like me to make sure people like you don't get caught up in the euphoria of being able to eat in a restaurant or attend a sporting event by having me witness it. 

Actually, if it were up to me it wouldn't be up to me because I don't care if you do or you don't as long as whatever it is you choose is done as far from me as possible for as long as possible (or even longer). Absence makes the heart grow fonder and the sooner you're gone the sooner I'll miss you (in theory). 

As someone who's been practicing social distancing in some form since about the third grade, it all sort of looks the same to me from where I am, which is someplace you're not. By design or accident. Makes no difference to me.   

And when I vacation in a place like this, I not only do not expect them to leave the light on; I insist that they don't.

Gute Reise.
-bill kenny

Roll Up Your Sleeve

I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on television (possibly because I have a face best suited for radio). I don't pretend to be an Internet Epidemiologist or a Virologist like (m)any of the myriad of same we've all encountered on social media platforms on a non-stop basis over the last couple of months as our country and the world has battled sometimes fiercely and at other times just fitfully in attempting to contain and conquer the most terrifying (to me) health threat in my almost-seven decades here on the Big Blue Marble, COVID-19. 

I've spent most of my adult life never allowing my lack of knowledge on any given subject to keep me from having an opinion about it (just like you, in case you were feeling superior; you're not. We're all bozos on this bus and sometimes some of us have a window seat and sometimes we don't) so why would COVID-19 be any different for me? It's not.

About a month and a half ago, in a  post called Vacci-Nation, I offered a peek at my earliest years on Earth while recounting barely-remembered early childhood memories from when I was (maybe) three years old at a time it was just me and my Mom and Dad in a high-rise in Flushing, Queens (New York City). I had some interesting emails in response. 

Post World War II grown-ups were having children, us, who were to be the vanguard of the Baby Boom, as the United States became not just a but the world power and the political, social, and economic powerhouse of the world. And yet even as my parents and their friends were fruitful and multiplied, infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis) was reaching epidemic levels, killing thousands of kids in this country every year and untold numbers around the world. 

Dr. Jonas Salk had developed what proved to be the first effective vaccine against polio but when it was being tested no one, Salk included, 'knew' that it would work. I was still a toddler when my mom and dad had an opportunity for me to receive Salk's polio immunization in its earliest days. I remember Mom telling me as an adult she never hesitated about a decision.

Polio was the most frightening disease you have probably never heard of, and Salk's vaccine is the reason why. The vaccine was released just before my third birthday in 1955 and cases of polio disappeared dramatically until, by 1995, it had been basically eliminated in the Western Hemisphere. I received a vaccination; a child one apartment over didn't because her parents were afraid of the unknown consequences. She contracted polio. Normally this might be where I'd suggest 'thus endeth the lesson.' 

Except, on the last Friday of last month, my wife and I received the second of the two Pfizer COVID-19 vaccinations and gave not a moment's thought to all, or any, of the discussions and distractions, swirling around from those who not only know everything about vaccines but everything better, so it's okay to think of me as one of those folks when I tell you to trust the science, keep wearing your mask, practice social distancing and wash your hands.
-bill kenny

 

Redefining a Casual Conversation

You would not know this to read me I know, but I have remarkably talented brothers and sisters with more skills and abilities than I have fingers and toes (and I interned one summer in a morgue if you follow my drift).

All three of my sisters and both of my brothers are younger than me so I sometimes offer the feeble defense that the bar was set kind of low, but quibbling aside each of my five siblings has talents and strengths that make them pricelessly invaluable to their own families as well as treasures within mine.

Here's the kind of stuff I'm talking about as posted the other day by my sister, Kara.

A timely insight from Damian Barr. Only someone like Kara could unearth it.
-bill kenny   

Everything Old is New Again

I am no longer stuttering or stumbling over the YeeHawdists of Vanilla Isis' attempted insurrection of 6 January because I've rubbed enough elbows with the Children of the Corn right here where I live a state considered just about as blue as any in the nation. 

The Gadsden Flag, the bumper stickers that boast of ignorance and hate, none of that did NOT exist prior to 6 January when the Arsonist-in-Chief tried to set it all ablaze. The surprise of those who chose to NOT see it before that date is what keeps tripping me up, and I don't get out much anymore. 

This is from ELEVEN YEARS AGO and I cannot pretend to have an IQ too much beyond an average room temperature and here I am back in the day, channeling Nostradamus I guess except I called it: 

That's Why I Love Mankind

Dante called it The Divine Comedy though he wouldn't have been laughing at what I said when I first heard about the latest looners ensnared by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (and how in the heck did we decide those three went together like faith, hope, and charity, or the Kardashians?).

Just what we needed since we've had had so little for at least the last twenty centuries, more proof that we are God's special creatures, the Lord's punchline, assuming He takes us seriously as we dare to wonder if He exists (we might never see Him because of who we are, not because of who He is).

And you thought all we needed to be on guard against were Al and Eunice Kider, Auntie Fa, and Tommy and the Taliban. What do you think this is? A Children's Crusade at Chuck E. Cheeses? Ladies and Gentlemen, put your hands together for a nearly seamless blend of anti-government, militant Christians who call themselves Hutaree. For just a moment when I heard the name I flashed on F Troop but that was the Hekawi.

The NY Times account quotes their website (and who doesn't have one these days) “Jesus wanted us to be ready to defend ourselves using the sword and stay alive using equipment.” 

I have to wonder if this is the same Jesus who helps professional basketball players make free throws or assists baseball pitchers in achieving strike-outs. Where does He find the time for ALL this other activity? Not only are the NBA playoffs practically just around the corner but baseball season just started!

As a child of the Sixties, I often wondered why the Zig-Zag rolling papers people didn't make a bigger deal out of the physical resemblance of their guy to the Son of God, but I'd like to think it had something to do with respect for the purity of others' beliefs. 

So now I have to wonder where these hockey pucks with hair found their divine inspiration and how much more of this My God Is Bigger than Your God most of us who travel on this Big Blue Marble will have to put up before someone someplace finds the biblical passage that talks about Blessed are the Reloaders and we start collecting paving stones as we search for those without sin. 

It's a cinch we won't find any. What's that bumper sticker? "Lord Deliver me from Your Followers " Amen.

-bill kenny

Falling Up

If you were in any store of nearly any kind within the previous three weeks your perception of what today is all about involves marshmallow Peeps and Cadbury chocolate. Good luck with both of those. Here are some previously voiced sentiments in the spirit of today's returnee.  

These started out as some thoughts (or what passes for such) from some years back and then things got twisted I guess. Some things like wine improve with age; others, like milk, not so much. I'll leave it for you to decide which is which because you always do.

I used to be a Roman Catholic--actually, that's less than accurate or truthful. It's like saying I used to be an alcoholic. Those two statements have no past tense, or pretense (my attempt at a literary joke); they just are and in this case, I am both.

The jaded, faded imitation of a person I am today looks at his faith as a child and finds it easy to mock the boy on his way to manhood, but also envies him the beliefs he had. When I threw the faith of my fathers into the ocean of doubt, I had nothing to hold onto in its place because I never had the courage of my own convictions and could not develop any trust in those of anyone else other. 

Today is Easter Sunday the most important feast in the Christian liturgical calendar and (pardon my pseudo-theological seminary sermon) precipitant of the article of faith that makes us Christian if that's indeed what we are. Christmas gets the lion's share of press, carols, cards, shouted best wishes at one another, and window dressing. Quite candidly, it takes all the air out of the room in terms of holiday celebrations.  

Christmas gets marketing help from every wholesaler and retailer imaginable and why not? Christmas is a lovely story, wonderfully symbolic and simply beautiful if you don't want to think too much about it.

Take a look today in the New Testament of your choice and foreboding's afoot in every verse of every version of the events leading to Easter (those, by the way, are the versions and verses of my choice). And in one of the most ironic choices of terms associated with any aspect of Jesus Christ, is Good Friday, which marks His Crucifixion and Death (I went back and made the "h" a capital, not because there's hope for me but out of fear that there is no hope). And as you read the accounts, let's face it, the events of that day are absolutely horrible.

The crowd, the occupying forces, everyone, it seems has abandoned the Son of God who is sentenced to die (I'd say 'murdered' but some might argue the state does not murder) in an extraordinarily horrible manner. And yet.

It is both that death by Crucifixion but more importantly the belief in the Resurrection which followed that so many commemorate today that's the defining event for every Christian, even the ones who seem more like Simon Peter than even they should ever admit in this life.  I want you to remember this. Come on, try to remember.
-bill kenny

Wholly Saturday

I have never been to the Vatican, nor have I stayed at a well-known motel chain, but I know my way around the Stations of the Cross and the Lives of the Saints. I'm always amazed at the number of people who think Christmas is the origin of Christianity-others consider the beginnings to be Easter Sunday.

If the former is The Promise and the latter The Promise Fulfilled then today, Holy Saturday is the act of faith and hope that defines you as a Christian. The belief in the Resurrection which the New Testament portrays as the promised reward for the faithful servant is never so near and yet oh so far as it is today.

The earliest disciples had nothing to go on, unlike those of us we of the Brave New World Order. They had witnessed a crucifixion-one of the most egregiously horrific forms of a death sentence at its time. Cowering in an upstairs room, huddled together while fearing any sound and every footfall was possibly a signal someone was coming for them, they had no way to see the glory of Easter Sunday. All they could do was believe.

For them to believe as devoutly as they did between the worst day in the history of the world and its greatest day remains for me as a loyal son of Holy Mother Church, but a FARC for more years than I care to recall, the day which created the Christian religion, today the test and proof of faith.

From childhood on, I struggled against the suffocation that surrender to the traditions and the rites seemed to signify. I took no solace in unquestioning and unswerving belief, preferring what I understood the path of Thomas to be and finding no one who could answer my questions, absenting myself from the body of believers. How odd this declaration of freedom never created a sense of being free.

Not that I don't envy those of faith and think about the comfort that comes from that, especially as I did last night (as I have for years on Good Friday) revisiting a news archive to read again about the costs of war and who pays them with the death of Captain Nicholas Rozanski in 2012. He came from Dublin, Ohio, to be lost in the fog of war on the streets of Maimanah, an unremarkable spot on a map of a nation we have carried with us for now over two decades, unable or unwilling (I don't know which) to lay that burden down.

His death almost exactly nine years ago, and those of all the fallen and forgotten should be another reminder to those of us who are alive to redouble our efforts to be the best people we know how to be in The Now because The Next, as the New Testament illustrates, can be so lonely and uncertain without a reason to believe. And either you have a reason to believe, or you become one for someone else. In either event, when you do, every day is Easter.
-bill kenny

Shedding Off One More Layer of Skin

There is, preached Kohelet in the Book of Ecclesiastes, a season for every purpose it says in the Old Testament, seasons for everything and around the world today within the Christian faith we are within the Paschal Triduum. 

Monsignor Harding, wherever he is in all of eternity, would be wide-eyed with wonder that, of all that I have been given or taught, and of all that I have lost or had taken from me, that would be a term I would hold onto.

I know a lot of Christians who see the birth of Christ, Christmas, as the defining moment of their faith, and I guess if you work retail that's an attractive argument. As a child growing up in Holy Mother Church in the late Fifties and Sixties, I knew (and had plenty of nuns, Sister of Charity type, if I were to forget) for Catholics it was the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus.

I can still remember Sister Thomas Anne faintly smiling as she ticked off the three events on the fingers of her right hand: pinkie, ring finger, and middle finger (how ironic is that? (I'm lying, third-grader students had no concept of the significance of the middle finger, not even Bobby D' who was a pretty fast crowd all by himself)). 

She paused as she would note the similarity to the Holy Trinity, three persons in the One God. When I watched her do this same explanation, with the pregnant pause in the same place, complete with the slow smile of accidental recognition of her triad point for the next five years, there was still a sign of course, but, I must confess, the wonder was gone.

And yet, I suspect she, too, would be smiling today. It is Good Friday, a day of such momentous import to so many disparate elements of our historical, philosophic and cultural identity where, no matter your belief, or disbelief, you can take solace from the perfect sacrifice of the Son of God who became the Son of Man and laid down His life for all sins by all sinners. 

Even if you have hurts that can never heal, you can, if only for today, have hope, knowing there is a tomorrow.

-bill kenny