You Hear the Tolling Bell

Today is Memorial Day, another holiday we've moved to a Monday (ironically and accidentally actually on a Monday this year) so we can have a three day weekend with plenty of time for a barbecue, a run to the beach, and some laps at the Brickyard (okay turns out that was yesterday, but it's the thought that counts). 

If we work it right, we don't ever or even have to think of those with whom we grew up and with whom we went to school but who never, themselves, got to be old, or whose parents and grandparents, having survived the Depression battled fascism to its knees in a worldwide war and their children and their children who have been engaged in a dozen "smallish" wars for the last half a century that all seem to cost lives.

Every town across the country has observances as do we here in Norwich, Connecticut. The first, as is tradition, is at Taftville's Memorial Park, starting at 10, and though I'm not a resident of Taftville I'm always welcomed as will you be. It's a wonderful way to start Memorial Day and I missed it last year because of the pandemic and am happy to have it return. 

Also returning is a parade organized by the City of Norwich and the Norwich Area Veterans Council that steps off 'sharply' at noon from The Cathedral of Saint Patrick on Broadway and ends with a memorial ceremony at Chelsea Parade. 

On a day usually filled with backyard barbecues and family softball games, the remembrances help us realize war is not an abstract geopolitical game played out on a grand stage by dominant personalities-it is very local, extremely personal, and heartbreakingly private. Those of our neighbors who choose military service have as many reasons for so doing as there are those who so serve. 

And while today we should mark the ultimate sacrifice of those who have served, we can also spare a thought or prayer for those who have survived as well. They bear scars, often invisible and painful, of their struggles that take a lifetime to heal.

We must never lose sight of all of those whose service makes us who we are and to whom we owe more than we can ever repay. They are a call to arms for each of us to be better than we are for ourselves, our children, and our nation.
-bill kenny

Four Decades Later

I wrote this in 2009 and have taken a stab, sometimes more literally than I'd like to admit, at wrestling it to the ground and finishing it over all the ensuing years, (so far) without success. I keep looking for the only approval I guess I ever wanted and coming up a bit short. I suppose there's always tomorrow and tomorrow..... 

Time creeps up on you and once you're past a memory of an event, it just seems to disappear. I think, in this case, some of the memory loss is due to how we observe Memorial Day this year because many of my memories are always tied to the Memorial Day that my father died.

Out walking after dinner last night I realized, I was still in the US Air Force (don't worry, NOT as a pilot or anything even close to important; you know how movies with crowd scenes have 'extras'? I was one of those) and was standing Staff Duty watch at my assignment, the American Forces Network HQ, in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, before The Wall came tumbling down and peace, love, and harmony ruled our planet. 

It had just turned three o'clock in the morning, I had the radio on and Jan W (who pulled the ridiculously early shift Milt F had once worked while stringing for ABC Radio) had just played the sounder and started his cast in the newstank when the telephone rang at the switchboard. At three in the morning, not a lot of good was on the other end I feared and I was right.

It was an operator from the American Red Cross Family Notification Program in Mannheim and she asked for the newsroom as was the routine. Once connected, she would say the code of the day, verifying who she was, and then state the name, rank, and unit of the service member who did not yet know that s/he had a family emergency/death in the family 'back home.'

Everyone in Europe, it seemed, listened to us. We were so pervasive, I got mail from listeners in Scotland, Norway, and Iceland who would ask about a particular song I had played in the middle of a set of records. I seriously believed you could tune us in on a toaster. We were everyone's soundtrack.

I told the Red Cross lady the newscaster was on the air and offered to take the information myself. When she spelled the last name, I realized it was my last name and when the first names matched, I was able to tell her 'and he's asked to return home for a death in the family,' and have her confirm that course of action.

She asked me to read back the notification, to assure her I had it and would relay it as was the standard operating procedure. I told her I was the servicemember who had just learned his father had died. She apologized though I never figured out for what.

I waited for Jan to finish his newscast and carried the Red Cross logbook back to him. I stood there while he read the one-page summary of the conversation, signed the receipt on the bottom, and looked up at me. When he did, I nodded slightly, and with my shift now over, I went back to my desk to pull together my thoughts for the trip home.

When my boss, Bob M, came in later in the morning he was as kind as he could be while helping me depart on emergency leave, get a lift to the Frankfurt Flughafen, and flying into JFK in New York.

It's odd how I cannot remember who picked me up if anyone did. I do remember a bus ride somewhere in Jersey to somewhere else in Jersey and eventually walking down a long and still-dark-in-the-early-morning-light-of-day-road on which my parents had built a sprawling house. A house, if not actually at the end of the world, was so close to it, you could see the end of the world from the backyard.

My dad and I did not get along if by 'not get along' you mean actively loathed one another. For many years, before and after his death, I thought it was because we were so different but I've realized it's more because we're so much alike. I think from the time I could talk I said 'no' to everything he ever wanted of and for me.

My parents' house was bedlam. Only the three youngest children were still living with my parents; the oldest, my sister Kara, a senior in high school was just weeks away from graduation, her younger sister, Jill, in one of the middle grades of high school and Adam, looking very solemn and all alone, I guess was in elementary school. I still feel bad about abandoning them for all those years, all those years ago. Sorry doesn't start to cover it and all I can offer is an apology and regret for my cowardice from then until now.

I had escaped and after me, a sister and a younger brother had all gone their own ways but, in candor, I had gone the farthest and fastest to another continent and another culture. I had met and married a person whose own family was as damaged in its way as I always thought mine was. But in my father's house, that night and the next day and the next night, I didn't know where the journey would take me.

The funeral director kept calling my mother, 'Mom', for (I'm sure) grief-management reasons. I remember nothing else about him except that he kept doing that until I felt compelled to tell him very quietly mine would the last face in this life he'd ever see if he did not stop doing that. I'm not sure my mother even realized the man was there.

I traveled in my uniform which was all the clothes I had brought with me. I don't why I packed only Air Force uniforms. It did make it easy to spot me at the funeral, at the graveside, and at the wake where scores of people whom none of the rest of us had ever known, but who knew my father, stopped in to say how sorry they were and how, if there were ever anything they could do, to please call.

None of us ever did, but that's okay because none of you meant a word of it, so we're even except for where we got odd. The afternoon my father was buried, the day after I had returned to the States, my oldest younger sister, Evan, took me to the airport. I checked in for the flight back across the ocean to where my heart and home were.

And I've kept all of those memories tucked away as if in a photo album or shoebox only opened once a year around the Memorial Day weekend in the hope, forlorn so far, that this time is the final time I try to exorcise the past.
-bill kenny

"...Fitting Services and Testimonials of Respect..."

Without putting too fine a point on it I guess, today, Saturday, is for all intents and purposes the official start of the holiday weekend. I’m not going to get stuck in that ‘let’s check the weather’ trap to see what kind of plans I’ll be making because aside from attending some local observances on Monday I don’t actually do the planning in my house. Sigrid, my wife, does. Forty-plus years on, she’s earned the right to do that.

I served eight years in the Air Force as don’t snicker, a radio and television weenie (that’s what we called each other, but only when no one was around). Vietnam was ending (actually Saigon fell while I was in basic training), and the “All-Volunteer Force” had started as did my quarrel on behalf of language lovers everywhere (my point: since I was being paid, I was a ‘professional’ not a ‘volunteer.’).

It’s okay; no one ever paid me any mind when I hollered about it then, either. I spent 13 months with “The Friendly Giant of the North,” AFRTS Sondrestrom, ninety miles north of the Arctic Circle, and went from there to American Forces Network, Europe, Headquarters in Frankfurt am Main (West) Germany. 

I lost a friend in Sondy, Jack, who drowned in a freakish set of circumstances involving the 24 hour a day Arctic summer sunshine, a wild river, and a tipped raft and then, years later, we all lost Bruce and Mike when the rotors on an Army chopper they were aboard for a story about an international parachutists' jump at the Mannheim air show stopped rotating and all of them became the day’s only story.

All in all, for eight years, I’d be hard-pressed to tell you who in any service at any time had an easier duty. Oh, every once in a while a record might skip, or a cart wasn’t re-cued but nothing that caused the Russians to cross the Fulda Line. The hardest part was running into folks on flight lines or out on tank ranges who would tell me how much what I was doing meant to them while they were the ones always in harm’s way. 

Especially when in the decades since I stopped being in the Air Force we got very serious about how often we sent people into combat and a helluva lot less concerned about the consequences for feckless and reckless foreign policy that resulted in Americans coming home in body bags.  Anyway. All of that is a preface to encouraging you to read all of this.
-bill kenny

 

More than the Start of Summer

There are things we never forget. Some are generational: where you were when you heard President John F. Kennedy had been shot; what you were doing when the World Trade Center was attacked or when What's Their Name was declared champion on America's Got Talent. 

Other experiences, and to each his own, are more personal: where I was the first time I saw the woman I was to marry or what I was doing when our first-born told us he'd gotten hired for his first full-time job or our daughter told me she'd been accepted into college. 

Life is actually millions of interconnected moments, each one linking and leading to the next from the previous and each of our lives is really what we do within those moments, together and alone.

This is the Memorial Day weekend and the above was my feeble attempt to try to make sense of the sacrifice of those who died in uniform in the defense of their country, because it's my country, too (those numbers are the best I can do, by the way).

Until it got rolled into the great Monday Holiday Law to make More Three-Day Weekends (or whatever its official name is), we celebrated Memorial Day, or Decoration Day as our parents called it, always on May 31st. Now it caps the start of summer weekend. Progress, eh?

Those hot dogs and burgers aren't going to grill themselves. And those BOGO sales at the strip malls will not last forever and what about the Indy 500? Yeah, everyone's a winner when we make things into three-day holiday weekends. Sure, we lose sight eventually of what the holiday is about (some of us get Memorial Day and Veterans Day mixed up), but that's got as much to do with the rate and pace of change in our lives and society as well as of our inability to maintain our focus long enough to complete a thought. (Prediction: soon there will be a service, ala Twitter, but that allows only much shorter messages-we can call it Blrtr (=blurter).)

Previous generations used to observe, not celebrate, Memorial Day, by visiting the graves of relatives and friends who'd died in uniform and placing flowers and little American flags. I saw someone the other day at the "old" cemetery in Norwich (Yantic Cemetery), on Lafayette Street behind Backus Hospital, driving his Audi on the walking path between the grave markers while talking on his cell phone. Classy, clown, real classy. And the sports radio on? Nice touch.

Here in Norwich, and near where you live as well, there will be observances-ours are Monday and will span the city, starting in Taftville at 10 AM at Memorial Park followed later in the day, at noon with a parade that starts near St. Patrick's and concludes at Chelsea Parade.

There's speeching by a lot of folks who never served a day in uniform (sorry. My eight years in the Air Force makes me cranky sometimes at people who think because they are entitled to their opinion, I, too, should be entitled to it) with small children scampering between the rows of metal folding chairs that the organizers so meticulously arranged and then all get rearranged as friends (every year, a few less than the time before) sit together and share their own memories while young men trapped in old men's bodies recall their wild youth and the school chum who didn't return from one of our far-off wars. 

Then there will be a wreath-laying at the (quite lovely) memorial on the north end. And before we know it, we're living and reliving the Gunner's Dream. 
-bill kenny 

Because We Can, Should We?

These big brains and opposable thumbs have taken us as a species to places no one could have ever imagined. We've plumbed the depths of the ocean, walked on the moon, created so much poison that we've scattered across our planet that we're choking on plastic and have diseases, COVID-19 coming to mind, that can kill untold numbers of us.  

Maybe we can and will, someday, be successful in addressing and reversing the damage we've done to ourselves and our home planet using the technology our ingenuity continues to invent to save ourselves. 

Leaving me to hope that as we mature as a species we get more judicious in how we choose to use our time, talents, and treasure. Because in my mind, just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.
-bill kenny

If You Can Believe in Something Bigger than Yourself

After what feels like suspended animation thanks to COVID-19, we're about to enjoy our first holiday since health precautions and safeguards were relaxed just in time for what many of us consider the unofficial start of summer, Memorial Day.

We could be so intent on getting our Summer started, and making up for lost time, we might lose sight of what Memorial Day was intended to be. Some of us have parents and grandparents who can remember when Memorial Day was called Decoration Day and even farther back than that, it was an attempt to honor the war dead of the War Between the States, evolving into a remembrance of all those men and women in uniform who sacrificed their lives to preserve our liberties.

Across Norwich, we’ll have remembrances that can only be improved by your presence and participation. 

Again, this year, the Peter Gallan American Legion Post 104 and the Frederick J. Sullivan Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2212 will hold a Memorial Day Ceremony at the Memorial Park in Taftville (next door to the Knights of Columbus Hall on South Second Avenue), this Monday morning, Memorial Day, beginning at ten.

Everyone is welcome and the ceremony will include members of Boy Scout Troop 80 from Taftville and the Three Rivers Young Marines, as well as local elected and community leaders but mostly just neighbors, like us, pausing to say 'thank you' to people whom we’ve probably never met and who never asked to be thanked but whose sacrifice makes Memorial Day with its barbecues and softball games, as well as every other day here in the Land of Boundless Opportunities possible.

If you can, after the ceremony in Taftville, I hope you'll consider heading to Little Plains Park, formed at the split between Broadway and Union Street, and pause to honor the 26th Connecticut Regiment Volunteer Infantry many of whose members are interred in the Yantic Cemetery. Their memorial in Little Plains Park honors their sacrifice during the Civil War at the Battle of Port Hudson.

From there it's just a few steps to the Cathedral of Saint Patrick where the City of Norwich and the Norwich Area Veterans Council's Annual Memorial Day Parade will step off at noon and continue down Broadway to the Monument Area of Chelsea Parade.

There will be a commemorative service at the parade's conclusion honoring the city’s war dead in all the conflicts which have both shaped and shaken our nation, accompanied by a moment of silence and one final reflection on past sacrifices and full measures of devotion.

We tell one another freedom has a price and each generation must learn its cost. Memorial Day is our thank you to the heroes who paid that price. But we should ask ourselves what is our responsibility to them? We live in a world of instantaneous communication and television sound bites where history and news are often confused with trends and ephemera that render memories meaningless.

On this and every Memorial Day, we should honor and remember all in military service who died because freedom is our most precious gift. Our heroes forfeited their lives for that belief, requiring us to live as engaged and energized citizens deserving of their sacrifice.
-bill kenny

One Year On...

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. 

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
-Frederick Douglass

"I can't bring myself to watch yet another video, not because I don't care, but because we're all just a few videos away from becoming completely desensitized. 

"The public execution of Black folks will never be normal."
-Andrena Sawyer

All Lives Matter but only if and not until Black Lives Matter.
-bill kenny

You Can Leave Your Hat On

Driving in the middle of the day on Saturday, I passed a fellow in an electric blue Miata convertible with the top down, wearing a large hat. The fellow, not the car. Actually, I knew the driver, not that I waved or gave any sign of recognition, though the 'You're #1 with me' gesture did come to mind.

I'd worked with the man a really long time ago, and I suspect neither of us recalls that period with any warmth or fondness. He had the Miata then when it was a new and cute little car that sort of reminded fossils like me of a classic Lotus without all kinds of pieces falling off every time you drove it someplace.

For over a century the sun never set on the British Empire and for many years the same was true of British Leyland Motors. The same nation that built Lancasters and Spitfires to thwart Hitler and his Horde for the ages cranked out Austin Metros and Triumph TR7's with little thought of tomorrow. 

Anyway. What had caught my eye was, on a beautiful warm day (and it was and we deserve as many in a row as we can get for as long as we can have them), he had the top down, to catch the rays (I'll assume). Except, he had a large hat on in the car, behind the wheel. To me, that defeats the whole purpose of having the top down. If you wear a hat in a car with the top down, it should be the law you must also shower while wearing a raincoat. I'm sorry, some rules are needed here. What is the point, otherwise, of having a car with a convertible top?

If you have a sensitivity to the sun, put the top down only at night or when the car is in a garage; leave the top up when you're driving outdoors (and when you're driving indoors and the indoors is a car wash) or just sell the car and buy one with a permanent roof (We have a name for a car whose roof can be lowered or removed, a 'convertible.' What should we call a car whose roof does NO tricks at all and why doesn't that car deserve a name?). 

Or in this guy's case, lose the hat that covers your scalp and get one big enough to cover your head. Keep America Beautiful, bozo (and if it's of any solace, that's NOT what I started to type).
-bill kenny 

Publicans and Pimps

I'm wondering if folks like Joel Osteen have ever been tempted to think (even) bigger than their mega-churches especially considering how their politics of plenty seems to work, perhaps rebranding them as MAGA churches.   

This might be a model that could really generate some serious coin of the realm both in the here and in the hereafter.

As the good book itself says, "blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord."
-billkenny

Vicariously Enthused

As we speed through the third decade of the 21st Century we seem to be continuing to accelerate. We have machines that do our shopping and every and any other task we no longer have the desire (or ability) to accomplish and I wouldn't be surprised if by the next dawn's early light we had machines to chew and swallow for us and then after that it's a small step to living and dying for us. 

We could, I might argue (but won't) eventually disappear from existence through famine, flood, pestilence, or war (or all of the above simultaneously), not ala Sara Teasdale, but rather Ray Bradbury, and our impervious machines will stand as testaments, sentinels, and souvenirs of who we were and what we did. 

Not that there will be anyone to miss or mourn us.   
-bill kenny

The Neuralgia of Nostalgia

Has the Internet really been around long enough to have earned a retrospective? 

Well, the folks at Esquire magazine seem to think so and have sold enough advertising to support a very thorough if not especially serious through the past darkly look at the utility we now take for granted. 

I admit to not missing the sound of a modem and the electronic handshake at all. 
-bill kenny

Dear Sir or Madam

In an ideal world, we each might choose to make our life an adventure, or a romance, or a comedy, and in some instances, a tragedy or a farce or perhaps even a graphic novel. We choose our own lives and how to live them.

Each day is a fresh start, a blank page if you will, but remember:

Hardbound or paperback.
-bill kenny 

Respite

I'm thinking this morning about a couple of lines from an old James Taylor song I love so much, they're all the words I ever learned of it, "whenever I see your smiling face, I have to smile myself, Because I love you." 

As someone whose personality led me to social-distancing decades before it was life-sustaining or required and whose looks were vastly improved by donning a face mask, and who was encouraged by numerous a fitted brown paper bag for my entire head (eyeholes optional, apparently), I'm still delighted that we are a big step closer to what I recall of our lives pre-COVID-19, even if my memory of before is all I'll ever have again. 

I don't have to stand at the Marina where the Yantic and Shetucket Rivers meet to form Norwich Harbor and the Thames River to be reminded that no one steps into the same river twice because both they and the river have changed. Change is neither good nor bad; it just is. What we make of change and how we react to it is what gives it a positive or negative value.  

Remember where we were on April 20, 2020, when by executive order, Governor Ned Lamont directed the covering of mouths and noses (face masking) and distancing when we shared public spaces? Last week, responding to new guidance and recommendations from the Center for Disease Control, CDC, Lamot announced that, as of midnight today, he was ending those restrictions for fully vaccinated residents.   

In light of all those pandemic pounds I've added over the last thirteen or so months, I'm hoping he's not considering reinstating a requirement for trousers rather than sweatpants while out and about because I'm not sure anyone else is ready to see what that looks like in my case.

I think we who have reached this point should allow ourselves a long collective sigh of relief as we continue to make progress on the promise we made to one another to build ourselves, city, state, and nation back better than it was. We don't have to be great to start but we have to start to be great and today's as good a day to do that as we've had.

You don't need me to remind you we should not celebrate today as the conquest of COVID. There's too much disease and death still in our country and across the world to not continue to be steadfast and vigilant (and careful and protective) of ourselves and one another. 

So many of us are exhausted from the effort and exertion (emotional, intellectual, physical, financial, spiritual) it has taken to stay on the path we are own as we struggled to keep our own tiny boat of loved ones, friends, and family from being swamped by the crushing rush of COVID-19 and associated circumstances. 

Now is the moment for all of us to remember the mantra from the pandemic's earliest days, #AloneTogether, and realize while we were very much in our own boat, we also shared an ocean. Many of us know or are themselves, someone, who lost a person in this plague. Those of us who didn't need to keep you in our thoughts as you hold those departed in your hearts. 

Today, we should remember we can face anything and as of today, we can share our whole faces with one another. So if you see someone without a smile, give them one of yours.
Don't worry; they'll pass it on.
-bill kenny 

 

Double Jeopardy: I Take Beef for Three Hundred Please

Do you remember those Wendy's commercials with the old lady yelling?  

Fast forward about forty years. 

Obviously, I love this story but the why may be less obvious to you so I'll share. It's because of the specificity of the reporting: "The incident occurred Tuesday in the potato chip aisle of a Walmart in South Euclid, about 15 miles east of Cleveland." Flawless.

All I'm wondering is how do you want that blunt object, well done or medium-rare?
-bill kenny

The HOV Lane at the Express Checkout

We'll all seen people with sweatshirts or tee-shirts that say 'ask me about my grandchildren.' At some point in the past unknown to me, I have been fitted with one that says 'tell me about anything; I ABSOLUTELY don't mind.'

I was in the local grocery yesterday afternoon and boy howdy did we all start going back to the store after what we keep hoping is the all-clear on CoVID 19 or what? No reason to not mask or not practice social distancing. Just sayin'. 

Anyway, I wasn't in the self-check-out line. I only had one item so I thought the express cashier was a good idea. Little did I realize how wrong at so many levels I could be. I wound up (at a safe distance) behind a fellow carrying a lot of stuff in his bare hands, without the benefit of a shopping cart or a basket. 

I, too, have had that happen, where I get ambushed in the baked goods by freshly made oatmeal and raisin cookies while I have my hands already full (A reach exceeds grasp kind of moment). Have there been times I've parked the item I originally came into the store to get and instead bought the other found along the way stuff, then taken that all out to the car, and then returned to purchase the original item? Yes, guilty as charged. Would I benefit from groceries having a corral of carts somewhere in the middle of the store for when I finally realize I can't possibly carry everything I want to buy? Yes, please. 

Not sure what happened with this guy. He was pushing a bag of charcoal briquettes in front of him but did not seem to have any meat you would normally associate with grilling in his hands (and I don't care to imagine where else he might have put it). I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I've never been hailed and enticed by briquettes when I'm Lost in the Supermarket, so I didn't have the highest regard for this fellow traveler on the Big Blue Marble.

He seemed to be talking to one of the magazines in that rack above the gum and candy, the one with what looked like Mel Gibson (I think) and (maybe) his girlfriend as a thumbnail-sized photo on the cover. But he wasn't. As he stacked his stuff (and '12 Items or less' became a suggestion, exactly when? I missed that memo) as high as he could on the smallest possible amount of space on the conveyor belt, he turned around to face me and much to my surprise continued talking. 

There was a reasonable amount of frantic head nodding and eye-blinking, not a lot of eye contact (ALL on my part), which was of no help at all in understanding a single word of whatever he was, or wasn't, saying through his mask.

All the while the cashier was scanning his stuff, he had his back to her, continuing to address me. When she announced the total, I had to point him, using the traditional rapid head bob technique (and NO sudden movements) in her general direction so that he realized the ride was just about done. 

Of course, he wasn't prepared to pay and went through his pockets looking for cash, paper, and coins, before defaulting to a credit card, shuffling off with enough plastic bags (at ten cents a pop) to choke a landfill all the while jabbering away to anyone (else) who made eye contact with him.

When I handed the cashier my sole item, she remarked that she hadn't seen me 'in here with that guy before' as if I made it a practice to collect strangers in the night. I thought about telling her just that and then decided silence, in my case, was golden. Besides, if I dawdled, I'd be late for the cookout, and that would never do.
-bill kenny 

If It Takes Two to Tango

Did you ever hear the expression 'three on a match,' or 'two's company, three's a crowd, but four on the sidewalk is never allowed,' or was that just me? I'm just making conversation, pay me no mind.

Speaking of making conversation, how about variations of  'I wouldn't date you if you were the last person on earth' (I used to hear that one a lot in high school and college)? Yeah, that one stings a little. But here's a conversation stopper, "What's the minimum number of people needed to survive an apocalypse?"  

Be cool. There's no such thing as a wrong answer but remember, too, to show your work.
-bill kenny 

So Thick You'll Want to Use a Fork

Mission creep is what group dynamics folks describe what the rest of us might well call L.O.S.T, or Line Of Sight Tasking (I'm still not sure what we call group dynamics without making our moms cry). At some point in a project one of the very bright people who came up with the original idea realizes there's yet another function s/he forgot within the transaction and announces 'someone needs to do/be .....' The first person who makes eye contact inherits this new responsibility with absolutely no authority or means to accomplish it. Don't look up! Oops, thanks for playing.

It's part of our lives as individuals, as well, fretting in the various roles we each play in the drama. I had a plateful (and more) when it was just me, myself and I. Falling in love and getting married moved me, or us, to egoisme a deux and then we added our children to the mix. Solo, spouse, parent, while also being a child, sibling and wearing a half dozen other hats. You can't tell the players without a scorecard, especially when we each are covering numerous positions.

Is there a limit to all this multi-tasking, if that's what this actually is (I like to think that term is better applied to linked tasks vice totally different ones-like a product being both a floor polish and a dessert topping) and when do we reach a limit, how do we know? 

I remember the 'how to cook a frog in boiling water' urban legend (don't judge; I run with a colorful crowd, sehr bunte leute) that makes me suspect there's no 'top end.' If you place a frog in a pot of boiling water, the legend goes, it will simply hop back out; but, if you place the frog in the pot of water and then slowly and carefully raise the heat of the flame under the pot, the frog will never move until it has been cooked. I've often wondered if this is why so many of us have pruny fingers?
-bill kenny

Where's Weird Al?

I cannot carry a tune in a bucket and lack the ability and the discipline to ever have learned to play a musical instrument of any kind. I'm really good at turning up the volume on the radio in the car and singing at the top of my lungs, undeterred even when the singers get the words to their own songs wrong. 

I admire people who do play an instrument, though snob that I am, I tend to hold in somewhat lesser regard those whose instrument is the accordion. 

Thanks, Wolfgang Kreh!

It's very unfair of me (and Tom Waits as well, so I'm in good company) to be so persnickety about an instrument as complex and complicated as the accordion. After all, it produces music and as is well-known, music soothes the savage beast. And sometimes the not so savage.
-bill kenny

What's Going On

I guess it shouldn't really come as a surprise to any of us that, in a nation that elected a D-list celebrity to the office of the President, what we regard as 'truth' and 'facts' now come from a bewildering variety of sources, many of them a comfort in my youth that we called 'the newspaper funny pages.'  

Newspapers are fading fast and in many communities have already disappeared. These news deserts are a sad sign of the times as advertiser-support is what drives the size and scale of newsrooms and as fewer people choose newsprint, that readership base grows smaller making it less attractive to advertisers causing revenues to decline and newsrooms to shrink which attracts even fewer eyeballs and round and round goes the gossip.

But the funnies persist, even if we now call them the comics. And here's one I've enjoyed for years that was painfully factual when it was first published over twenty years ago and hit the same nerve perhaps even harder when it resurfaced last week. 

"Picket lines and picket signs. Don't punish me with brutality."
-bill kenny

Baseball Is Like Church

By now, you've read, or should have, that the Norwich Sea Unicorns, undefeated since changing their name from the Connecticut Tigers will be joining the Futures Collegiate Baseball League, the FCBL. Think YMCA but with different gyrations and contortions (I can see the Sea Unicorn mascot dancing on the dugout roof during the mid-inning break now). 

The FCBL is a wooden bat league (which is the way the Good Lord intended baseball to be played). FCBL ballplayers are unpaid collegiate athletes who hope to gain experience and exposure to Major League Baseball scouts. The Sea Unicorns' home opener at Dodd Stadium is Memorial Day, at 7 PM. Tickets went on sale Monday and you can get information on all the home dates, fireworks, and ticket prices here 

I'm delighted there will be baseball atop the mountain this season but there are a lot of business expenses and cost-sharing details the city of Norwich and its namesake Sea Unicorns will have to work out (full disclosure: I was on the Baseball Stadium Authority for the first ten years of Dodd Stadium and while baseball fans see a sport, it's a very serious business), so I'll keep my fingers crossed that everything that needs to be agreed upon will be worked out equitably.

I don't know much about the FCBL (you can already hear the song in your head, can't you?) except that regular-season games that are tied after one extra inning are settled by a home run hitting contest. The team that hits the most homers in three minutes wins. I would have preferred they'd chosen a pie-eating contest but that might be because I have a travel fork I take with me everywhere.

The FCBL does have the designated hitter rule, DH, and as a National League guy (except for my passion for the Yankees) I'm vexed. I dislike the DH and not just because I wonder where guys like Ruth, DiMaggio, and Aaron might have ended up if they could have sat on the end of a dugout during the dog days of August and come out and batted three or four times a game and then sat down again.

Do what I do a couple of times every summer: stop someplace where kids are playing sandlot ball or Little League and ask how many want to play baseball when they grow up. And then, next, ask them what position. Guess how many of them say Designated Hitter? Yeah. Game, set, and match.

Apropos “game.” And I hate to be unctuous about this (no, I don’t): the purpose of baseball caps evolved as the game matured. They were intended to shade your eyes from the rays of the sun because The Lord intended baseball to be played outdoors and during the day (only) so S/He could watch from heaven. The purpose of the workweek during any baseball season was, and remains to this day, to get in the way of going to a ballgame.

I do not understand why other sports teams have ball caps. It's not part of their uniform, and for the NFL, how would your guys even wear them? Under the helmet or over it? And that goes for the NHL, too, come to think of it. And I would stop smiling, NBA; sports in tiny shorts; so millionaires in their underwear? Seriously? 

But humor aside (you were wondering about the previous paragraph), professional baseball is a business and because it's driven by television advertising dollars, day games have gone the way of the dodo, or just about. And for a sport that started out as 'family entertainment' major league baseball has long since lost the plot on that point. So if we go back to my sandlot full of kids playing baseball, maybe none of them want to grow up to be players because it all happens after their bedtimes. 

But in a little more than two weeks' time, basically in our backyard, some bright and eager hopefuls, with equal amounts of talent and enthusiasm, will take the field and make Dodd Stadium their own field of dreams. And we can all watch. And cheer them on.

-bill kenny

(More) Pointless Ponderings

While out driving the other day I was behind someone with a bumper sticker that you just know has a HUGE story behind it. I've sort of seen the first part before, "My Dog is Smarter than Your Honor Student" but it was the second part, "My God Can Beat Up Your God" that leads me to wonder just how deep some still waters run.

I long ago abandoned in despair the faith of my fathers so there really is no upside to the hereafter-I can appreciate the humor in having painted myself into a corner like this; I'm just never happy about having to sign the painting.

Forever and a day ago there was a news story on the alterations made to an episode of South Park because someone had posted threats against the lives of the cartoon's two creators (I know, 'it takes two guys to come up with that stuff?' Everybody's a critic) for defaming Islam. 

I'd like to think so many different cultures around the world have embraced the idea of a deity because the ideal represents a unification of values and belief systems that, no matter the flavor or brand, have more in common sometimes than those who practice them. 

I've grown old watching us shift from the idea that we were created in God's image and likeness to vice versa, which scares me more than I care to admit. Probably not my place to wonder, but if there are End Times, and they do arrive and all that which is prophesied does come to pass, who among us is going to stand before the angels and archangels, Cherubim and Seraphim, the Thrones and Dominations, and explain to God, whatever you perceive Her/Him to be, exactly what the heck we've been doing down here. That should be a hoot.

-bill kenny

Like Soup and Salad

Nicholas Newhart puts the shit in shit out of luck (pro tip: where it says 'click here' do it but brace yourself). 

That this happened outside of Kid Rock's Nashville, Tennessee, restaurant (underscoring how he must be to fine dining what he already is to great music I guess; a true Renaissance man) just shows how some things are just fated to go together. 

Ain't no drag (you know you know the rest of the line).
-bill kenny

For Joan and Anni

Today is Mother's Day--not everywhere in the world, but pretty much everywhere around these parts and in most all of the places you or I are ever likely to go or be, so that's a good deal. I've heard that florists sell more flowers, that more greeting cards are bought and mailed and that more telephone calls are made on this one day in the United States than on any other day of the year, all of which underscores how significant so many of us see this day as being. 

My mother grew up as the second-oldest child, and the second daughter in a large family. In the course of her life, her older sister, all three of her younger brothers, and her husband of nearly thirty years all died before she passed in June of 2017. She and her husband, my father, had six children in two cohorts. I have no idea how many grandchildren she had, but I have little doubt that she knew and that's what's important. 

She was a breast cancer survivor who could, in light of how often she had been dealt from the bottom of the deck, could have been a very different person than the tiny and more fragile-than-I-remember-her-from-the-last-time woman who called every year on my birthday or at Christmas, before she walked across the street to the beach (she lived in Florida because she hated snow) and who was always ready to offer advice, when asked, on any topic under the sun but who never pushed her viewpoint because she didn't want to seem bossy. 

My wife's mom lives farther away from us than Florida. She lives in Offenbach, Germany, and was born in the same year as my mother. They met once, a long time ago, when Oma America, as our daughter Michelle, called my mother, came to visit and had afternoon coffee with Oma Germany. My wife's mom's husband passed away many years ago, after we arrived here in the States, but still years ago, and my wife's family is a bit smaller than mine--two younger sisters and a younger brother. My wife speaks with her on the phone on a reasonably regular basis and, I always manage to get a shout-out to 'Mutti!' 

Both Moms were born in a world in the throes of the Great Depression, lived much of their teen years in a world at war, and then had and raised their own families in the uneasy truce that followed as the world that was then, created terrors and technology that have become the landscape of the world that is, now.

Like your Mom, my mother and my wife's mother aren't in the pages of a history book someplace, though, without being indelicate about this, we have an opportunity to have a history at all because of them. I've wondered how different, and better, this world would be if Moms were in charge. 

Let's face it, they were always wizards patching scraped knees from the playground and broken hearts from the same place. Moms could also assemble that science fair project from stuff under the sink the night before it was due, and they were always available to quiz you before those Friday spelling tests. 

Why would 'real world' issues like arms control or the flood of refugees, or the establishment of universal affordable health care be too hard for them? Moms make miracles happen every day.

"Lift up your hearts and sing me a song,
That was a hit before your mother was born.
Though she was born a long, long time ago,
Your mother should know. Your mother should know."
Happy Mother's Day.
-bill kenny

Shake Me but Don't Wake Me

This time a year ago I started having dental appointments to create a mandibular advancement device. I've always snored, or think I have and Sigrid assures me that there have been few and far between nights in our forty-three years plus of marriage when she hasn't had to jostle me to get me to change positions in the bed. 

She assumes I'm dreaming I'm a motorcycle but the truth is I had very few memories of any dreams and actually had my pulmonary specialist tuck me into an overnight sleep study where we discovered I had horrible sleep apnea and restless legs (in my previous life I was a dancer, I suppose).

He had me visit a dentist who specializes in sleep disorders and she made me my very own device to shift my relaxed jaw so that I could better breathe and within days of getting it (after weeks and months of measuring and adjusting, and COVID precautioning and fighting with the insurance company) I just pop it into my mouth and turn out the lights and dream and dream and dream. 

I'm not always snore-free but, Sigrid says, I'm better than I was. And after all, I'm only sleeping.
-bill kenny

  

One of Us Has Gotten Older

I'm not sure I really understand what an immutable fact actually is. I believe an open-faced peanut butter and jelly sandwich will always land face down when you drop it, but I'm not sure if that counts as either immutable or a fact. And now I have a sticky kitchen floor so there's that. 

This is from a different decade (that's how long and longer I've been at this) and I believed it to be true when I first offered it and more so, perhaps, now. I called it:   

I Think it Started with George

I've rooted for the NY Yankees most of my life. My dad was a NY Giants fan and continued to root for them even after Horace Stoneham moved the ball club to Candlestick Park and my mom grew up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and remained one for many years after Walter O'Malley had led the way west and to riches beyond imagination for professional baseball and ultimately all professional sports. In the last decade or so of her life, Mom became more of a Miami Marlins and Tampa Bay Rays fan, I think, because of geographic considerations.

I see my Dad and Mom, being from two tribes in two different worlds as they were in the early Fifties, really like Romeo and Juliet (at the very least, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) against all odds, meeting and marrying, I can hear the swelling violins over the mighty Wurlitzer playing Take Me Out to the Ballgame (what? The only constant is change. Just go with it, okay?).

As a tyke to teen I rooted for the NY Mets even through the return of Wilie Mays, my all-time hero, to play for The Amazin's in the twilight of his career, nearly getting brained trying to play center field. We went to more than our share of games in Shea Stadium (motto: 'You can almost touch the airplanes taking off and landing!') and even as kids we could tell something was stinking up the field and it wasn't what the ground crew was using. 

These weren't the years of Tom Seaver and Tug McGraw, and You Gotta Believe and I Guess the Lord Must Be In New York City, these Mets teams were frighteningly bad, just ask Jimmy Breslin.

My younger brother, Kelly, and I went to a Mets game one afternoon with my friend George B, from Browning, and his younger brother when Roger Maris played for the St. Louis Cardinals and every time Maris came to the plate we, along with everyone in Shea, booed him lustily for all of his success with his former ball club, the Yankees. I did feel a pang of guilt when, years later, he died of cancer wondering if we boo-birds had contributed in any way to his demise.

But for most of over six decades, my team has been the Yankees (and their beer sponsor, when Mel Allen was their broadcast voice, was Ballantine). A decade or so ago, visiting our son living in Boston at the time, we wound up on Yawkey Way, behind Fenway on a Sunday game day against the Yankees and spotted the teeshirts with "Take Your 26 Rings" on the front with "And Shove 'em Up Your Asterisk (sort of)" on the back. 

Until then I hadn't realized the intensity of the passion that those who disliked the Yankees possessed. I've had friends with bumper stickers, "I root for two teams, the Red Sox and anyone playing the Yankees." Notice the past tense of the verb (kidding and sorry about keying the paint on your trunk. When you squint, it does look a little like the Yankees logo, weird huh?).

Imagine my surprise to come across an item on ESPN that at first made me smile, but now, has hurt my feelings, "Indians, NOT Yankees, Most Hated Team in Baseball" What? The Cleveland Indians, a Big Wahoo Welcome, and all the rest of the less than miraculous happenings along the Cuyahoga River, those Cleveland Indians? 

Obviously, this was all long before the Houston Astros elevated cheating to an Olympic event (though I guess you could argue the Russians beat them to that). I thought it must be a bad joke, like the two hundred and forty-seven sequels to Major League, which was one of the greatest sports movies of all time. 

Seriously, the Cleveland Indians? We're talking Bob Uecker over that huckleberry, Phil Rizzuto, 'just a bit outside' versus 'Holy Cow!' C'mon! But there it is in black and white, or whatever color electrons are on your monitor, 0.9 to 1.8, but I do take some solace with the amazing consistency of The Olde Town Team, who finished second. Again. 

I can hear the rending of garments all the way to Harvard Square. Burn On.

-bill kenny