Time Waits for No One

I have loved The Rolling Stones from Time Is on My Side through Hackney Diamonds. 

Sometimes, a little more, and sometimes (looking at you, most of the last thirty years' output) a whole lot less. We grew up together and now it's official: we've grown old together as well.

There is no truth to the rumor I started that instead of a mosh pit there will be an Early Bird Special Area with valets for the walkers.
-bill kenny

'We the People'

You might want to clear your calendar to make time next Tuesday evening at 7:30 to attend the swearing-in of our new City Council and Board of Education in City Hall.

It’s an opportunity to thank outgoing members of both bodies for their selfless service and to congratulate the new members on their assumption of new roles and responsibilities (before in what will seem like a matter of moments we start to hold them accountable for all manner of unhappy consequences, most of which will, as it turns out, have nothing to do with them).

The peaceful transition of power is a manifestation of the miracle of democracy and something, based on voter turnout, I fear too many of us think happens somewhere else but not here. Flowery words, I know, so how about some real talk?

One of the challenges in representational government is sorting out who, exactly, is being represented. After any election, a President, a Governor, a mayor, and all who are elected to office, must reconcile their 'election mandate' with the simple reality that not everyone voted for them.

Additionally, quite often it's hard to define what we, ‘the people,’ want of our elected leaders. Do we expect people to reflect our wishes and do our bidding or do we want those whom we’ve placed in office to see their positions more as striking off and striking out in new directions for the betterment of all and each of us?

When we all clamor for those in charge to 'listen to the people' we sometimes forget that we, the people, don't speak with one voice or have one thought. From the first tea party in Boston Harbor to more recent incarnations across the country this past Election Day, we're still working to define, and then refine, what we, the people, want of those whom we elect.

We've spent decades talking at one another instead of with each other. We've substituted diatribes for discussions and deployed examples of past failures (and we’ve had more than a few of those) to rationalize continuing resistance to attempted and needed improvements. Communication remains the key component to any success we hope to have, otherwise, all we did was select new brooms to sweep old dust.

Many of the challenges, or as an acquaintance calls them ‘opportunities to excel,’ that we wrestled with before the election are still with us. People prefer problems that are familiar to solutions that are not.

Our schools have morale and leadership concerns that our Board of Education members will have to attempt to resolve. Not forgetting the continuing reinvention of the classroom experience as the new school construction project comes up to speed.

Public safety concerns on Route 82 did not evaporate the day after the elections, nor did the historically inadequate police station suddenly sprout an additional floor. Economic development downtown as well as elsewhere, looking at Occum and the proposed second business park, needs to be more effectively articulated and fully explained.

We, the people, all of us need to be as informed and engaged in the running of our city as those whom we've elected to do so on our behalf. If you couldn’t be bothered to vote earlier this month, guess what. you are part of the problem we face in making Norwich someplace we can all come home to. We need each of us, so be ready to help.
-bill kenny

The Power of Poetry

One of the nice things about social media is finding people like Brian Bilston. Some days, like today in light of the headlines, I reach for him faster and more desperately than I'd like. He doesn't seem to mind.

He doesn't make me feel smarter with what he writes; he makes me feel better.
-bill kenny

Singer (but not a Songwriter)

I have a confession: I have close to ZERO mechanical aptitude or understanding. I tend, as an example, to stand in front of store doors for half a second in the hopes someone is coming out so I know which way the door opens because I can not necessarily tell. 

I am in awe of how light switches work and never take them for granted and what about pedestrian nearly-forgotten items like the humble Thermos bottle? It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold-how does it tell the difference? It is a mystery to me.  

My wife possesses more skills in her little finger than I have in my entire body. She is a wonderful chef, an expert handyperson (see my above observation on mechanical aptitude), and a wizard seamstress. I mention that last attribute because I have a newfound appreciation for her sewing machine.

Not that I'm about to break out in song or anything, just sayin'.
-bill kenny

  

One Foot In and One Foot Back

Someone much wiser than I once told me freedom of speech doesn't entitle you to shout fire in a crowded theatre, nor does it afford you the privilege of sitting next to someone, whispering non-stop as the celluloid races through the projector gates. The danger, he said, each one of us faced was that 'sometimes the things you do speak so loudly I cannot hear what you're saying.'

I thought about that yesterday as I watched people scurrying through the local mall beginning the search for low-cost holiday gifts for their mailmen and newspaper carrier, oil tank filling guy, coffee-making person, etc. dozen or a hundred jobs that no one notices until they're not done. 

The key is to make sure to find something that doesn't look cheap and when you start the hunt early, you have a better chance. I've had this conversation with people in years past who have very complex and complicated mental math they do to compute just how much to spend on a gift for a person whose name they more often than not do not know or for one who, if the job is done right, they rarely see 

And in the case of the 'sandwich guy' or the 'coffee server' (and the like), it's a person with whom you would never speak, aside from 'please' and 'thank you', but if you crossed paths in a locale such as Borneo or even Boise, you'd chatter away like magpies who'd known one another your whole lives. The concept is called familiar strangers and many of us have a world populated with them and very few others.

I've gotten better as I've aged (I'm not bragging; I set the bar pretty low) and I no longer immediately say everything I'm thinking, which I did for decades, and then wondered why I had tension-filled relationships with people. Turns out I had difficulties distinguishing between inside and outside voices, especially as I tend to hear both, and if you don't, it's your loss. 

There was a time I'd ask those shopping for knick-knack thank-you gifts, 'Why don't you just give the person money?' After all, it's a holiday whose primary colors seem to be red and green, and since most of us are in the former why not share some of the latter? I think we give each other seconds of pleasure that are put away and forgotten or lost by the end of the holiday season because we can't stand the insulted silences if we don't.

It's not words, so much, that frighten us, it's the quiet between the words. That the words have, perhaps, sharp edges is all well and good as long as they keep coming because that way we don't have to worry there might be time to think about their meaning and the last thing many of us want to do is find ourselves alone with our thoughts. 

I wonder if there's life on other planets and if, like us, they have giant parabolic microphones to pick up the sounds emanating from this septic orb. If so I suspect they've long since learned to turn the volume all the way down. Who would blame them?
-bill kenny 

The Beauty of Small

Many years ago in Germany, I had an acquaintance who described Americans as "people who buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like." I was very unhappy with him for a long time about that characterization but I always think about what he said when Black Friday rolls around and know I cannot argue with his point.

Where I live, Norwich, Connecticut, a town of about 40,000, if I were to add up all the square footage of all the shops in our downtown, occupied buildings or otherwise, I suspect it's less than the floor space in the average Super Box Store. It's getting better and will keep growing but the big bucks head to the Big Box stores. Fair enough, I guess.  

I can be gracious and concede that reality because today is Small Business Saturday, and assuming you're not tuckered out from that super deal you got on the 1932 hand-carved mahogany Terraplane at MaxBucks MegaStore, you could support one or more of the local shops where you live, all of whom help make your city or town an even better place to come home to, so let's agree to do that okay?.
- bill kenny

In the Middle of a Holiday Weekend

Sometimes in the afterglow of all the holiday merriment, we can forget folks currently out of sight. It shouldn't mean they are out of mind.   

Thank you for all that you do. Stay safe.
-bill kenny

Let Grateful Days Be Endless

Some have unkindly suggested my last original thought died of loneliness. Neither confirming nor denying that statement, let me help begin the Thanksgiving celebrations with some words I've offered in this space previously. 

You may think I’m being less than industrious but for my part at a time of the year when we hold traditions most dear, I think I’m creating one of my own for us to share. 

I'm retelling a story that’s older than our country. Variations of it have been experienced by many who've arrived on our shores since our earliest days. Sometimes we forget we are at our best as a nation when we realize we are diverse people sharing circumstances.

Thus, here's our story: The travelers were very poor and had come a long way with very little money and less hope. Their lives had been so desperate that arriving uninvited on a continent that had no use for them had appeared not only attractive but was their only (and final) choice.

The first months were terribly hard. The immigrants didn't know the customs, couldn't understand, or speak the language, had little grasp of the nature of the place they had come to live in, and had even less desire to learn of it. Having arrived in the middle of the winter, unprepared for the season's savagery by their experiences in their own country, nearly half were dead by the Spring.

Their hosts in this new world had difficulties of their own with the newcomers. Their customs, their language, and their religion were all so different from what they had known; it was hard to see a way to develop any sense of attempted community. On more than one occasion, as it had turned out, befriending the new people had proven to be unwise as more and more of their sort just kept showing up and crowding out those who had lived in the area for so many decades.

The emigres were in a precarious predicament. It had taken all their meager savings to make the trip to what they hoped would be a fresh start. They believed or wanted to, that if they worked hard and did well, one day they could send for family and friends to join them in their brave adventure. 

But just about every day was a challenge and far too often without a victory. They were isolated, decimated, and left to their own devices. It took extraordinary hospitality and courageous kindness by one of the long-time residents of the established community to extend a helping hand and organize support so that as the following fall approached the new people had reasons to hope and believe.

How fortunate that there hadn’t been any strict security screenings at territorial borders and coastal ports of entry or any screenings of any kind. Fortunate for us, who followed in their footsteps that is. 

We, the direct and indirect descendants of those first arrivals four hundred and three years ago at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, tomorrow will celebrate Thanksgiving, only because Samoset ignored the arguments and fears of so many of his fellow Abenaki and welcomed and assisted the Pilgrims when they arrived in the New World, establishing even before we were a nation, a legacy and tradition of welcoming everyone to our shores. 

Happy Thanksgiving. 
-bill kenny

The Streets Are Lined with Camera Crews

I wrote what follows fifteen years ago and that's pretty hard for me to grasp especially since I was writing about something that happened, now, sixty years ago and yet i still feel the dryness in my throat and the tears welling in my eyes as if it all were yesterday. Because to my heart, in a way, it is.

As I recall, we had already had lunch and recess on the closed-off portion of Division Street. The grammar school had been built less than three years earlier in what had been a vacant lot near the high school on the city block in New Brunswick that St Peter's Parish owned. 

The church itself, flanked by the convent on the far side and the rectory on the near side, was actually two blocks away, down the street and up the hill from the railroad overpass across from Makaronis' Town House Restaurant and next door to Albany Wines and Liquors, and near the bridge at the train station where my father and hundreds like him congregated workday mornings (and for my father, Saturdays, too) and traveled first by Pennsylvania Railroad, later (after the merger of two failing lines), Penn Central and still later (when Uncle Sam 'rescued' rail travel in the Northeast Corridor) on Amtrak into 'the city'.

I was in fifth grade at St. Peter's School (I learned years later, despite the name carved in marble on the front of the building, the possessive case was inaccurate and incorrect. But no one had yet invented industrial Wite-Out and when I first returned to the USA, I drove through my old hometown one weekend while my family was still in Germany, looking perhaps, for myself and the person I was then in the hopes of better understanding the man I had become. 

The school name, in all its incorrectitudeness was still there. There have to be some constants in the universe, I suppose.) and our classroom was in the basement, on the Division Street side of the building (as opposed to the courtyard side, facing the high school).

We had been working on our penmanship. Our school was a firm practitioner of the A.N. Palmer method of cursive writing. Those of us in third through fifth grade loved the name of the writing style and found it incredibly funny for what it almost sounded like. We assumed the Sisters of Charity (a misnomer of some magnitude I should note), our teachers, weren't in on the joke.

I can still see the classroom. Sister Rosita's desk at the front, centered and in front of the blackboard that took up the entire wall behind her, facing in the far corner, to her left, the entrance and exit door in the back of the classroom. Our desks faced her, arranged in academic order. That is, the student with the best report card was in the far upper left corner at the head of the column with everyone to and through those who failed lunch and recess at the far lower right-hand side of the room, as defined by Sister Rosita. Fifty-two students of varying abilities and enthusiasms--all blank slates waiting to be drawn upon.

Everything in that classroom was defined and controlled by Sister Rosita with the occasional support and intervention of Sister Mary Immaculata, the principal, whose office was upstairs (no talking in the stairwells! no running in the halls!) who existed, aside from report card day, as a voice on the cloth-covered speaker in the upper left corner of the classroom, above the blackboard alongside the American flag to which we pledged Daily Allegiance.

If you are left-handed, as one of my brothers is, the Palmer Method is a trial since it assumes and presumes all of us write right (in Latin, left is the word 'sinistro' from which we have derived sinister; do you sense a bias here?) but even for right-handers, the capital Q is challenging. It's a fine line between a cursive Q and a very pretentious number 2. There are also two variants on the lowercase 't', one for in the middle of a word like 'little' and the other for when it's at the end of a word such as 'variant.' When you're in fifth grade, these are matters of great concern.

Earlier in the week, before lining up to board the buses that took us home (and there was always a snobbery of those who walked home, the townies from New Brunswick, towards those of us from the developments in Franklin Township, beyond the city's borders) we had all watched, again, the Civil Defense film on what to do in the event of an Atomic Attack. 

I remember the sound of the film threading through the projector gate almost drowning out the assault music soundtrack laid down by the 101st Airborne String Quartet over the ominous narration of someone like Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., (no one had ever heard of Sr.; which being a Junior, I had more than casual curiosity as to how that had happened. I still use the Jr., even though my father died decades ago). 

Orchestra crescendo, a vivid orange flash that filled the screen and turned it red and then black, and something about turning away from the windows and putting our heads under our desks. Most of us were ten and eleven and hadn't spent a lot of time confronting thoughts of our own mortality. We weren't thoughtless; we just hadn't thought about it. It made for a quiet ride bus ride.

All of that evaporated as the loudspeaker crackled as Sister Mary Immaculata activated the microphone at her desk. We waited and then waited some more as, instead of her usual imperious summoning of a hapless miscreant student for punishment for a real or sometimes imagined offense, there was the hum of an open microphone and the sound of a radio or television, whose volume was very low. Sister Mary Immaculata was, for the first time in my history at St Peter's, at a loss for words. We all leaned forward, as if willing her to speak and perhaps thirty seconds later our efforts were rewarded.

She started slowly and softly in a tone of voice I had never heard from her, or I think, from anyone. As I was to learn later in my own life and use myself, it's the voice to explain events and occurrences that have no explanation. 

She started by telling us that the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (with whom every child of the Roman Catholic faith in the United States had an unspoken and unbreakable bond. He was our President, the first Roman Catholic, the first President who didn't look like our grandfather, a President with a pretty wife whom our moms liked a lot with small children (younger than us in the fifth grade), had been shot, later adding he was in Dallas, Texas.

All of us at St Peter's School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and (very probably) across the United States and (maybe) around the world, bowed our heads and clasped our hands as Sister Mary Immaculata led us through The Rosary--the entire Rosary, not just a decade. 

That was how I, at least, knew something more horrible than what she was telling us had happened, was happening. I'm not clear if we had finished when she interrupted herself, struggling to remain composed, to tell us the President had died. We said another Rosary for the repose of his soul, but my heart wasn't in it.

I don't think I'd ever wondered until then why God didn't answer every prayer the way a petitioner wanted (I'm pretty sure I didn't use the word 'petitioner') but as the afternoon abruptly ended and we all went home to participate in the national seance provided by the three TV networks (no cable news, no satellite, no video on demand, no Internet) almost all in black and white (color television was a luxury almost beyond measure), I knew without knowing the world as I had lived in it had ended, not changed.

I looked at the calendar this morning with regret and incredulity, in equal measure. I and everyone who was born, lived, and died, in the USA in the sixty years since President Kennedy's murder, will never know what we and our world would have looked like had we prayed harder or longer or louder. 

I'm not sure I ever prayed again or in the hope of my prayer being answered. And after so many years and tears, I'm not sure I even know how. I can remember that kid, head bowed, at the front of the room and I envy him for the strength his faith gave him in such a dark hour, knowing that the darkness was not only beginning but winning.
-bill kenny

 

Another Origins Story

As a young child, I watched "The Adventures of Spin and Marty" on our black and white television in the living room. I knew all the words to the theme song (in those days every TV show had an opening song), "Way out West on the Triple R, yippee yay, yippee yoh. The horses are the best by far, yippee yay, yippie yoh, So saddle up boys, and saddle up well and listen to the story that I  have to tell...Yippie, Yay, Yippie Yiy Yippie Yoh." 

Spin was the returning camper and Marty was the tenderfoot. The Triple R was sort of a summer camp and working ranch-the ranch hands tolerated the campers, who were more or less dudes (city slickers playing at cowboys) and I so desperately wanted to be one of those campers.   

Being dressed up in our house was to be 'all duded up.' And then Bill and Ted came on the scene. Bogus.

But before Bill and Ted, or Spin and Marty, there was Dude and Dandy. 
So if you're out tonight and you're on your bike, wear white.
-bill kenny

Around the World in a Day

Or in this instance, across all of humankind's existence in about an hour. 

Hold on tight and Enjoy. 

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

Where's Warhol's Stopwatch?

I don't get out much more (or, for that matter, any less) but even when I drove to work on a daily basis I wasn't one of those guys, and I think it's mostly guys to be specific, who listened to sports talk radio. 

I've mentioned previously and repeatedly I hate talk radio, but my hatred of it is old school and quite pure in both its origins and intensity. I despised it long before asswipes like Rush Limbaugh made it a cesspool cum echo chamber (dittoheads, my sweet Fanny). Every market has at least one talk radio station and if you turned them upside down they'd all sound the same. 

Sports/talk radio makes me sad, rather than angry. I am a casual American sports fan (I love German soccer, above all else) who is much more interested in the scores than ninety-minute podcasts (where did that term come from and where is Stan Freberg when we really need him) on the origins of the laces that are in the football cleats of some outside middle linebacker whose annual salary would cover the payroll of a dozen or more public safety folks, plus their benefits. 

As for sports talk on TV, I have a weakness for Pardon the Interruption on ESPN with whatever those two guys' names are, Tony and Wilbon? Tinker and Evans? Scotch and soda? I don't like the show when either of them is missing and someone else is warming a chair. 

But in recent, for me, weeks/months, someone named Pat McAfee, usually in a wife-beater tee shirt with a peanut gallery or gaggle of me-tooers has been popping up across the thirty-two hundred or so flavors of ESPN on my cable system. It's possible he's on all the time and I have just been more fortunate than I realize in not dealing with him. 

Obviously,  he's very successful though the reasons for that success elude me entirely. He's like pineapple on pizza-not to my taste though you're welcome to it. However in this case, if you could just confine him to one channel and tell me which one it is, so I can avoid it, I would be thrilled almost beyond words. 

Of course, being beyond words would also render me ineligible to work on talk radio, I think Vincent Van Gogh might have been on to something all those years ago. 
-bill kenny        

Plain as Black & White

Sometimes you can have a march in November, despite the calendar if you steal a march on Amazon when it comes to Black Friday announcements. The effort and pressure to perfect the art of the deal has never been more intense. 

And when it comes to deals you'd have to go some to beat Joshua's announcement.  

I'm assuming his offer also comes with free shipping though not necessarily a guaranteed destination.
-bill kenny

Now and Then

For reasons too boring (and a little more personal than I'm comfortable with), we interrupt this daily screed for this. 

Join us tomorrow for more thrills and chills, more or less.
-bill kenny  

Not a Shiny Object

You might think we are a long time out from the 2024 presidential election but it will happen in less than a year, ready and willing or not. 

And, quite frankly, I'm not sure enough of us are ready much less willing to make sure that whatever ideology we pretend Donald Trump espouses is defeated. To be clear-he has no ideology. He's a greedy, grasping, pile of human excrement wrapped in a very thin orange skin, filled with vulgarity and vile narcissism. 

Remember as kids learning in school 'anyone in America can grow up to be the president (except women and black people (that part wasn't said out loud)) ' Well, the joke was on us. In 2016 the Orange Asshat was elected president and wasn't that a lot of fun for everyone.  

Too often we regard elections as popularity contests or even worse as some kind of horse race. Admittedly Trump is a horse's ass but that's not the frame of mind to have in looking at 2024 and our nation. 

NYU's Jay Rosen totally nails it. Pay Attenion.
-bill kenny

O'Tis Getting to Be the Season

It looks like the last of the sort-of summer weather is now in the rearview mirror so If you've been struggling to get your holiday season started, there's no time like the present (that's both a hint and a play on words, btw), because the festive occasions are coming thick and fast and nearly non-stop between now and the beginning of the next year. 

The autumn days continue to grow shorter giving way to darker skies with hints of snow in every brisk(er) breeze; the newspapers get a little plumper as merchants boost their advertising hoping to catch a shopper's eye while halls and other stationary objects find themselves bedecked in holly and garland.

And dashing all the way, it's the fifteenth annual O'tis a Festival this Saturday from nine until three (with visits by both the Grinch and Santa (though logically not at the same time)). Contrary to all the pronouncements of armchair experts who rarely go downtown, there's plenty of free parking and (yet) again this year helpers to help guide you to the best parking spots. 

There will be music, merriment, and (m)entertainment (I really wanted three M's) for the whole family as well as two floors of handmade arts and crafts from dozens of regional vendors with ideas and offerings to help jump-start your annual gift-gathering and giving. If you haven't attended in previous years, you've picked a good time to come and enjoy.  

One of the bonuses, I believe, to the O'tis a Festival is all the added hustle and bustle it brings to downtown, not to mention the extra feet in the street (and on the sidewalks) to check out not just the fest but what to look around throughout downtown and find something new to you. There's more, a lot more than you think so come early with the intention to stay late.

Speaking of downtown, if you haven't already done so, you can find five minutes and go online to take a short survey with a long title, "Chelsea Harbor and Downtown Norwich Mobility Study Public Survey." it's a chance to be a light instead of a horn. 

And while the O'Tis a Festival is a terrific time (and reason) to get started on just-right gifts for loved ones and others on your list there are opportunities to give and share the spirit of the season, especially with those in need right here in our backyard.

With Thanksgiving a week from tomorrow, your Connecticut Food Share will also put to good use any donation of food or cash you’d like to offer. It's been another tough year for those struggling to make ends meet (as the ends seem to get farther and farther and farther away from each other) and even donations are hard to come by, so if you can help, please consider donating to their "Thanksgiving for All." 

And if you want to get even more helpful locally, look no further than Saint Vincent de Paul Place who would welcome your help for this holiday, or any day for that matter.

. 

This is the holiday season and we can make it happier for friends and for friends we’ve yet to meet. An attitude of gratitude makes what we have enough, and enough is all anyone can ask for. 
-bill kenny

Triumph of Light over Darkness

I think it's just a little ironic in the early weeks of Eastern Standard Time in the Land of the Round Doorknobs (a/k/a 'I love that it gets dark at 4:30 in the afternoon') that this past Sunday was Diwali.

I'd read about it, but so insular has my life been for seven plus decades, I knew next to nothing about it in terms of origin, meaning and significance.

I think Grandma was right; the wider you open your eyes, the more you see.
-bill kenny

Words Are Pouring Out...

The older I live to be the more often I need a decoder ring. 

I'm not the only one; here's one of my heroes trying to sort things out.   

Mark Twain died for someone's sins, but not mine, Lord.
-bill kenny

Buckle up, Buttercup

Are you strapped in and wearing a helmet? okay. Here we gooooo! 

Was that cool or what? Who wants to go again?
-bill kenny

This

This is the best and perhaps most frightening but also heartening thing I've read in a long time. See if you agree.

Told ya!
-bill kenny

The Nation Which Forgets Its Defenders

I first wrote these words well over a decade ago and offered them last year as well. I think they bear repeating.

Today, Veterans Day, began as Armistice Day, marking the end of "The War to End All Wars" also known as World War One, but sadly, failing to achieve its goal, hence the numerical suffix. 

For most of the thirty-five nations who fought in it, it lasted the better part of five years, from 1914 to 1918; we in the United States didn't become a combatant until 1917 but made up in ferocity of engagement what we lacked in the length of deployment. 

The world a century ago was very different than the one in which we live and is so unlike today that it's as if it were another universe. If we survive as a country and culture for another one hundred years, what will now look like to those here then, I wonder.

There are many observances around the country today. Like ours in Norwich, Connecticut,  the ceremonies are often simple with little pomp and circumstance as is probably most befitting to celebrate a well-shared national experience. In 2020, the last year I could find verifiable statistics, there were about eighteen million veterans among us. 

We honor all those who serve in our nation's armed forces, living and deceased. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the size of our veteran population, and the imperative and importance of taking care of all those who are wounded in body and/or in spirit, grows exponentially. 

Veterans Day remembers and recognizes all the characteristics embodied by those who serve as well as those who wait for them which allows us to remain the freest nation in the history of the world.

I'm old now but I can remember the boy I was who listened to a Navy veteran of the War in the Pacific during World War Two, just elected President of the United States, urging us to "...pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty."

The elections earlier this week both capped and sparked a lot of discussion and more, mostly fixated on attempting to determine what's wrong with our nation and who is responsible. Today is a day to remember all that is right with us and with one another.
-bill kenny

Ignorance and Arrogance

One of the guilty pleasures I very much enjoy on social media, and they go by thousands of names, are sites with video clips of people behaving badly. No matter how cynical you are about our fellow travelers on the Big Blue Marble, all of these sites make your cynicism look cheerful. 

I regard them all as 'car crash on the highway' material. I can't really look at them but I can't look away. I'm numbed by the ham-handedness of so many people, also realizing much of what I do probably strikes someone as exactly the same as that which I am condemning. 

Do you sit there like I do, mesmerized by the images, wondering 'What were they thinking?' If so, this may not be quite as reassuring as I had hoped. By a mile or more. 

Willful ignorance. Not just a national resource, a natural resource as well.
-bill kenny

The Morning After Election Day

Disclaimer: I had no personal stake in the outcome of Tuesday's elections here in Norwich. I wasn’t running for anything, or from anything (with my knees, always welcome news) and I had no bets riding on how the votes turned out.

I know for whom I voted and why (and hope you did the same) but I believe by the dawn's early light of Wednesday, whoever we chose for City Council and Board of Education will have a difficult job, as will almost all of those across this country, newcomer and incumbent, who serve in our millions of communities, townships and cities in a variety of offices. 

Sometimes the passions during election season can blur that perspective, and, speaking for myself, if they have in recent weeks, be it thought, word, or deed, my apologies.

I once read (and remember) someone telling me, ‘We campaign in poetry but must govern in prose.’ I’d like to think that means while we use words to excite and perhaps incite supporters during a campaign for office, once the morning after Election Day arrives, we must attempt to govern by summoning the best from within ourselves and hoping for the same from the other side of the aisle.

Offering me a bigger perspective on this idea earlier this week though I suspect that was not necessarily their intention were lawn signs on neighboring properties I passed on New London Turnpike, though there were similar groupings of signs elsewhere across Norwich, supporting candidates of both parties for a variety of offices..

I've driven past these houses for years with little to no thought and wouldn’t be surprised to learn in all those years, the very same people have been living there, leading whatever lives they lead, together with their families. 

I can imagine the members of those households sharing flag football games in the fall that spill across each of their yards, enjoying summer barbecues and winter snowball fights, and going trick or treating together or organizing whiffle ball tournaments that begin on lazy summer afternoons shortly after mid-day and don’t conclude until the last of the light has faded from the sky in the evening.

What I saw in these houses were neighbors who had different views on who was best to assume leadership positions in the city each of them calls home. And not just here but all  across this country, today in the aftermath of the ballots cast before polls closed yesterday evening, discussions and conversations on that topic will continue even as each of those neighbors starts their day by opening their front door this morning to retrieve the newspaper, for one of them, their candidate for office will have been less than successful.

And perhaps later in the morning or maybe tonight after putting the car in the garage and walking the dog, they will go out to where those lawn signs are, pull them out by the stakes, put the metal frame holder in the garage for another day, and fold the cardboard sign in half and place it in the recycling box.

And their world, and ours as well, will continue, as shall we. Because the sun also rises; learning to see it is both a skill and an art.

-bill kenny

Democracy Is Not a Spectator Sport

Today should be a national holiday because it's Election Day and there's nothing more important than an informed vote. That's your hint to go and cast yours.

Bad officials are elected by good people who decide to not vote.
Don't let that happen today.
-bill kenny

Arboreal Detritus

We have no trees on our property. I mention that because this time of year walking from the front porch to the street in front of the house involves wading, yes wading, through two and three-foot-deep piles of leaves that have gotten pinned against the wall that joins the property to the city sidewalk. Every imaginable color and shape of a leaf. 

If you stand still in and among them, you can hear the squirrels working their way through the leaves in search of the bi-ped whom they have every historical reason to believe NEVER leaves the house without peanuts to feed them.

I hate when I come home and get out of the car to open the garage and one of the 'guys' spots me from a tree branch and starts a mad dash towards the car. The object, in the squirrel's mind, is to get to me before I get back in, so s/he can scarf up one or more peanuts and dash off. 

The flaw is I'm not equipped with the peanut dispenser option; not even the LL Bean model of the Forester comes with that. Chances of making the squirrels understand this: less than zero. Every day the same drill. I know better than to stock up on peanuts because if I ever do flip a peanut to one or more, I'll be buried by them as they'll just assume I've been holding out on them all this time.

The squirrels are starting to get their whiter shade of fur (I checked with the estate of Keith Reid, and they said that was okay) which, is the way things should be I suppose. I've started to wonder idly if areas of the world with palm trees have squirrels or chipmunks, but suspect I'll never bother to find out for myself though years ago I was keen to see it all and do it all.

Instead, I stand on my front porch and watch an oak leaf, almost perfectly pirouette, stem first, in very tiny circles from high overhead and land in the ever-expanding pile of leaves that have blanketed the sidewalk on our side of Lincoln Avenue. In the winter months, it's best to be on the odd side of the street, numerically speaking, because of how the sun rises and the manner and length of its rays help clear the ice and snow from the walks with less effort required than that of our neighbors on the opposite side.

One of the trade-offs, though, is November as the winds turn raw and blustery and blow in from the coast driving before them all the leaves that short weeks earlier had seemed like garland on tree branches across the region. Those days are behind us now, as the daylight grows shorter a little more every day through the Winter Solstice. The cycle of the season continues within and without us as the days dwindle down.
-bill kenny

Closing Walls and Ticking Clocks

This time today was yesterday when it was already yesterday. This morning in the wee, dark early hours, we fell back an hour (I've always liked how we keep that straight, 'spring ahead' and 'fall back' and that 'wander stupidly like a drunken lemur' I hear so often is, I guess, only used to describe me) all across the country.

I've never been clear how much of the rest of the world does this time-travel-but-standing-very still-stuff although daylight savings is utilized across significant portions of the earth's Northern Hemisphere. I wonder about hourly employees working overnight shifts when the clocks change directions....do they work seven and get paid for eight in the Spring and then work nine and get paid for eight in the fall? 

Is there a law or a workplace practice that covers this and why on earth is a seventy-one-year-old guy, pecking away at a keyboard in Norwich, Connecticut, worrying about stuff like this? When you have no life, interest in the obscure becomes a crusade.

We share the planet with a nearly infinite number of other life forms from single-celled amino acids to the full scale and scope of the abiogenesis catalog (You thought this was the band BEFORE Peter Gabriel joined? Nope), and none of them have watches, much less the concern for time and its division and measurement that we, Homo sapiens, have.

And then we look up in surprise and dismay at the time and wonder where it's gone when it hasn't gone anywhere. The end of a television program, a movie, a radio serial, or other entertainment, a relationship with another person, or a business relationship or political alliance.

You don't have to be Richard to have misgivings about time and what we do with it. Being human will qualify.

-bill kenny

Neither Tom Nor Time Waits for No One

He defined a gentleman as 'someone who knows how to play the accordion, but doesn't.'

Subject to your questions, this concludes my briefing.
-bill kenny 

The Moon's a Phantom Rose

 This is a creation by Jaci Scalz of which I never tire.

I don't have anything else to say except enjoy.
-bill kenny

Lost if not Forgotten

When I was very young, and despite your snicker I actually was young, going through the primary grades of St Peter's (sic) School in New Brunswick, New Jersey this day, aside from Good Friday, was the saddest day of the year.

Today is All Soul's Day. When you're nine and have transferred to 'the Catholic School' from Pine Grove Manor in Franklin Township because there was finally room in the class near the start of the fall for you and Neil, your next-door neighbor who is now suddenly promoted to best friend, the more you think about the implications of All Souls' Day, the sadder it gets.

As I've aged (badly) I've developed quarrels with the Catholic Church in which I was raised but most of that churn is what I've taken to calling middle-level management. With all due respect to the priests, bishops and even His Holiness, the Pope, I'm not sure how much of the edifice the one true church (as it calls itself when it finds/feels itself under attack) has created since Jesus Christ founded it, Petrus, would pass the 'R U Serious?" test with the Lord.

We're not grading on a curve, either, guys. Wanted to pass that along. But one of the things I still believe, regardless of my exact grid coordinates in the theological hemisphere, is that there can be nothing more tragic than to be forever forgotten. As a primary grader on this night, I used to fall asleep trying to remember every single person I had met in my life, tough enough job when you're nine but when you're no longer nine, it borders on the impossible.

But maybe that's what 'heaven' actually is-the memory of you by another person. Look at history of it is a tale told by an---well, never mind who's doing the telling, but pay close attention to who's doing the remembering. Is forgotten the opposite of famous? And who prays for the souls of the faithfully departed when no one remains who recalls who they were? When facts fade, faith must suffice. 
-bill kenny