Some Settling of Contents Can Occur

These started out as some of my thoughts (or what passes for such) I've offered in years past and am so doing again. Some things like wine improve with age; others, like sweat socks, not so much. I'll leave it for you to decide because you always do.

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

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

Today is Easter Sunday the most important feast in the Christian liturgical calendar and (pardon my pseudo-theological seminary sermon) precipitant of the article of faith that makes us Christian if that's indeed what we are. Christmas gets the lion's share of press, carols, cards, shouted best wishes at one another, and window dressing. Christmas gets marketing help from every wholesaler and retailer imaginable and why not? Christmas is a lovely story, wonderfully symbolic and simply beautiful if you don't want to think too much about it.

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

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

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

Untangling the Riddle

I've used an expression for many years without fully appreciating the depth of it. And maybe you have as well, 'like a canary in a coal mine.' 

Hold the presses! There was a resuscitator. 

"First to fall over when the atmosphere is less than perfect.
Your sensibilities are shaken by the slightest defect.
You live your life like a canary in a coal mine.
You get so dizzy even walking in a straight line."
-bill kenny

A Childhood Memory

As a child at Saint Peter's (sic) School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, it was forcibly impressed upon us by the Sisters of Charity whose charges we were (and for whom many of us became crosses, and yeah, Kelly, I'm talking about you) that there was nothing good about Good Friday. 

When we were old enough to mentally and emotionally comprehend the New Testament accounts of the Passion of Christ I couldn't imagine a more horrible way to die. As I grew older if not up and learned more about our species' history and track record in dealing with one another, I realized we could, and often did, behave like a life form beyond any Redemption.

Christmas gets all the ink and Easter all the lilies and chocolate, but Holy Thursday through the sunrise services of Easter Sunday morning are 'go' time for Christian believers. The events and circumstances of Good Friday, the sundering of the curtain in the Temple in Jerusalem (what a great word 'sundering ' is when you're in fourth grade; actually, it's still pretty cool), the forgiveness of The Good Thief, the testimony of the Centurion Longinus at the foot of the cross and a hundred and more sidebars, nuances, and obscured by time and telling points on the biblical accounts always seemed to make Good Friday the most important of the days leading to Easter. 

Around the world today, processions and reenactments of the Stations of the Cross at or near three o'clock in the afternoon will cap observances for the faithful and faithless alike leaving them Saturday to recoup and regroup before the Promise is redeemed for saints and sinners all with the light of Sunday morning.
-bill kenny

Now and Zen

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

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

You wander the aisles, grab stuff you want, scan it, and put it in your own recyclable bags. When you're done shopping, you head to a checkout and scan one final bar code that tells your handheld sidekick you're past tense, and it transfers your order to the register with the total amount in the display. You pay for your order and out the door you go. If you've noticed a heavy reliance on the Honor System in all of this you can already guess where the weak line is. Thanks for playing.

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

This whole process is a bit like Tom Sawyer getting people to paint his fence for him. It's not that the groceries cost less if we do all the heavy lifting, they don't. But this system isn't designed to make our lives easier. Once upon a time in grocery stores of a bygone era, there were actual employees who took the items a colleague was ringing up, placed them in bags (eggs and loaves of bread on the bottom, canned goods and automotive supplies like engine blocs on top of them) and placed those bags in your shopping cart and, if asked, would help you get that cart to your mode of transportation and then back to your abode where the unloading and putting away were your job.

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

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

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

-bill kenny

Perhaps a Pointless Parable

Wading through the comments on social media about a projected Board of Education budget north of one hundred million dollars, the ongoing rehabilitation of long-dead properties on Main Street, and (the flavor of the month, at least this month), a(nother) traffic study to reinvent downtown, all of which provoked various shades of anger, indignation, and outrage, all I can do is shake my head. 

I'm resurrecting a story I first offered well over a decade ago. It is NOT my creation but was shared with me back in the early nineties. It still stings.

Dave and Dan were standing on the dock near the Howard Brown Park in Norwich, crabbing. They'd known one another for many years and had watched as their city, so bustling in their youth, quietly disappeared one business, one restaurant, and one block at a time leaving nothing behind for anyone. For them, crabbing was more than relaxation, it was a diversion to take their minds off their city's troubles.

Except Dave had other troubles as well. As quickly as he caught crabs and turned around to drop them into his twenty-gallon catch bucket, one or more of the crabs already in the bucket would make a break for it. Dave spent almost as much time chasing fugitive crabs skittering down the dock and back into the river as he did fishing for them.

Dan took his crabbing at a very different pace. He worked with a small hoop net and bait cage, catching no more than one single crab at a time and when he did catch a crab he'd spend minutes turning it over, examining it from every angle, holding it up to the light, looking at the cheliped, the apron and the walking legs. Sometimes, after concluding the examination, Dan would drop the crab into a child's sand bucket that was his catch bucket and the most recent captive would settle down in the water coming to rest on top of another unfortunate crab.

At other times, Dan, when he'd finished examining his catch, would simply throw the crab back into the river, rebait his trap lower his hoop net over the side of the dock, and resume crabbing.

As the hours wore on, Dave spent more and more of his time struggling to keep any of the crabs he'd caught in his dockside catch bucket, often first hearing the lid clatter as it was pushed off by one of the crabs, then chasing it down the dock before, with one final leap, it eluded his grasp and reached the freedom of the river. Dan watched Dave struggle, slowly shaking his head in sympathy, and, as the shadows grew longer in the afternoon sun, he offered his friend some advice.

"You're doing it all wrong," Dan said. Dave stared at Dan for a moment before finally pointing out, "It looks to me like we're both doing the exact same thing I don't understand what I could be doing wrong that you're not. Point in fact, Dan, I've caught a LOT more crabs than you have but I'm not able to keep them because they never give up trying to escape and eventually get away!"

"Yeah," said Dan, "that's your problem. It's what you're catching."
Dave, by now, nearly furious could feel the gorge rise in his veins as he practically shouted at Dan, "How can there be a problem with what I'm catching? I'm catching crabs-you're catching crabs. We're both catching crabs!" 

"True enough," Dan agreed, "but you're catching all kinds of crabs. I'm only catching Norwich crabs." Dave stared at his friend for a long time. "What do you mean, you're catching 'Norwich crabs?' What the hell is a Norwich crab and how could that possibly make a difference?" Dave demanded to know. 

"It's the most critical difference," said Dan. "With Norwich crabs, when you have one and put him in the catch bucket, if he tries to get out, all the other Norwich crabs hold on to him very tightly and keep him from ever succeeding."

When I was told this story years ago, I thought it was extremely funny. It never occurred to me that it was also true. If we, and by "we" I mean you and me, whoever and wherever we are, don't learn to let go of the resentment and anger from previous failures and choose instead to reach for rewards, despite the risks, at our next opportunity, be it economic development, learning new things like clog dancing, or letting someone into our lives, this story goes from very funny to very sad to being our last story, the one that becomes our epitaph. Trust me on this.
-bill kenny

Dirty Laundry

I earned my livelihood living on the periphery of the Blue Smoke and Mirrors Machine-at one time I was in broadcasting but discovered the truth was often too situational to be of any lasting value and today's hero was this afternoon's villain.

I decided not only that discretion was the better part of valor but that it also paid better. And as Dylan observed money doesn't talk, it swears. Since I've been told I have a colorful vocabulary, I feel pretty much at home with Benjamins in my wallet and normal hours. Principles are over-rated.

But, like you, I can't be everywhere so I rely on news operations to tell me what they know and I then come to conclusions about what I want to know and how important it is to me. As the years have gone by, however, the pickings have gotten slimmer, Jim, to the point of vanishing before our eyes and ears.

The Pew Research Center releases regularly State of the News Media reports and they are not the happiest of reads, believe me. Read any of them at your leisure, or ignore them at your peril. I find them disquieting like so much else we moderns hath wrought. I grow more concerned by the day at how lazy we customers are about where we shop for 'news.' If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, some of us want to know how much per quack it costs.

We all have neighbors who, when they read the local newspaper, cannot distinguish between a letter to the editor, an editorial, or a news story. Yep, they can't tell one from the other and away we go down the rabbit hole.

And not helping is that news is now a business like it never was at any time since Joshua went the battle of Jericho, 'and we'll be right back with that report on how the walls came tumbling down after this commercial for Sak-Rete.' What would Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow make of the dog's breakfast we have created? They'd probably join Newton Minnow in describing it and we'd ignore the lot of them.

Maybe the most terrifying aspect and I feel that way because it was supposed to be liberating, is the emergence of "new media" a/k/a "social media." The appeal for me as a reader and writer is the platforms are immediate and unfiltered but that also means I must make sure I clearly tell you what is fact and what is my opinion. I cannot allow you for one moment to lose sight of the importance that you are reading a truth, not the truth, but even that is too much because it's my truth.

When a story from the Galvanize All Babies at Birth Guild and the Associated Press are treated by us, the reader/viewer, as worth exactly the same, it may be too late. And then we wonder how we arrive at often thoughtless and venal decisions (because we chose to).

Perhaps after you've finished reading the morning paper (usually takes what? 15 minutes if you do the crossword?) or watch the Happy Talk News on the tube, broadcast, or cable (all the anchors really do sort of look the same) you'll have the chance to have a good long read at those Pew Reports, if you can still remember how to do that because right up with listening to one another, reading has become a lost art.

I'd feel sorry for us but we've created this world in our image and likeness. We wanted fast food for fast times-check. How about news by people who hate to research and report it for people who hate to receive it?  Double check. That order was to go, right? Coming right up.
-bill kenny

Assembly Required

Not sure which I love more, the graphic and its point....

...or the song and its point.

Tie goes to the runner and I'm wearing one, lucky me.
-bill kenny

New Beginnings Come from False Things that Are Allowed to Die

Another proverbial blast from my past. At the time I called it:  

Faith of Our Fathers

As a child, this was a big deal Sunday in my house. And I have to be honest, I was almost a teen before I even fully grasped why--Palm Sunday was up there near, though not quite at, Christmas Mass and Easter, and when my first name still had a 'y' on the end of it, I never really followed the reasoning as to why. Behold the Man, indeed.

Palm Sunday always seemed to be the deceptive handshake. The New Testament has accounts of the triumphal entry of the Son of God into Jerusalem, being welcomed by those who would turn on Him as part of the inevitability of a week that had Him crucified on Friday (a more excruciating way to die at the time was unknown) and resurrected on Sunday.

I never impressed any of the nuns at St. Peter's School in New Brunswick with my scholastic aptitude or ability to interpret scriptures (I was almost married myself before I caught on to the importance of 'for I know not any man' and Joseph not having Mary stoned and why) and yet I still experience a dryness in my mouth dreadful foreboding as the events of the Passion Week unfold.

I couldn't stop reading about it as a child and I couldn't look away. When Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber cashed in with Jesus Christ Superstar, if nothing else, they linked the inquisition of Christ forever in my mind with a jaunty little music hall number that I can hear even as I type this. Another reason I'm confident of my destination in the next life.

Today is a day for many to visit the church of their choice. Sidewalks are crowded as families make their way to retrieve fronds of blessed palm (my mom's mother had a piece that never left its location, behind a framed black and white photo on the wall. 

Only now do I realize I have no idea of who the picture was, nor any idea who I might ask). The blessed palm that doesn't end up scotch-taped to auto rearview mirrors or suspended by a thumbtack alongside the front door will be collected after all the Masses today, at least in the Catholic Church of my youth, and then burned to become the ashes used on our foreheads for Ash Wednesday.

Intro ibo ad alteri Dei. I think I still know the words and know that I always will. I once had the faith to believe in their meaning but I lost that or perhaps threw it over the side to help speed me on my way, and then I lost my way. I have the charts and maps spread out on the floor, but it's starless and bible black and I can't find my way home.

-bill kenny

Glad You Asked

 Pantload45 keeps asking this question on his Truth Social app.

What was it Mom used to say?
Oh yeah, don't ask the question if you can't stand the answer.
-bill kenny

For No Especial Reason

I have a massive collection of vinyl, thousands and thousands of sides, and very nearly as many compact discs from my first purchase of Meet the Beatles at the record store on George Street in New Brunswick, New Jersey too many years ago to mention without blushing.

I have listened to every one of those pieces of plastic, even the ones that have proven to be a less-than-good idea in terms of purchasing. I can't really get behind music services like Spotify because artists get screwed on royalties so I sometimes dive into the deep end of the pool in terms of exploration and get soaked instead of hydrated.  

I forgot how much I loved this song until it popped into my head a moment ago. Enjoy.
-bill kenny

A Nearly Portable Feast

I'm typing as fast as I can and only hope that spell check saves me from the ignominy of reading like a Hottentot at a Hootenanny. 

It's my own fault really. I like to live on the edge, walk on the wild side, sail too close to the wind, hang on by just a thread, and as many other cliches and bromides as I can get on a 24-hour loan from Billy Bob's Emporium of Previously Used Sentence Components located in Del Rio, Texas.

Went to make myself a little pick-me-up and decided to skip the Java jive and the tea leaves and made a cup of chicken bouillon from those cubes that are so dense I've always suspected they are actually made from the matter that comprises a black hole in space. I especially like how there's always one piece of the foil wrap you cannot get off until you're reduced to trying to scrape it off with a fingernail and then, uh-oh, there's bouillon fragments under the nail. Do NOT put that fingertip in your mouth. Ever. If you have to ask why, it's too late.

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

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

And then atop the screw cap, I saw the fateful advisory, 'Best by August 2017.' I'm lousy at math (and English as we both know) but I knew there was trouble. The light grew dim and my life started flashing before my eyes. It's been so unremarkable, mine was replaced by the Jimmy Dugan Story and since that's so short, the second reel was the Song of Bernadette (Peters, which was disconcerting especially the excised dance of a thousand Veils scene from Barney's Great Adventure).

And then, just before the darkness enveloped me, I tried to figure out how anyone, even the manufacturer (yeah, Hormel, I'm talkin' 'bout you) would distinguish between good, better, or best in chicken bouillon cubes. 

Turns out it was getting dark because I was dozing, not because the mortal coil was assuming the shuffle-off position. Talk about relief! Of course, I'm still a little peckish-perhaps a slice of fruit cake will hit the spot.
-bill kenny

Dollars and Sense

We all know times change and yet we cling sometimes too hard to a truth that we believe to be a truism from our own childhood. When I was a kid, still in short-trousers as I recall, my dad gave me a piece of wisdom I suspect not unlike the one your parental care unit offered to you: "Never pay more than thirty thousand dollars for a house without a basement."    

By today's standards and cost indices, I'd have trouble affording a used car, to say nothing of a house. And yet, when was looking at houses some years ago, and cars come to think of it, I was still remembering my father's insight. Maybe that's why so many of us in Norwich are staggering a little bit reacting to sticker shock as very early discussions on the next Board of Education budget suggest it will be one hundred million dollars. 

A million of anything is a LOT, and one hundred million is a lot more than a lot so the cries of anguish, anger, and exasperation are not unreasonable or unexpected, but unless/until you have meaningful suggestions and alternatives to offer to those on the Board of Education (and the City Council),  it's hard to separate the noise from the signal. And typing comments in ALL CAPS on social media platforms doesn't really help at all. 

It takes more energy and effort to be a light than to be a horn (that's why your car horn still works even when your battery is too weak to power your headlights) and despite how smart my dad was, thrifty shopper that I am, I won't be finding even a used car with a basement.at least not today.  

The recent re-evaluation of our house, probably like yours, was gob-smacking in its escalation. My evil twin Skippy joked that my wife and I should sell our house for what our new tax assessment says it's worth, assuming we could find a buyer and then didn't mind camping out since we'd then still need to find somewhere to live (again). And no matter how often I look at the paperwork confirming my new assessment, I still don't feel rich. How about you?

Everything costs more than it did when houses cost thirty grand and came with basements to include cars with full-size spare tires. Whether it's galloping or creeping, inflation isn't just for balloons. And we know that, whether we like to admit it or not. 

The Board of Education's role in budget creation is more like that of a weather observer than an old-fashioned rain-maker. It's tempting for us to demand "the Board should just say 'no!'" but fixed costs are just that, and while No is how Norwich starts it cannot be how this budget ends. 

Almost forty million dollars of the Board's request is for costs associated with Norwich Free Academy and other high schools. What do you suggest we do about that? (Realistically). And since we're thinking, let's spare a thought for special education costs including state mandates which continue to escalate faster than the speed of thought. Unless or until the state of Connecticut funds 100% of the mandates it levies on each of our towns local taxpayers will foot the bill every time. (But where will the state get that money? Look in the mirror.) 

It's easy, too easy, to simply complain about the price of education. Wait until we try calculating the cost of ignorance because we chose to refuse to work together to find solutions.
-bill kenny

Honoring Honoré de Balzac

I return to this thought every year on this day because I need to remind myself that all of us, present company included, is the sum of everyone we've ever met. I know, as a result of two extended and extensive encounters with two particular individuals, I'm better than I have any reasonable hopes of otherwise being. 

As I said, I've posted this before and appreciate your indulgence in allowing me to post it again. When I first wrote it I called it:

Scared that He'll Be Caught

This is a tough week for anyone who's ever picked up, owned, or been named for anyone in, Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints. I say that because this week the main event, of course, was this past Sunday, Saint Patrick's Day. 

I'm not sure every place on earth paints the median strips on main street green as part of the parade or adds food coloring to the beer but let's face it, Saint Patrick is the 800-pound gorilla in the room for the entire month of March.

This is too bad because today is the Feast of Saint Joseph, husband of Mary (Mother of God) and (to my mind) Jesus' step-dad. I sometimes fantasize about an at-the-dinner-table exchange between the Son of Man (as a child) and Joseph that has the latter suggesting "Then go right ahead and ask your 'real dad' for a new bike and let's see what happens." And then I wake up in Hell and have no reason to complain.

Today, the Feast of Saint Joseph is when the swallows come back to Capistrano. I wonder if the village fathers paint the center stripe on their main street a shade of bird droppings white and grey or if they even have a parade (I think I'd steer clear of the beer, but that's just me). 

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

I borrow a sentiment from Jackson Browne, in claiming that 'I don't know what happens when people die.' And in keeping with that latter point, I have known two very dear people who shared the Feast of Saint Joseph as their birthday. 

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

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

Bob might have reminded some of an absent-minded professor, as his desk was piled high with scraps and bits of every single project he ever worked on (I suspect) but he knew where every single item and element was in that office and when he was in mid-project he was a wonder to behold creating entire campaigns out of baling wire and chewing gum (metaphorically speaking).  

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

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

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

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

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

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

The More I Know, the Less I Understand

Everyone has a theory for what ails us as a society.
Except me. I have Stephen Covey. 

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

 

Worth Repeating

This is NOT the first time around for these thoughts, but they fit the date so here they are again. When I first offered them, I called this  

With the Morals of A Bayonet Blade

This is a day that, as full of Irish heritage as I am (along with so much else (maybe more?)), I get more than a little creeped out by the celebrations of all that is emerald even when it's not.

There's a claim there are more persons of Irish descent living in New York City than there are in Dublin, but I suspect that's a statement you can make without (nearly) fear of contradiction about almost every ethnicity who've come to settle here in The Land of the Round Doorknobs.

Whether your tastes run from Danny Kaye singing Danny Boy to U2 through The Chieftains or Horslips and how you wash down your bubble and squeak, if you're celebrating being Irish or pretending to be Irish, or you just like to bathe with Irish Spring, I hope your day is a good one. 

When The Gangs of New York was making the rounds, I watched it like a deer in the headlights growing more disquieted and discomfited with each frame. Though I was already old enough to realize history is written by the winners and should have been old enough to know better, I learned of a past of which I had only suspected. 

For cinema, the movie had more than an inconvenient truth or two about alternatives to the 'melting pot' (myth) explanation every child received as part of her/his American history classes in grade schools across this country for most if not all of our growing-up years. (And I'm not just talking about Leo's accent.) 

Instead what more of us learned as we aged was that we have as many dirty little secrets as we have truths we hold to be self-evident (and sometimes the former is also the latter but in that case is always unacknowledged). 

The stories of the 1863 draft riots in New York City during the Civil War were as well-known in their time as the number of leaves on a shamrock and the animus and enmity directed at 'the others' (of all stripes) is as true to this day, a century and a half later. 

So whether you're marching down that New York City Fifth Avenue today or in any of the hundreds of slightly out-of-control celebrations across the nation that we tend to use to get us closer to spring, spare a thought for the Battalion de San Patricio five thousand miles from a home to which they could never return who became a Legion of Strangers to those who would have been their countrymen, but were refused.
-bill kenny

Some Days This Stuff Writes Itself

My email system(s) are so much smarter than I am-they automatically (and mysteriously as far as I can tell) can sort spam from real correspondence before I ever see it. Considering how easily distracted I am by almost everything that's probably a small mercy for me.

After a certain amount of time, days I think, the spam folder empties itself into the trash as we roll merrily along and I remain blissfully oblivious to whatever havoc could have been unleashed by a message. 

Except every once in a while my curiosity gets the better of me and I peek into the spam folder for a glimpse at what I am missing. More often than not I encounter a fragment like this from yesterday's mail harvest, "I am a Beautiful Midget girl I just need some fun." 

Good to know. Forewarned is forearmed. 
-bill kenny

Far Between Sundown's Finish

 Haiti, Gaza, Ukraine, Uyghurs, and the refugees on the unarmed road of flight.

Here in the Land of the Round Doorknobs, the rest of the world is just low-voltage noise that we pay close to no attention to. Instead, we're outraged when gasoline prices are more than a dollar a gallon as the Founders intended. We have a Congress that bans TikTok but doesn't have the balls to do the same for assault weapons. 

And we're sleep-walking to a national election in November where one of the major parties' presumptive nominees is currently facing multiple and more felony counts on various charges and has been found guilty of sexual assault and stealing from his own charitable foundation. Of Thee I Sing.
-bill kenny

Talk about Fear of Flying

I came across a story the other day in my local newspaper and laughed, for a moment, until I started to think about all the times I've flown and how many times I might have been involved in a similar situation and never realized it. 

Luck of the Irish perhaps? Not helping calm me down, if you didn't already know this, is I hate to fly. And this pair are now yet another reason why.

At least their airplane was larger than the one that flew me from Philadelphia to Groton-New London Not Quite International Airport all those years ago, where every passenger (all ten of us) had both a window and an aisle seat.
-bill kenny

A Penny, or Perhaps More, for Your Thoughts

We're about to enter the most serious time on the municipal calendar, the annual deliberations and processes that produce a city budget. I've been a Rose City Resident for over thirty years but while the actors in speaking parts may change, the movie really and rarely does. 

We all want 'nice things': good schools, paved streets, excellent public safety and infrastructure, as well as hope that somehow despite the increases in prices we see every day on every store shelf, the goods and services delivered by our local government will somehow cost less this coming year than they did this one. Spoiler alert: Guess what won't happen again this budget season? 

We can feign surprise, unhappiness, and even anger but we want what we want, and it has to be paid for. Historically, humans formed government early on as a means of creating a collective (defense) to provide for individuals and we've just merrily rolled along ever since. When times were/are good, everyone smiles, and when times get tough we become unpleasant.  

Perceptions of reality are reality. For every chart and index you can show me that says we are living well (albeit also well beyond our means), I can produce one that says never have so many had so little while so few have so much. And we're both right. 

Sadly, until relatively recently we've been able to muddle along and compromise for something we thought was the greater good but now for lots of reasons I don't pretend to understand we prefer argument to agreement and seek to blame one another for circumstances we very much do control.

Nationally, I fear we listen too much to people on all sides of the aisle who claim government no longer works and, when elected, set about proving their own point. Locally, we have far more in common than what separates us, putting us more or less in the same boat (in all three rivers); it's usually more a question of how much we're willing to pull together on any given oar on any given day to get us to land every fiscal year. 

We'll read it again real soon enough in newspapers and on social media platforms, 'this is a difficult budget season that requires hard choices,' or words to that effect. Of course it is, governance is hard work and we're lucky to have friends and neighbors willing to help do it. All the budget babble is code for having to choose between what we want and what we want right now.

Proving perhaps God does have a puckish sense of humor, our City Manager will offer his first draft of a budget on April 1. I know, April Fool's Day, though I don't think any of us will assume he is joking. Before we get to that point on the calendar, maybe a read-through of our current budget, adopted last June, will help give us a sense of perspective and proportion. 

You'll find a schedule of all the hearings for all the departments here. All hearings will be live on the public access TV channel as well as available on the city's website for review.   

You may have read recent news stories on the 33% increase in the city's grand list which at first read is astonishing except we had a city-wide reassessment so this year's budget formulations will be even more fraught with anxiety and concern as mill rates are recalibrated and need-to-haves and nice-to-haves, struggle for pride of place in the final calculations. 

This is a year for stubby pencils and open minds and hopefully, more consensus than contention. All of us need to commit to the idea that government supports programs delivering the best quality, most necessary, and lowest cost public services for our collective good. And nothing else.
-bill kenny

My Fair(est) Lady

I've never been a hockey fan-actually, never much for ice skates. We have a beautiful Ice Rink in Norwich that we went to when our children were younger (and so were we come to think of it) but I don't think I've been in it for the last two decades or so. It's me, not them.

Back to the hockey. The first time I saw her she was wearing a Buffalo Sabres hockey jersey, a souvenir, so to speak (as I was to learn) from an earlier relationship. (I'm fine with the memory because I got the girl in the jersey.) To be honest, if the Sabres, or any hockey team had looked as good in their jerseys as she did in this one, I'd have become a huge fan of the struggles to capture Lord Stanley's cup years earlier.

She was tall, taller than I, thin, with long straight hair. I had seen her in a club Chris and I went to in Frankfurt am Main's Sachsenhausen district and this was later and we were at another place, "Old Smuggler's", beyond the Hauptwache near the Eschenheimer Tor district.

She was, and is, so beautiful, I forgot to breathe and the moment I saw her I knew I would marry her. I didn't know her name, know how to meet her, or know anything about her but I knew I would marry her.

I'm not a person with a strong religious faith (me, not Him) but by the time we got engaged forty-seven years ago on Palm Sunday (the 3rd of April it's engraved in my wedding ring), I came to believe that it wasn't, and couldn't be. coincidence or happenstance that had crossed our paths.

I cannot conceive of how wretched my life would be without her--how, in a hundred different ways every day, everything I do and everything I am is because of her. She almost makes the day begin. Happy Birthday, Angel Eyes
.

Yes, Please.

Where was this on those cold winter days, not just of my long-ago childhood but of recent weeks? 

Yes, maybe it's not heaven in a bowl, but I, for one, say, give it a chance!
-bill kenny

Rise and Shine

If you have recently risen from bed and are slightly out of step with the rest of us, perhaps you failed to advance the clocks in your house before retiring. If it's of any consolation, you are not probably alone. Some of us deal with the annual 'spring forward/fall back' routine better than others. 

To me, it's another way we're separate from all the other lifeforms on the planet. Animal, vegetable, mineral, most everything else adapts to the 'gets dark later/gets bright earlier' hot and cold parts of life on the Big Blue Marble, but not us. We impose, or attempt to, ourselves on our environment and surroundings.

We create a concept we call "time" and then work on its division into seconds and minutes that added together we call hours and then gather twenty-four of them (no other species does, aside from the rabbit in Through the Looking Glass), pronouncing that to be a day.

We then line up a bunch of days into something we call a week, combining them in various clusters of varying lengths called months  concluding here, my dear, with that which we call a year. Not bad for bi-peds with big brains and opposable thumbs (and basic cable).

For the next couple of days, most of us will be out of sorts and/or out of sync and will blame it on shifting of those damn clocks. I'm not sure that's valid for anyone other than the people working the 11 to 7 overnight shift (who had an hour shaved off their day today, but work nine and get paid for eight at some point this fall), but it sounds great and we all do it. Why we really should be ouchy and grouchy is that so few of us have a plan for what to do with the extra daylight. More's the pity.

We could start a garden, read to a child, go for a walk, visit with a friend, spend more time with a loved one, fly a kite, ride a bike, paint a fence (or a masterpiece) or write a letter. Of course, you could say, we don't need more daylight to do any of those things. And you're right, we don't. So why don't we just do them?
-bill kenny