I Have Some Memories

Almost seventeen years of writing this stuff daily generates enormous amounts of chaff (and sadly, tragically tiny portions of wheat) as you who read it obviously know. I fell across an 'oldie but goodie' as we used to say in Radioland long ago. Actually, fourteen years but who's counting? At the time I called it: 

Two Ends Against the Middle

The office I work in is in a building that is part of a business campus, I guess you'd call it. There are six buildings, nearly but neatly grouped in a pattern facing inward, with a courtyard for a car park and many lawns. They all have low chains not to keep the grass from escaping but to discourage us who work here from walking on it. 

It's only here to be looked at-I never got the memo, but suspect there is one. I occasionally imagine, for my own amusement, spreading large amounts of glass shards on the parking lot to keep the white lines neat and clean and free from tire tread marks.

Yesterday's weather didn't start off too well-it wasn't rainy but it was overcast and very humid, a condition I've heard forecasters refer to as 'threatening.' But, much like the mailmen of old, whom 'neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor hail nor gloom of night can keep from their appointed rounds' until privatization (of course), a little unsettled weather doesn't stop the landscaping guys. By the time most of the folks in all of the buildings were wandering into work, the lawn guys were getting their swerve on.

I don't know what lawnmower men do in Connecticut in January-perhaps shovel snow. They may be snowbirds and migrate to points south and get closer to the tar balls in the Gulf of Mexico. But come spring, they swarm ashore across the state on rider tractors and zoom around on these weird-looking stand-up-with-one-foot-on-each-side-of-the-engine-and-rotating-blade-self-propelled-machines that scare the bejabbers out of me.

Yesterday there were two sets of guys--one were the Rough Riders, Weed Whackers, and Clippings Blowers and they were machete-manicuring every blade of grass that dared stick its head out of the earth. 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the lawns we never walk on, there were guys with a large, industrial length six-inch wide hosing, snaking from a tanker truck labeled "hydro-seed." I love this stuff-it's like the Hairclub for Men for lawns. I think they should call it Topsoil Toupee and don't understand why someone hasn't copyrighted that name.

It's not just me, right? The stuff looks like lime gelatin mixed with tapioca--not sure it has to, but fear it may want to. All kinds of fixings going on in there, sort of like Mickey D's special sauce on the Big Mac, except the green goop has ground-up newspapers, fertilizer, seed and miracle ingredient z-247 (and it's Yossarian who says it, and Heller who wrote it. One of them isn't real and the other isn't alive. That's how I tell 'em apart. 

By all accounts, the stuff grows like wildfire or maybe spreads like wildfire, or like drunken cheerleaders after a homecoming football game. I'm not clear on the descriptors but there's always a lot of grass in a big hurry after the hydro seeding fairy has paid a visit. And that means the Briggs and Stratton small engine jockeys have happy hearts and bulging wallets. I

If they keep at it long enough, they can stick around all year long and stack peat, neatly mowed mind you, on top of one another as fuel for the blast furnaces as our very own Nutmeg State reinvents itself as an industrial dynamo, which will happen right after the next incarnation of Eli Whitney stops drinking that cotton gin.

-bill kenny

The Electric Fire

I've spent a lot of time in the last couple of days channel skipping, not surfing, between my local TV stations and the Weather Channel as a heat wave has engulfed New England and large portions of the rest of the world as near as I can determine.  

I'm so old I can remember Bill Buetel, Roger Grimsby, and Tex Antoine at WABC TV-7 Eyewitness News in New York City. The earliest days of happy talk TV as it's somewhat lovingly called by some, but I missed the broadcast where Antoine was fired on the air for an egregiously inappropriate observation on a news story Grimsby had just finished before tossing to Tex (and Uncle Weatherbee) for a forecast. 

It's a far cry from the 'let us entertain you' approach that certified meteorologists on my TV news teams are now employing and deploying with a vengeance. But I suppose it could be worse, far worse.   

I mean, technically, that would be worse, wouldn't it?  
-bill kenny

Do Penguins Have Knees?

That's not a rhetorical question. It's a book title; actually, the title is "How Does Aspirin Find the Headache?" and one of the chapters is about penguin knees. Not to be confused with the bee's knees. I got the book for Christmas years ago from our daughter. It solved a lot of mysteries or at least mysteries to me. 

As someone who takes prescription medication by the boxcar, I take for granted the orange containers my meds come in, and until yesterday hadn't spent a moment wondering why that color. I'm glad I hadn't as I found out why and now so, too, shall you. 

As for why the drugs that go into the orange plastic containers are so much more expensive here than almost anywhere else on earth, well, that's a whole 'nother book entirely. More like a fairy-tale, to be honest.
-bill kenny

Urban or Urbane Renewal

One of the most amazing things to me, a child of the library card since the late 1950s, is how the world of convergence and connectivity brings the world to a screen near me 24/7 and 365.

I don't even need to know what I'm looking for and a search bot will find me something, anything (animal, vegetable, mineral) bring it back to the screen, and after I've cast it aside, reviewed other sites it has retrieved for me, and via one or another algorithm, start to guess what I might like/want or need and finds that. Eventually, an Ethernet happy ending of sorts.

We live in a state well-known for its perceived wealth, Connecticut, one of the Original Thirteen Colonies with astounding affluence along what we call The Gold Coast (though not all that glitters is gold; in some instances it's bling) and crushing poverty and squalor in places such as our capital, Hartford.

Our infrastructure, from highways to fiber optic networks, is aging (and near failure) as it is across the Northeast with little investment in any of it since the Korean War. And if you think our bridges are old, you should see our population. Actually, you're reading one of them now. I've lived here with my family since the fall of '91 when I was in my late thirties. I was 72 in April and get the senior discount at the local coffee shop. No one was more surprised than I to wake up this morning to find that I'm old. Except, it's been happening for years and not just to me.

But that's why I was mentioning search engines and items of interest at the top. Humor a geezer, willya? It takes us all night to do what we used to do all night and if I need an extra paragraph or participle to get to my point, what's your rush anyway? Whippersnapper. I will, like many of us, probably end up dying in a place I had never heard of until I lived here. There are worse things I guess.

It's nice enough though some improvements would be appreciated. A few more pony rides for birthdays wouldn't kill anyone and while there's always room for Jell-O there's not a whole heckuva lot of pie from what I've seen. 

Tell you what else we don't have a lot of, and not just us, but almost everyone east of the Connecticut River, is mass transportation. If you don't have a car (or a truck) you are so screwed in terms of shopping, working, socializing, and living in general. And from what I've been reading, it's going to get a lot worse for a lot more of us across this land and the prognosis isn't good in the long run or short term.

Never regarded mass transit as mythical or mystical much less magical. But we're going to have to start to change how we manage it and how willing we are to use it and make it pay for itself, especially before the kids put us in the home otherwise how else are we ever gonna see the grands?
-bill kenny

Call Me Ishmael

Too many years and too many turntables ago I developed a fondness for bands and performers some of whom despite vast and copious amounts of talent were to never be rewarded with either critical or commercial success. 

Still they slogged onward in obscurity and penury until inevitably entropy and disinterest overcame and consumed them. One of those bands was The Shirts. 

Their second album released in 1979

I've searched for one particular track online for far too many years and then I found it. It's not the answer to all answers but then again the question is a killer: 

When will you play the great cathedral?
I can't wait. 
-bill kenny

Simmering into Summer

It's not just always clever wordplay and scintillating wit around here (well, technically it can be argued it's never either of those and I would be hard put to successfully argue the opposite). 

But today's an opportunity for public service, something I'm not noted for, with good reason. With the start of summer today, it's safe to say we'll all be looking for more family time in the great outdoors. 

Here's a picnic tip I stole from Yogi Bear. 

But on a surprisingly serious note, for me, some excellent advice for anyone who has a water bug in their family.

You can thank me later.    
-bill kenny

Lift Every Voice And Sing

It's easy to find someone who sees happiness as a rationed commodity so don't you (whoever you are) take too much joy in something going on around here, or else (I'm never sure what is supposed to happen after the 'or else' part). 

That said, when looking at Norwich events and the people with whom we share our city, why do we wait for the other shoe to drop when we could dance barefoot? We keep checking the reaction at the cool kids' lunch table, forgetting there are no cool kids (or lunch or tables, come to think of it). 

It takes every kind of people, sang Robert Palmer, to make what life is all about and we have the singular good fortune in The Rose City to have just about every kind of people there are. So, we should be as filled with life as the days are long (or maybe more so) and recognize there are often more songs to be sung than voices to share. Today is one of those days.

This morning at eleven at the David Ruggles Memorial Freedom Courtyard at our City Hall is the 35th Juneteenth Commemoration Ceremony and Flag Raising marking the 159th anniversary of Juneteenth, the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. 

Juneteenth combines "June" and "nineteenth", commemorating the order issued by the Union Army's Major General Gordon Granger, on the morning of June 19, 1865, who'd arrived on the island of Galveston, Texas, to enforce the emancipation of its slaves and oversee Reconstruction. That order proclaimed freedom for slaves in Texas in the aftermath of the surrender of the Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi.

Juneteenth was recognized as a federal holiday in 2021 when President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law.

I’m sure those attending this morning’s ceremonies will share this song. I wanted you to enjoy the words as the poetic hymn James Weldon Johnson intended them to be.

 Lift Every Voice and Sing

Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died
Yet with a steady beat
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years
God of our silent tears
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way
Thou who has by Thy might Led us into the light
Keep us forever in the path, we pray
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.

Lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee
Shadowed beneath Thy hand
May we forever stand
True to our God
True to our native land
Our native land.

Happy Juneteenth!
-bill kenny

Never Knuckling Under

I lead a sheltered life and keep myself to myself, more or less by popular demand. Not that long ago I was reacquainted with the 'knuckle bump,' a phase or craze that had somehow eluded me. My luck ran out, I guess. 

I had no idea what the person intended when he put his right fist straight out, but I confess to flinching and bracing for impact. Then nothing happened. I opened my eyes and he stared at me the same way I stared at my plate years ago when I learned 'calamari' was Italian for squid.

In retrospect, I appreciated the crash course on cool I received -except I know instinctively that what an old guy thinks is cool, ain't. All those trick pygmy pony handshakes from years gone by--the ones that look like they were choreographed by Alvin Ailey. Except when I do them it's more like Jerry Lewis.

I am, like it or not, a living fossil, and the former portion of that assertion is subject to some discussion I've been told. Since most of that all happens after I've toddled off to bed, I have no first-hand knowledge of the respective positions except to note Wednesday is trash day in my neighborhood and so far I haven't awakened on a  Wednesday morning and found myself curbside.

I've accepted my place as an aging bebop doofus hipster who became far more decorative than useful decades ago and then, as my looks faded and old age set in, took to staying indoors until the sun went down because I was frightening the neighborhood children. 

They, like our two, are grown and gone, so I can wander around to my heart's content secure in the knowledge that anyone I meet will work very hard to avoid even acknowledging me much less exchanging greetings. Which is too bad, really, as I'm getting pretty good with knuckle-bumping.
-bill kenny

From a Smile to a Tear

We live close enough to the William W. Backus Hospital that I can walk to it and not break a sweat. I didn't realize how close it was to the house when scouting for a place to live back in the autumn of '91 but trust me, I'm grateful for the proximity more than I should be, perhaps. 

Several years ago the hospital added a helicopter landing and take-off pad and is now part of the Lifestar network or whatever it's called. My wife would probably know better as years ago she had a heart attack and they transported her via Lifestar from Backus to Hartford Hospital. They're a part of the soundtrack of our neighborhood as they fly in any and all types of weather and are (to me at least) an everyday miracle. 

Thinking about the Lifestar helicopter reminded me of Magnus und Marchy (bear with me). They were two German kids popped for dope, actually hard drugs, as I remember the sporadic letters in tortured English arriving from JVA Stadelheim and, more often, Neudeck (where the women's jail was/is) who listened to a radio show I did over forty years ago. They weren't married, I don't think, but were boyfriend and girlfriend; at some point, on the outside, they had become junkies together.

When they started writing-actually Marchy did as Magnus knew close to no English--they weren't clean but were in jail. I didn't know how long they were in jail for or how much longer they had but I did get the sense it was a long time. I'd hear from Marchy with a request about every two weeks.

I had to keep track of her letters since she'd reference something in one note and mention it in later correspondence in much the way you'd return to a topic in a conversation. Her letters kept me on my toes.

I recall her request (for herself), "I'm Going Home by Helicopter," from Ten Years After (with Alvin Lee, whose blazing guitar licks were stupefying especially at maximum volume). TYA had leapt into American rock awareness with a blistering performance in the Woodstock motion picture. I hadn't realized until I'd needle-dropped the record that Marchy was right! Listen to the intro yourself, Alvin Lee does say 'by helicopter.' I had never heard it in all the times I'd listened to the song.

I smiled just now remembering the smile I had when I played it for her. And then I recalled the letter from Magnus, actually by someone else in the cell block who could write English, days after I'd played the song thanking me for it and telling me how much Marchy would have loved hearing it if she hadn't deliberately overdosed the weekend before.

And then suddenly my smile gets very tight until the jaws ache and I realize you can lose people more than once and that no matter how often you do, the pain is real because the loss still hurts.
-bill kenny

A Different Decade

I first offered these words ten years ago.
Time flies when you're having fun (actually, it flies regardless of your state of mind). At the time I called it:

You Could've Been a Legend

Being my wife's spouse and our children's father are the two things I do best and most days I'm not that good at either of them. My wife makes the former work for both of us.

As for the latter, I didn't take classes and while I yearned for an indeterminate probationary period, there was none. And nothing but on-the-job training. It's the hardest job I could ever love and despite what I believed while I was on the receiving end, Dad is the highest compliment and best descriptive in the whole world.

And today is our day. Of course, all of us who are fathers have people to thank (especially our children without whom technically....) and I won't even try to list all of the fathers whom I have had the good fortune to know, because that list would go on forever.

I have to pause for the father I shared with my brothers and sisters.  

This a photo I caged from my brother Adam who got it from the school where Dad taught (and which I attended).
He got the pictures, while I still get newsletters and fundraiser solicitations from them.

Our dad is a long time gone but there have been many times I've had wistful and wishful conversations with him about our two kids (who are now themselves adults). I think in many ways, I've spoken more with my father in the four-plus decades since he passed than I did in all the years we shared the planet.

I know these are fantasy conversations because had I ever asked him for advice and had he ever offered it, there would have been no place for me to put it. 

So full of myself was I for so many years that it's only been in the last score and more that I've learned to appreciate how fortunate I am that those who love me do so despite rather than because of me. 

I can't help but think he'd have laughed his ass off at that because of how often I've laughed knowing it was true for him as well.

Getting married to my wife made me a man. Having and loving the children that together we made and raised made me a better person. Happy Father's Day.
-bill kenny

See You Later, Pollinator

It took one whole growing season, but most of our lawn is clover this year. Last summer I bought pounds and pounds of clover seed and was somewhat disappointed with how the lawn didn't fill in. What I was missing was patience. 

I also need patience while mowing our lawn now, because, by design, it attracts bees and insects I think are bees (an entomologist am I not). We have an electric mower so I'm not sure they can hear creeping up on them. 

I keep a sharp lookout as I mow since I can appreciate the irony of my murdering them in the clover patches I planted to attract them, but I suspect they wouldn't see that at all.   

I am a big believer in Give Bees a Chance and the better that we are at that, the better off we could be. There's an exhibit currently in a Liverpool museum that I'll never get to see but I wish I might that makes a cogent argument for the importance of bees.

The article seems to me to be engaging and informative if not quite the full Monty 
-bill kenny 

You Can Stand Alone

Today is Flag Day. though you'd probably not know it from visiting a Hallmark Store.

We think "flag" on the Fourth of July and mentally if not physically pack it away by noon on the fifth. In the aftermath of 09/11/01, people had them everywhere to the point, I feared, that the flag had no point for many. 

And for too often in recent years, we've had scoundrels of all political and ideological stripes wrap themselves in the flag, physically as well as metaphorically, while insisting 'love me, love my dog' as if their display of patriotism could somehow overcome the venality (if not actual criminality) of their behavior. 

Some of us salute the flag; others stand when the National Anthem is played or the colors are presented. Still, others take a knee to remind us how far we are from the ideals that we want to believe our flag represents for our nation.

Our men and women in uniform do not defend the flag-they defend the nation the flag represents, warts and all (and have you looked at us in the mirror lately? We are some pretty scary people my friend). 

The flag stands for us but sometimes, I'm saddened to say, we'll fall for anything.
-bill kenny

Sort of a Funny Story

I had spinal fusion surgery in the middle of February. Vastly improved the quality if not the quantity of my life. I am extremely grateful to my chiropractor who introduced me to the surgeon and hospital where I had the surgery. 

I was discharged the following day and in the course of the next six weeks with physical therapy, I can now ride bucking broncos without a saddle or a saddle sore. Or something like that.

That's NOT the funny story part of the funny story.   

About two months after the surgery I received a statement from Medicare for the $54,000+ medical bill and the statement was 'NOPE.' I have retained my Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance and, as it happens, that insurance aside from a deductible, paid for the surgery. 

Not surprisingly, I contested the Medicare decision. I have Medicare Part A and right there on my card, it says 'Hospital.' I received a phone call yesterday from the agency (or one of them I suspect) Medicare uses to fight with clients advising me that I needed to also have Part B for Medicare (which I don't because of the BC/BS) to pay for any of the surgery. 

I pointed out (yet again) that my card specifically mentions 'Hospital,' and was told, 'Yes, BUT, a hospital stay must be more than three days before Medicare Part A provides coverage.' 

And by the way, the Medicare initial ruling was 'UNappealable' and the implication was I had a lot of nerve contesting the decision. Yeah, the funny thing about that is the surgery for that nerve probably won't be covered either. 
-bill kenny

Nice Things Are Over-Rated

I’ve finally figured it out. We who live and work here are why we can’t have nice things. We don't think we deserve them. We are happiest when we are unhappy and delirious when we can share our vitriol and displeasure with as many people as possible, whether they ask or not.

We’re vexed with newspapers that tell us things we don’t like (‘fake news’), and our favorite radio station is WII-FM, whose call letters stand for What's In It For Me? If some initiative, public or private, benefits anyone other than ourselves, we're at best lukewarm in our support of it. More like room temperature.

If you don't think so just ask one of us, any of us, and we'll tell you. 
Submitted for your approval (Thank you, Mr. Serling), social media comments about last Wednesday’s presentation on modifications to the traffic pattern, accessibility, and (quite frankly) point and purpose of the downtown waterfront area. We like to complain about how things are but when someone suggests a change, we’re cool with the status quo.

We prefer problems that are familiar to solutions that are not. We are still talking about the same ‘problems in the city’ that we were talking about when I arrived here in 1991. We are a city of discouraged experts who not only know everything, we know everything better. We argue over the cost of a project or initiative but have no idea (or interest?) in how to calculate its value.. 

We call ourselves 'The Rose of New England' but we behave more like thorns. Our spirit animal should be Winnie the Pooh’s Eeyore who always expects the worst and rarely is disappointed. It's sad and frustrating to encounter the same disheartening reactions, no matter the topic, often from the same people (the movie is the same, sometimes with different actors).

We do big things well; build bridges, roads, and schools, make sure the lights come on and stay on and that the water flows (except when there's a flood and then we have people who make it stop). The big things are easy; the devil is too often in the details.

After we have new sidewalks, no one feels responsible for sweeping up the dirt and detritus that so often covers them. We step over trash rather than pick it up and put it in a bin usually a few places from where we are and we're all good at the look-away when an unpleasant situation would be defused with just a glance of interest or concern.

It's convenient to point fingers and blame others (and often very satisfying) except three fingers on the hand point back at ourselves. Blame is one thing-responsibility is another and when it comes to our neighborhoods that is on every one of us.
 
Instead of shaking your head at the overgrown grass near the Sweeney Bridge, helping make a lousy impression at a gateway to the city, take some pictures with your cell phone and send them to the state highway department yourself or, share them with the City Manager who'll forward them.

Government is NOT something done TO us, but rather FOR us. That is why we strive to form a more perfect union. Everyone has a speaking part and a responsibility to do and to do better.

We need engaged citizens and that takes practice. You don’t have to be great to start but you can start to be great, so why not today?
-bill kenny

Not Suitable for a Sunday Sermon

I was thinking about this Saturday afternoon, mulling over the loss by my Connecticut Sun to the New York Liberty. Not that it had anything to do with the WNBA but then decided since I set so many teeth on edge on a regular and repetitive basis without ever even trying, posting this for a Sunday might be perceived as sucking for a bruise.

It was and is not my intention to incite or inflame. I was raised a Roman Catholic and now I'd say I'm 'spiritual' rather than 'religious' or of any one denomination. If you think that was an attempt at a disclaimer, you're correct. 

Every organized religion, and a couple of the somewhat disorganized ones, has sacred writings, scriptures if you will. No matter the region, or the religion, it's part of our human genome, the need to be a part of something bigger. 

Be it the Koran, the Old Testament, the New Testament, or the latest Roman a clef by Danielle Steel, there's a narrative and place to go look for details. When you argue a matter of theology and someone says, 'You can look it up!' the texts are what they're referring to.

There's the blood of the Lamb, the descent of the dove, the tongues of fire, the burning bush and an almost unending number of symbols and signs that The Lord (however you perceive Them to be) uses to get our attention and pass along the Word.

What if we were the first generation of people on this planet who had a Deity? I don't pretend to know what all of those before us had, I'm just saying what if we're the first and Our God uses the tools we have today in much the way as in the days of old. 

Someone I encountered recently speculated how God might communicate the Ten Commandments if They had to use text.

Perhaps:
1. no1 b4 me. srsly.
2. dnt wrshp pix/idols
3. no omg's
4. no wrk on w/end (sat 4 now; sun l8r)
5. pos ok - ur m&d r cool
6. dnt kill ppl
7. :-X only w/ m8
8. dnt steal
9. dnt lie re: bf
10. dnt ogle ur bf's m8. or ox. or dnkey. myob.

M, pls rite on tabs & giv 2 ppl. ttyl, JHWH. ps. wwjd?

For my part, I wonder "What would you ask if you had just one question?"
-bill kenny

Remember the Future

I was born while Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson were crisscrossing the country seeking votes as the Presidential candidates for their respective parties. I arrived before the voters' verdict that November. Sometimes, timing is everything. 

I've surprised myself by living as long as I have, considering the type of personality I have and the lifestyle choices I've made. As James McMurtry (whom I'm hoping to see perform in Fairfield, Connecticut on 10 September (I'm a little revved about that, can you tell?)) offered, "There's more in the mirror than there is up ahead" which is as perfect a description of life as we know it as I think you'll ever find anywhere. 

When I do look back at everything those of my age have learned, unlearned, and often relearned again (and sometimes more than once again) as times, tools, and technology have changed, it's pretty awesome and has been quite a ride. 

I take nothing for granted anymore; that's sometimes thought of as wisdom which really is time multiplied by experience. And anytime I'm feeling cocky (only happens during waking hours) about being ready for what's next, I encounter an old-time (my teenage years) news clip that settles me right down again. 

Makes me wonder what's around the next bend. I guess we'll know when we know.
-bill kenny  

I See Your 'Perchance' and Raise You

I have weeks where upon awakening in the morning I have no recollection of dreaming at all and other times when I can remember things so vividly it disquiets me especially when in the dream there are people I know from real life who have no connection to one another and who are now together. 

Perhaps you too have dreams that feel like they last forever but, I've done enough reading, if even less understanding of what I'm reading, to recognize that very often dreams take a matter of moments and not even minutes. 

Childish Sweet Dreams by Sergey Nivens

As a matter of fact, what we know (actually, what I know) about dreams wouldn't even fill one side of a three-by-five file card so I welcomed the discovery of this feature by NPR.   

I think Shakespeare's Hamlet may have been on to something when noting, "To die, to sleep – to sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there's the rub, for in this sleep of death what dreams may come…"
-bill kenny

Saturate Before Using

Today is World Oceans Day.

You don't have to be a son of a beach to appreciate their importance to life here on the Big Blue Marble. 

What might be the best way to celebrate today is to learn more about the damage we are doing to our oceans and work to be a part of a solution while we still have a planet to save.
-bill kenny   

A (Christmas) Rose By Any Other Name

I was walking around Chelsea Parade as is my custom (those 10,000 steps a day will not walk themselves, right?), and as I walked down the Broadway side, and passed the flagpole to my right I fast-forwarded to the end-of-year holidays. I was reminiscing about one of my favorite traditions, the Christmas Rose that Public Works and Public Utilities used to erect every year around the time of the Winterfest Parade. 

When the preventable plague, COVID-19, overtook all of us, part of the collateral damage as our world changed was the Christmas Rose was not constructed that year. I very much looked forward to the following year only to learn that during all assembly and disassembly, and wear and tear as well as 24/7 exposure to the elements, the Christmas Rose was beyond salvage or repair.

I suspect throughout the years, much of the display had received homegrown and handmade repairs and refurbishment. In today’s economy, the cost to create and construct a new one, in terms of time, talent, and treasure would be prohibitive. In a universe with never quite enough for all the ‘need to haves’ even a fanboy like me is forced to accept a new Christmas Rose could only be a ‘nice to have.’  

But passing the flagpole and thinking about the Christmas Rose led me to wonder about an outdoor holographic projector to recreate A, if not The, Christmas Rose. I know, ‘You need to get a life.’ Thank you, I’ve had one. As Springsteen sang, ‘I ain’t here on business, baby, I’m only here for fun.’ And exhorting you to think about this is my idea of fun.

I found a YouTube wizard, reallyMello, who has become my frame of reference on this quixotic (not chaotic) quest. He created four videos detailing his outdoor Halloween holographic project and here’s where they started.

First, and to answer your question, I believe it can be accomplished, but because of an accident of birth (I was born handsome rather than smart; also, delusional), it will take many hands and minds better than mine (=yours) to make this happen, assuming the permissions whose number I cannot begin to imagine, can be granted.

And no, it will not come cheap though in looking at what seems to be the logistics required for this, I don’t think it’s beyond the financial grasp of a modest GoFundMe page effort as no more than $5000 should do it (or perhaps the newly-resurrected Sachem Fund might be a vehicle to consider although this project would have nothing to do with Chelsea Gardens (Attempted joke)). 

Intended by no means to be exhaustive, we’d need a projector, holographic screen as well as a sturdy frame (REALLY BIG) for a large amount of tulle fabric, and a USB flash drive to hold as many images of the Christmas Rose as we can scrounge up.

Also, critically important and integral to the success of this project, are people with the knowledge and skillsets to put this all together, literally and figuratively.

Count me out, sadly. I once cut myself so deeply with an apple corer (while trying to dry it) that I had to visit the Backus ER which gives you a gruesomely accurate insight into my handyman credentials.  I used to specialize in being decorative rather than helpful but since my looks faded, I’ve been sort of in limbo.

I think we could do this, but we’d have to work together. 

What do you say? Can we, and more importantly, will we? Let me hear from you.
-bill kenny

Eighty Years On

I offered what passes for thought on this subject not too many years ago, and not that you asked but I think they bear repeating. When I first offered them I called this: 

Some Short Thoughts on the Longest Day

I believe the farther out in space we go, the more alike we look. It’s only when we re-enter our atmosphere that the effects of gravity and tribalism become more pronounced. 

Residing as I do in Global City Norwich, I smile as we punctuate our lives with a growing variety of celebrations of so many of the different stories we are as the people who all happen to call this place our home.

I wanted to emphasize the importance of stories because when we speak of History, which is really the story we tell ourselves of who we are and how we came to be, we usually think in terms of capital letters and monumental events, forgetting that all of us are the authors of our own tales of our time here on earth.

Today marks the 80th Anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe at Normandy, France, always called D-Day. In deference to and respect for, Edward Shepherd Creasy, who authored “The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World,” almost a century before the beaches were stormed at Normandy, D-Day wasn’t just a battle historians have concluded ultimately won World War II and saved Western Europe, but may also have been the milestone in our country’s journey of political, social, military, and economic ascendance in a world landscape littered with sometimes petty parochial and ideological loyalties.

We think of larger-than-life men and monumental moments when we study D-Day and there are many to choose from but we risk losing sight of the human element of our own humanity in the details that the day involved, which is what we should remember.

The survivor stories, so many people in the same device, fighting not only for something grand and noble like a Free Europe and, by extension, the free world but also for one another. 

They sought out a protected position where the sea met the shore while being raked by weapons fire without rest or respite as waves of troops waded onto the beaches and wrote with their blood and sacrifice the first chapters of what was to become our modern, Post-War World where we hoped cooperation would replace confrontation.

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to walk the beaches of Normandy and struggled to imagine the carnage and brutality of the conditions on that day and the courage it would have taken to overcome them. It’s a way of learning history that books and classrooms, while important, can’t really touch, but for many of us the stories, more so than the lessons, are all we have.  

And many of those D-Day stories are deservedly well-known while others are less so but I’m always struck in reading and remembering June 6, 1944, by what we, the inheritors of the world those who never saw the dawn on June 7, have done with it. And by how much harder we should still work.  
-bill kenny 

Remembering the Original Antifa

Tomorrow marks the 80^th anniversary of The Longest Day, D-Day.

I was traveling with a US Army Helicopter Company from Hanau, Germany, to walk the beaches of Normandy, France in the late spring of 1984. Walking, as we did for hours in the sand, can wear you out and the fatigue is profound and overwhelming.

I could only wonder what, on D-Day, a GI with a seventy-pound rucksack, and all hell in front of and around him, was feeling. We had done interviews earlier that morning with elderly Frenchmen who, as men our present ages and sometimes only boys, had been accidental witnesses to history, triangulating linguistically, as they spoke no English and we, no French. 

One of them, to the undisguised scorn of the others, admitted he understood 'some German' and so I would ask him, Auf Deutsch, a question that he would rephrase into French and ask a neighbor who would reply, which he'd relay to me in German and which I'd then translate into English.

When you read about Normandy and the planning and staging that led up to it, it feels very different than when you walk the beaches you've read about. There's a taste in your mouth from the salty air and a breeze coming off the water that carries the screams of the gulls even farther.

I wondered if those struggling ashore, from the landing craft or parachuting down onto those maintaining their watch on the Atlantic Wall, had a moment to take in any of that. On a day when so many would die, was there a final split second to savor life? There was no one to ask except those we visited the next day, unable to answer for all eternity, at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.

After you've struggled to climb to Pointe du Hoc (up the stairs carved into the soft stone and NOT the way the Rangers had to, directly vertical), you can almost, but not quite, grasp what it was like for the soldiers of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, first to seize this emplacement and then, as the Nazi High Command realized, finally, the invasion wasn't a ruse but the real thing and threw itself at the Rangers trying to drive them over the cliffs and into the sea, how they held their positions for two days.

The 80th anniversary of D-Day is more than a date on the calendar. It's a reminder that evil can and must always be defeated. No matter the cost or the price. Young American men had been in Europe decades earlier, during World War I, the War to End All Wars, which didn't. What they couldn't know as they waded ashore and struggled to stay alive long enough to shoot back at those shooting at them, in less than a year, all the shooting in Europe would be over.

How much we've learned as a species in the eight decades since is a matter of debate and discussion (and for some, despair) as the young men, of all sides, who survived D-Day pass from our earth at a rate of thousands every day, taking with them every memory and meaning we might have shared, assuming we had cared enough to ask.

Santayana noted 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' but those who remember that it was Santayana who said that are themselves also few and far between.
-bill kenny

Black and Hairy

True confession time: I don't do well with wee beasties including centipedes. silverfish, and most especially spiders. Actually, in particular spiders. 

I understand their role in the circle of life and I appreciate all the good things they accomplish, like elevating my heartbeat when I accidentally walk through the middle of one of their large webs.

I'm sure we look as creepy or maybe even more so to them than they do to us but I am not a fan and would not be terribly disappointed to never for the rest of my life encounter a spider of any size or color at any time. 

Arachnophobia is fairly widespread but here's something that may surprise you, spiders can have it too.

Second true confession time: that knowledge doesn't afford me nearly the amount of solace I was hoping for.
-bill kenny