Seasons Will Pass You By

My wife and I feed the critters, great and small, in our backyard (and beyond). 

We have regular feathered clients like cardinals, bluejays, woodpeckers, titmice (that's the plural I think), and sparrows to say nothing of our furry friends, the squirrels (still no chipmunks after all these years! I saw one last week one more street over so I'm hoping before I shuffle off this mortal coil to be able to stage Rescue Ranger in my backyard). 

We used to have turkey vultures in the trees lining our street but in recent months they've been conspicuous in their absence. And on occasion, all the small animals will draw the attention of the random small hawk whose presence terrifies just about all of them (and me, too, if I'm being honest) and it's all quiet for a couple of days on the feeding front and then, because the prey has disappeared so does the hawk.

But this time of year, I count fewer birds at our feeders and notice more overhead flight patterns all heading south. And I'm so culturally/genetically/socially conditioned that I find it interesting, and a thing of no small wonder, that the birds fly away while I remain rooted and fixed to this spot. But why? 

I think we live our lives (or at least I live mine), perhaps without fully appreciating it, "Down at the edge, Round by the corner."
-bill kenny 

Let's Stop Making Stupid People (In)Famous

But let's start tomorrow, okay? 

And, to be clear, I don't mean the Kardashians, any of the numerous permutations of the Real Housewives, or even (my new current guilty pleasure), anyone from Love After Lock-up. 

I'm talking about us. We, the ordinary people, who do egregiously idiotic stuff, usually illegal, unlawful, and laden with calories (I suspect).

Like Stephanie Hoffman, a resident of that hotbed of normality in The Land of Steady Habits, Enfield, Connecticut, who is, the report suggests a rather frequent flier in the Connecticut Judicial System and no stranger to a court of law. 

So, like I said, let's stop putting folks like Steph in the paper or online and instead where they belong, behind bars. Deal?
-bill kenny    

If Not a Chicken in Every Pot

My wife and I are still getting used to our new (leased) car. When you reach my age, with my lack of mechanical aptitude, owning something as complex as a contemporary automobile is a semi-fool's errand. We lease because all the maintenance is someone else's problem. When things go bump in the night, I call the 800 number and someone shows up to fix it, in theory (nothing has ever happened so far), 

Getting the replacement leased vehicle for the one we turned in, a 2025 Subaru Forester for a 2022 Forester, got me thinking and that doesn't happen nearly often enough. For the first five-plus years of our marriage, my wife and I didn't even own a car. 

We lived in a medium-sized city in West Germany (albeit a city that, by itself, had as many people as all of New London County, Connecticut had when I showed up here thirty-three years ago) with a bus, streetcar, and train network that made 'getting a car of our own' one of those 'nice to do' but not 'need to have' situations.

Then we migrated across the ocean. We now live in a medium-sized city in Southeastern Connecticut with a whimsical, at best, local bus service and NO ferries, jitneys, trams, or trains of any kind, so privately-owned vehicles move up the list almost to 'required appendages.'

The capital of the State of Connecticut, Hartford, is about an hour's drive from Norwich. I have no idea, if you were to attempt a journey by 'mass transit', how you would do it-but I daresay it'd take more than an hour and perhaps more than a day. 

I've read some interesting articles on the impact of the automobile on the American Way of Life (the right to keep and bear cars should have been included in the Bill of Rights, seriously). When you look at our older cities and neighborhoods anywhere across the nation, you can see from the center to the outskirts, like the rings of a tree, how the internal combustion engine became the infernal comedic device in so many instances, with us as the punchline.

Ours is not a state, and this side of the Connecticut River most especially, is not a region where relying on buses and trains gets you anything more than frostbite and long hours of travel. Sort of helps you get a better understanding of how people get addicted to a variety of controlled and uncontrolled substances--and you can make a short movie of mobility junkies, getting a hit off the gas pump--taking a deep drag off the high octane bong and snorting a line of Ultra 93. Talk about Mercury Blues.

Here in The Land of Steady Habits, our idea of addressing issues like soaring energy costs and greenhouse gases is to build MORE roads, with more lanes so people can get to where they're going even faster. As for arguments that an investment in mass transit will yield economic development benefits as well as improve our urban and suburban quality of life, we can't hear you-we've turned the radio up. All the way to Eleven.
-bill kenny 

Happy Birthday

Today, the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) celebrates its thirty-fourth birthday. If you're older than that you know the story behind that story and that it goes back to the end of World War II and the division of Europe into East and West.

I lived with my (West) German wife and our two children (dual-passported and why not? Their father is two-faced) in a city outside of Frankfurt in Land Hesse, the traditional leather capital of Europe, back in an era where Europeans made things, Offenbach am Main.

I had come to Germany as a member of the US Air Force in the fall of 1976, and when I landed at Rhein-Main Air Base, I compensated for NOT speaking any German when getting into the taxi to take me to American Forces Network Headquarters damals (back then) at Bertramstrasse 6 by speaking English VERY LOUDLY in case the driver was deaf, I guess. 

The exchange rate was two Deutschmark and fifty pfennige the day I landed and the meter read twenty-two marks when we got to the station. I gave the driver a twenty dollar bill and tipped him five bucks and then wondered why he was so helpful.

Patrick was born in July of 1982, while I was still in the Air Force and Michelle came into our lives in May of 1987 while I was a civilian working as a TV production guy for the Army. At the height of the Cold War, and I really hope most of what you've read in the hyperlink isn't new information to you, the US forces in West Germany were practically the fifty-first state. 

We had our own department stores, groceries, hospitals, bowling alleys, liquor stores and clubs, housing areas and schools. I worked for a senior civilian, long deceased, who'd relocated from France when they had invited us to leave in the Sixties, who spoke not a word of German and told me, a skosh more smugly than I fancied, that 'you don't need any German to shop in the commissary (grocery store)."

If, like me, you lived 'on the economy', it didn't hurt (let me tell you) and I made some nice change doing voice-over work for German-based advertising agencies who worked on campaigns for American products marketed in Germany (but whose corporate masters, like me years earlier, couldn't be bothered to learn that Deutsch stuff). We spoke German in my house because it was my wife's house in her country and if our children noticed Dad's language skills were a bit loopy, they were small and took no notice.

When ARD and ZDF started to cover the Montagsdemonstrationen, not just West Germans took notice, but it was hard to understand what those peacefully protesting wanted or what they would do if they got it (though few actually suggested what 'it' might be) but the bewegung (movement), took on a momentum of its own and it was obvious to all of us, on both sides of the barbed wire that demarcated East from West that winds of change had come. 

Some historians have suggested it was Gorbachov who tore down the wall that Ronald Reagan had called upon him to raze. I know a lot of dumbass Americans who think about something to do with vodka when you say Gorby's name, but in my basement is a piece of the Berlin Wall.

All this time after the Wiedervereinigung just about every Trabant and Wartburg has been replaced by an Opel Senator but a lot of work still needs to be done before all neighbors live as one people in one country. Happy Tag der Deutschen Einheit.

-bill kenny

All That Glitters....

I started writing this blog two weeks shy of seventeen years ago and missed exactly one day of posting in all that time. I have now lived here longer than anywhere else I have ever been and there are days I'm not happy about it and this, surprise!, is one of those days.

I love The Mountain by Laura Ding-Edwards. When I'm in need of inspiration or hope, I scan it again and savor every word.  I especially enjoy the couplet, "A day is not a lifetime. A rest is not defeat." I've been reading it a lot recently, practically wearing out my glasses.

I live in Norwich,  a small city in Southeastern Connecticut, and have since I returned to the United States, very much against my will, almost thirty-three years ago. If we had a spirit animal it would be Eeyore because lifelong residents, and there are many, are forever waiting for something awful to happen around here even when good things are happening all the time. 

Apparently, there's nothing quite as satisfying as slowly shaking your head and saying 'I knew it, I just knew it,' when something goes sideways. Too often too many are so busy tsk-tsking and shaking their heads they can't be bothered to roll up a sleeve or take some initiative. 

They see themselves as realists; that's as may be. I think of them as assholes. As you may have already surmised I don't have a lot of friends here despite all the years of residency not that I miss the company but it does get old to be in a perpetual foot race with people who when you have an idea, race to come up with reasons for why it can never work. Discouraged experts are just the worst kind of people to share a city with.   

Last week had some great news about funding two projects that, quite frankly, deserved support long ago but we had more will than wallet. That's now changed, but the same hand-wringers and woe-is-me folks are still waiting for a stumble so they can have their gotcha moment. 

All you can do, as a person, as a parent, as a leader in any capacity is try. And try again. If you fail, still try again and fail better. Eventually, if you want it badly enough you'll find a way. If not, you'll find an excuse. I, for one, have had it with excuses, maybe you should try that mindset too. 

I'm thinking about some folks in New York City, and NOT in Manhattan, who had a very small something and have made it a whole lot more than the sum of their aspirations and dreams. So when someone tells you that there's nothing one person can do, tell them to Go Fish.
-bill kenny    

Getting a Head Start on the Season

I know it's early, but Happy Halloween!!

For those who observe.
-bill kenny