Re-Roasting a Christmas Chestnut

I tell this tale every year and will continue to do so even as they lock me away in the home. I've taken to calling it: 

Bill's Christmas Story

If you've never visited this space before today, I have a treat for you (sort of). If you're more of a regular guest, I don't know what to say except maybe better luck tomorrow. 

I offer this tale every year (updated) on this date to the annoyance of my spouse, about whom it is, and the possible embarrassment of my children, because I like to get a rise out of them. 

I originally called it Christmas is all around but you may have a different title by the time you finish reading it (assuming that you do). 

I have a quite lovely black and blue on my upper left arm where someone decided to pinch me not because we have a Christmas tradition like that in my house, but because some of us think we do. 

It's a perfectly logical consequence in a relationship that began forty-eight years ago on Christmas Day which was when I first spoke to the person I was to marry. 

I'd note I haven't had much gelegenheit to speak since then, or to get a word in edgewise, but that would probably earn me a matching black and blue on the other upper arm.

I had seen the woman on a number of previous occasions, but could not work up the courage to speak to her. Nevertheless, I knew with absolute certainty I would marry her though if I didn't solve the 'haven't talked to her yet' obstacle, it would be tricky. 

Me and my friend Chris, thick as thieves then and now despite half a continent's distance, had gotten a headstart on the Christmas Cheer and had been downing it by the glassful for hours as we made the rounds in the Frankfurt am Main party district, Sachsenhausen. We probably weren't the only lost and lonely people, swarming like flies, but I believe we were two of the better lubricated.

At some point, we came to be in Old Smuggler's a bar near Eschenheimer Tor in mid-town am Main (great restaurants, terrific shopping, none of which we had any interest in). Chris and I were toasting NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as we'd concluded it was in support of the Alliance that he and I found ourselves on the cutting edge of the sword of freedom, not that either of us could actually utter that turn of phrase at that point in the evening.

I got much drunker much faster than Chris, who did a very good job looking out for me which is always necessary since once I got my drunk on I was even more of an ass(et/hole) than when I'm sober. I stopped drinking not because I suffered from alcoholism (I enjoyed it a great deal) but because I got tired of getting the snot beaten out of me mostly by inanimate objects that snuck up and tackled me. To this day, the only chair I trust is the one I'm sitting on, and only when I'm sitting on it.

Through a very crowded Christmas night came this woman who wanted to share our table and whom, in my liquid state, I felt should sit on my lap to save space. When she agreed, I knew it was now or never. (I was successful at falling in love. I hadn't been successful at staying in love. So far). 

Chris assures me I was very suave when I said to her, 'now that you're sitting on my lap, don't you think you should tell me your name?' Okay, not how Shakespeare scripted it, but, remember, it was a long time ago.

As I munched on some mandelspekulatius today, my second-favorite Christmas memory of Germany, I tried to imagine how events had to happen in just the order they did for her and me to meet when we did as we did. 

My brain hurts, nearly as much as my arm, and again I concede the limitations of a liberal arts education because I lack the mathematical wherewithal to pull off the arithmetic to do the figuring. I just accept some things on faith and how I met your mother is one of those things without question or quibble.

There is a reason for everything we do and everything we fail to do. And as much as I love the 'we're prisoners of an indifferent universe' state of mind, I don't buy it.

Hold on and hold out. 

It worked for me and I would hope for no less than the same for you.

Love is always a gift, as it can never be earned and this is the season of love and gifts. Happy Christmas!

-bill kenny

Dressed to Kill

I believe I'm finished with my Christmas shopping. I'm impressed with how, in my dotage, I've embraced the convergence of commerce and technology and for all practical purposes do ALL my shopping online. 

I tend to order things for family (I have no friends so I save time AND money) based on the item's appearance on my screen (I don't use my smartphone to buy stuff, it's too hard because the print is too small). My lack of attention to detail, in terms of size and/or color, adds new meaning to 'your mileage may vary.' Think of that scene in Spinal Tap with the Stonehenge set.  

You'd think I'd be an expert on online shopping by now but you would be wrong. Instead, I get distracted with minutaie control. Do you know why women's clothing seems to have fewer pockets than men's? Because it does. Hand to God.

Did you ever wonder why sweatshirts have an "X"? Not a curious George, not even a little bit? 

Can I buy anything for all these questions? Nope. I can't even lease the satisfaction of not being the first one to have ever wondered about them. Though would it kill you to follow me for more fashion tips? 

How about if you follow them, instead?
-bill kenny

So Close....

This is the fourth Sunday of Advent, and for many (more importantly) the 'so many days until Christmas' countdown has dwindled down to !!!! (exclamatory marks sold separately at fine stores everywhere)

Maybe today is a good day to see someone in a corner of our lives we normally see through on our way to the many important things we each do and never really acknowledge. We're a pretty crowded ant farm with beepers and briefcases and sometimes the person next to us falls through a crack and we never notice.

Anglicans (Church of England in the UK) call this Stir-up Sunday, not as in get agitated or become more forcefully engaged in the world around us, but for more quiet and comfortable reasons, but I do like that name and the possibilities and connotations.

For some of us, this is the best of the Season of Joy and for others, it's really nothing more than the next to last Sunday of this year. We are the sum total of all the choices we make and the lives and love we share. We are the reason for this season.
-bill kenny

Trostlos

This is the shortest day(light) of the year. From here until late June, the amount of daylight will increase incrementally until by the time we're ready to start planning summer vacations, we'll be sick of all the sun (present company excluded). Or not. 

Winter is why I don't enjoy Autumn, (<= understatement alert!) because I know what's coming next and the fact that it's been getting darker for months, and even more so and faster after we fell back at the end of Daylight Saving Time, just makes it harder to see both in the morning when I awaken and when I look out the window in the late afternoon and it's already pitch black. 

For purposes of this discussion, we can treat the cold and the snow as read.  

Osage Forest of Peace

So, as we sing the seasons through, today is the day for a dark and deep note. We begin to moderate the key and alter the tempo as the changes that make up our universe enfold and unfold around us.
-bill kenny

On With the Countdown!

It's less than a week until Christmas. 

Actually, if you want to get technical, it's five days (hope I didn't jinx it). All of which got me thinking or as close to thinking as I seem to get these days. 

No matter where you go, the week has seven days in it; but why? 

Between the Babylonians and Macedonians, you can't tell the players without a scorecard to say nothing of the days of the week.
-bill kenny

These Currents Pull Us 'Cross the Border

Today is my father's 101st birthday. It's also probably a lot of other people's birthdays, too, but I don't know anything about them, which is almost true for my father as well. 

I learned far more about him after he died than in all the years we shared the earth. He's been dead a very long time, more than forty-three years, and the only things I've accomplished since his sudden end have been to have lived longer than he did and to realize how much alike we actually are.

My father filled up a room like no one else I have ever known and my points of reference are rock stars, movie celebrities, and world leaders (yeah, I've done some $hit if I have to say so myself) but my father owned every room he set foot in.

He wasn't physically imposing, standing about five and a half feet tall, fighting and usually losing a battle of the bulge with a headful of gray hair, he told us, from the time he was nineteen. He had a line he offered people who thought he was an old man because of the hair, 'just because there's snow on the roof doesn't mean there's not a fire in the chimney.' I suspect he said it in French and Latin, as well, because he could and that's how he was.

He was also someone I could never please, no matter how well I did. It seems pathetic for a man 72 years old to admit to something like that, but if you know me, you know I am if nothing else pathetic and aren't surprised at all. Being named for him didn't help and if I had a dollar for every time he told me growing up it wasn't his idea to name me after him, I would never have needed to go to work.

What I got from that, within eye blinks of learning Sigrid was pregnant with our son, was to vow we would NOT name that child after me. Unlike so many other instances in our married life, that promise was something I did follow through on. Actually, the other thing I did was work very hard to not be the father or husband he had been.

The jury's still out on the first part, as our children are adults themselves now but I would hope my wife thinks I'm a decent husband, maybe even a good man, who does the best he can with what he has. Ironically, that's a legacy of my father that for many years I wasn't willing to grant to him.

Maybe, in the decades since his death, I've come to better appreciate how much work it takes to be a man who is there for his family. You get up every day and do the best you can and some days your road takes you places you hadn't planned on and you look up and realize you've lost your way. 

The trick, I think, isn't just in knowing that you're lost but more in being able to find your way back. Our children never met or knew their American Opa; nor he, them. That's a regret I'll have until the day I die.

And while I think my kids can talk to me about anything even when I hope they won't, there's a hole in my heart my pride won't acknowledge and a hollow sound that no amount of outside applause can cover. There's a grinding of gears in the tears between the generations that I remember from my own youth and knew then, as now, I am powerless to stop once it has started. 

Arms to shoulder, we'll leave our tracks untraceable now. I think you'd have liked them, Dad-our Pat and Mike, you'd have loved them, I know. Happy Birthday.

-bill kenny

Knotted Knickers Sold Separately

I've lived in The Rose of New England, Norwich, Connecticut, for a skosh more than thirty-three years. I fell in love with the city when our realtor drove me through it, though in the decades since I'll admit to being disappointed as the gap between the Promise and the Performance never seems to shrink. 

I used to attend meetings of our City Council with a regularity and frequency that not even some of the council members themselves could match but in recent years since I've allowed my rabies vaccinations to expire (as opposed to myself) I've made alternate arrangements.

I watch the meetings either on our local public excess channel (you think I mean access? Have you seen what's on there?) or on the city's website, live in growing anger and animus. Besides, in the comfort of my own study, I needn't share the dip nor pass the popcorn to anyone.

After just a few minutes of watching any of the council's sessions on the city's website, you can easily see why 'Comments are turned off.' The volume and vitriol with which those in attendance, to say nothing of the keyboard warriors who react to news accounts of the Council's meetings, berate the volunteers who thought they were performing a public service by serving, is gob-smacking.

The most recent cause for something bordering on outrage precipitant involved money, which should surprise none of us. We have a tendency in these parts to confuse talking about solutions with actual solutions. 

Case in point: the inadequacies of the Norwich Police Department Headquarters. It's been 'too small' for the police department seemingly since it was built. And let's not mention the choice of real estate overlooking the Norwich Harbor where it was sited. 

Anyway, bygones.

We've been talking about a 'new police station' if not forever then close to it. And at the first Council meeting of the month in December we did something about it, well, sort of. Talk about making it official.

Albert Einstein noted, "Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous." Still, I don't think the Lord was in Council Chambers when the resolution to purchase the Chelsea Groton Bank downtown location was approved. 

Coincidence would also NOT be the bank lowering the property's asking price by six hundred thousand dollars IF the City purchased it by the end of the year though it might be if $800,000 is the most the Council can bond WITHOUT going to referendum. Talk about 'moving in mysterious ways,' huh? 

Don't misunderstand me, please. We need to stop talking about building a new police station and actually build one. For those, and there are many, who are angry at a cost close to (at least) fifty million dollars, it was considerably less about a decade ago when voters rejected a different downtown site to build the station.

Maybe if we wait another decade, we can collect enough redeemable bottles and cans to pay for it, and of course, this time the price will be even lower because that's how we tell ourselves the world works. 

Newsflash: Police station construction costs money. Blame is better to give than receive but no one is to blame. Demanding the Council simultaneously build a new police station but not one that costs any money defies both gravity and logic.   

I've gained weight since I was a teenager, so my old jeans don't fit. I tried blaming Wrangler, but it's not working. Same thing with the police station. Why do so many argue about why there is a problem, instead of just fixing it?  

When did we become these people, and more importantly, when are we going to stop? A lot of us look to blame someone when we should just look in the mirror. Let me know if you like the view.
-bill kenny 

More in the Mirror

I tease folks sometimes by telling them 'The older I get, the better I was.' It would be funnier if it were close to true but it's not. I've been a stumble bunny pretty much every day of my life. 

But when I was a kid, the irony of ironies, I couldn't wait until I was older. And now that I am, it sucks but it's still better than the alternative. I read obituaries in my local paper, not just to check I'm not in them yet, and my reaction to the death of anyone younger than I am is 'They were so young.'  Even though neither I nor they (in all probability) actually are.  

I've been haunted in recent years and for decades by the suspicion that time is speeding up. Yes, I know the hours,  days, weeks, months, and years are the same length with one exception (looking at you, February) every four years. And yet, it's all faster. Because it is. Surprise! 

Perhaps experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.
-bill kenny

Auf Deutsch

I'm channeling The Other Bill and Gisela (it's okay if you don't get it) for Es Weinachtet Sehr. That's a rough translation of 'It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas', because it is (at least in our house). 

Inside, our house went from plain very early in December to CHRISTMAS in null comma nichts. My German wife is the world's most organized person and has transformed a lazy, slothful dullard into a --okay, bad example; let's use the kids or the house or the neighborhood. She is a wizard at organization and our house is now festive with a capital F (and a neutral pH).

The letter "F" is also the beginning of a word and part of a phrase, I use a lot from starting around Thanksgiving through the end of the year (hint: it's not fa-la-la-la). I was never good at making or having friends when I was a kid, a life-long habit as it happens, so when I watch people the other eleven months of the year cross the street rather than talk to me, when they now wish me 'all the best', I know better. I'm more polite now and don't tell them where they can stick their well-wishes, mainly because they'd walk funny, but I figured you out, so don't think you fooled me.

In recent years, our family has returned to its 'original size', as our children, Patrick and Michelle, and their spouses, are themselves adults and lead their own lives far away from ours. Without discussion (forty-seven years of marriage makes a woman psychic), Sigrid will coordinate everything so that she and I will have a holly jolly Christmas that will somehow include the kids.

And in the spirit of the season, there will be a time as one of these pre-holiday afternoons surrenders the last of its light and the darkness rushes in where I stand in our yard and strain to hear a thousand singing herons and the melody of my most favorite of all seasonal songs whose words I cannot understand but whose sentiment is wonderfully clear.
-bill kenny

Rejoice

Despite all the misery, malevolence, and hate-filled utterances throughout what has been (at least for me) a very long and contentious year and most especially now during what we called as kids the Season of Hope, today, Gaudete Sunday remains a favorite of mine (since my earliest school days).

Before I had memorized the entire Latin Mass, in the hope (forlorn) of becoming an altar boy, I had theorized from what I understood of the roots of the word Gaudete and its proximity to the birth of Jesus that it must somehow be Latin for 'just hold on a little bit longer.' I still think I should get partial credit for grasping the feeling if not the exact meaning

A lot of the warmth of our human hearts regardless of our beliefs is reflected by the holiday seasons that fall together this time of year somehow reminding us, I hope, that we are, when we can see and live beyond our differences and rise up to our promise and potential, all very much the same people.

Far too often we have too many blaring horns in the cacophony of life and can most certainly use another light, especially in this, the most hopeful of seasons. 

-bill kenny

What Comes Before 15?

I first offered this some years back trying to make sense of something I should have realized would never make sense. All this time on, it still doesn't.

No other animal works harder to rationalize our sometimes unthinking behavior than we do. No other animal can even see the absurdity and contradiction of how we so often live our lives. 

Because the carnage on this date in 2012 at Newtown, Connecticut, happened in the state where I live I'm haunted by a feeling similar to the aftermath of 9-11-01.

I suspect you've done what I've been doing, hoping at some point a penny will drop, a light will go on and someone, somewhere, will say or write something that causes us to have an 'aha!' moment and understand the inexplicable.

Instead, we struggle to accept that there will NEVER be a nice, neat, explanation for what happened to say nothing of why. Instead, there are so many moms and dads and friends and relatives of the deceased (an abstraction of the first order) whose hearts will never heal.

Those murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, were not 'victims,' they were people, mostly very tiny and very young people. 

The Innocents included:

Charlotte Bacon, 6; Daniel Barden, 7; Rachel Davino, 29; Olivia Engel, 6; Josephine Gay, 7; Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6; Dylan Hockley, 6; Dawn Hochsprung, 47; Madeleine F. Hsu, 6; Catherine V. Hubbard, 6; Chase Kowalski, 7; Jesse Lewis, 6; James Mattioli, 6; Grace McDonnell, 7; Anne Marie Murphy, 52; Emilie Parker, 6; Jack Pinto, 6; Noah Pozner, 6; Caroline Previdi, 6; Jessica Rekos, 6; Avielle Richman, 6; Lauren Rousseau, 30; Mary Sherlach, 56; Victoria Soto, 27; Benjamin Wheeler, 6 and Allison N. Wyatt, 6.

"This is a prayer for the souls of the departed" and we should all know it by heart.
-bill kenny

Arranging Phobias Alphabetically

No one as near as I can tell, is afraid of Thursday the 13^th or Sunday the 13^th. But when we start contemplating the calendar and fall across today, some folks get way beyond afraid and transcend 'skeered.'

Their terror is so real and so large that having just one poly-syllabic word to describe that fear of Friday the Thirteenth, friggatriskaidekaphobia, isn’t quite enough so we have to have a second word as well, paraskevidekatriaphobia.

I wonder how often either comes up as a word during the National Spelling Bee. I’d ask ESPN since they air it live but they’re working on their own fear, PatMcAfeeandKAronRodgersMaySaySomethingStupidlikeAlwaysphobia.

Friggatriskaidekaphobia seems to have its root in Frigg, who is/was the Norse goddess of wisdom (and for whom Friday is named) as well as two Greek words, triskaideka, meaning 13, and phobia, meaning fear. 

Paraskevidekatriaphobia is derived from Greek: paraskeví means Friday, and dekatria is another way of saying the number thirteen.

Girl Scouts would have asked for directions

What other blog gives so much value on the flimsiest of pretenses? And how do we do it at such an everyday low price?  Volume!  We buy directly from the dictionary factory and pass the savings, as well as diphthongs and diacritical marks, still farm-fresh right to you. Helps me avoid Athazagoraphobia.

-bill kenny

Juan In a Million

As a New York Yankees fan for most of my life, I've tended to regard the New York Mets much as I might my two younger brothers. I sure hope neither of them was watching the other day as the Amazins boned the Bronx Bombers on the Juan Soto signing.  

Seven-hundred-and-fifty-six-million ANYTHING is a lot, but when it's American dollars, color me impressed. Take that Aaron Judge, Mike Trout, and Shohei Ohtani. 

As Bob Dylan once noted, "Money doesn't talk it swears." But let's face it, it's pretty quiet comparatively speaking in a LOT of Major League Baseball Parks. 

I've heard of Selling England by the Pound, and cannot pretend that I'll ever be able to afford a cup of Kopi Luwak, but these are heady days in which we live. And the tarpaulin was rolled upon the winter frost.
-bill kenny

Are You In or Out?

One of the curiosities of representational government is sorting out who, exactly, is being represented. A President, a Governor, a Mayor, and any and all who are elected to such offices, have to reconcile their 'election mandate' with the simple reality that not everyone voted for them. 

Additionally, sometimes it's hard to define what we want of our elected leaders-do we want people who reflect our wishes and do our bidding or do we want those in office who see their positions as striking off and striking out in new directions for the betterment of all of us.

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

Locally (and I'm speaking about where I live, Norwich, Connecticut), and as someone who is NFH (Not From Here) I apologize if I offend (I have to say that; you know I don't really mean it), we've spent decades talking at one another instead of with each other. We've often substituted diatribes for discussion and have employed historical examples of past failures to rationalize opposition to planned improvement efforts.

Chelsea Parade, Norwich, Connecticut, readies for a summer shower

My wife and I raised two children to caring and responsible adults here in The Rose of New England and always had an interest and engagement in school and after-school activities, ranging from the PTO through the Board of Education. 

As the years have passed we've come to think of Norwich as where we live, not where we live right now, and have expanded the range and scope of meetings and volunteer commitments, from fund-raising for a variety of public health issues to serving on advisories and committees. 

We've seen all good people lend a hand to those neighbors whose need is greater. It's time for all those hands to join together again.

The Spring of 2025 is rushing towards us, but the winter of our discontent may have already arrived. We, the people, need to be as informed and engaged in the running of our city as those whom we've elected to do so on our behalf. If all you do on Election Day is vote one way or the other then you're part of the problem we all face in turning this city around. We can't do it without you.

Life is like a lottery where you must be present to win. And rarely is just being  present enough.

-bill kenny

Snow and Other Four-Letter Words

According to the calendar, winter is still eleven days away, though in these parts (and parts of us are excellent) normally by this time in New England we've had some cold and unpleasant days that let everyone know where we are living as the days of the year dwindle down.

Not unhappily for me, because I'm not seven and not hoping for a sled for Christmas, this year we are (so far) having decent days. Yes, there have been some 'crisp' temperatures and snow flurries but that's okay.  

I am not complaining, but as a loyal, if fallen away, Son of Mother Church, I've been conditioned to believe that we pay for what we receive, and we cannot have long faces when the 'real winter' arrives. What I'm concerned about is how long it stays after it gets here.

I'm concerned because I had experiences yesterday within minutes of each other that underscore Thomas a Kempis' notion that man proposes, and God disposes. 

As is the case most days, yesterday I saw a squirrel in our backyard. During the summer months, there are swarms of them but in recent weeks, the numbers have dwindled somewhat. I have a bag of peanuts and I threw a handful of peanuts out the back door and the squirrel bounded towards them.

I watched as it juggled one peanut in thei mouth while maneuvering to also carry a second peanut. As it wrestled with the second one, a blue jay from a nearby tree hopped down and snatched up a peanut, too, despite a half-hearted attempt by the squirrel to run them off. The squirrel finally satisfied it had both peanuts under control took off for parts unknown. That's when I began to worry about this not-quite-here winter.

The blue jay came down from the tree again, dropped the peanut it had previously stolen, looked around, and finding a much larger one, grabbed that one instead and very pleased flew away. I'm afraid we could be making snow angels around here until Arbor Day.
-bill kenny

Imagine All the People

Sometimes, I have to walk a tightrope between the faith of my father and my rock and roll upbringing. Yesterday was the Second Sunday of Advent. It was also the forty-fourth anniversary of John Lennon's murder. 

If you had wagered I might allow that to pass unremarked upon, you lose! This is from some years ago and I mean it today as much as I meant it then.

I wrote this several years ago. For a mouthy so-and-so, I might have found more words by now; but they stay stuck in my throat so these will have to do.

If I need more than a dozen words to explain the importance of John Lennon and the music he helped create, and the other music he made possible, I'm too old and you're too young to be having this conversation. And since I got here first chronologically, you'll have to leave. 

I was born the year Dwight David Eisenhower took the oath as President. Rock and roll was either very rhythm and blues-oriented (and called 'race music') or was so white it glowed in the dark with melodies from the Brill Building professionals as sung by any fresh face who showed up at the auditions. 

Little Richard's originals such as Good Golly, Miss Molly were covered and eclipsed by a variety of white artists and never enjoyed the success on pop radio station airwaves they should have, but UK rockers had no way of knowing that. 

People like Sam Phillips and Sun Records helped change all that with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and (of course) Elvis Presley. The seismic shock Elvis set off echoed halfway across the world where tub thumpers, literally, who were part of something the British called skiffle, attempted to emulate the American records they were hearing in the coffee bars and teen clubs.

The perspiring and aspiring musicians who spent hours trying to copy every chord change of every R&B song they heard had no idea that in the USA, the music to which they were so devoted had been co-opted to a large extent castrated by safe-as-houses imitators. Their world then was so different from our world now that words fail, which is why (perhaps) so many of us who came of age in The Sixties turned to music in the first place as a replacement for language.

If all you know of John Lennon is what you've read, you cannot imagine the electricity late-night American Top 40 radio had when The Beatles were on. They built a bridge from the UK for every disaffected rocker to cross, and it mattered not if they could sing, Noel Harrison certainly couldn't, as long as they looked the part. 

The Liverpool lads stuck and stayed where so many others had faded away because they had talent as well as the ear of a generation who sought a voice while they, themselves, searched for the sound they had heard years earlier. They may have never realized they had become the object for which they searched. We, on other hand, never cared and embraced them as the Soundtrack of the World to Be. 

The Beatles 'broke big in America' in the aftermath of the murder of John F. Kennedy and I've never believed that was coincidence. They were the standard by which all other pop music was measured. It felt, for someone in his teens for much of their public career, that The Beatles had been around forever but when they went dark in 1970, they had been a chart presence for far less than a decade. 

Where there were four, only two are alive today. All of them spent, and continue to spend, their solo careers battling unreal expectations, measured by critics and fans alike against an impossible standard no one could match. With Lennon's murder, the death of the public John overshadowed the personal tragedy of his two sons, Julian and Sean, as well as the pain and grief his wife, Yoko Ono, and his first spouse now deceased, Cynthia, felt and feel every day of their lives.

It's tempting when revisiting history to forget it can just as easily be written as his story because in this case, the bandmate, the father, and the husband were all walk-ons in the Beatlemania movie Mark David Chapman so abruptly and completely ended all those years ago. 

For many who never knew the man, except through his music, the anniversary of his murder is a long day. There's little we can do except enjoy what he gave us while watching the wheels go round and wonder what might have been.
-bill kenny
-bill kenny

Nearing Closing Time

In twenty-three days, this year will come to an end. I know, 'good riddance to bad rubbish.' 

I'm not sure I'm fully grasping that realization even as I type it. This has been another year I've been forced to concede the face in the mirror has aged and that the man behind the face hasn't nearly as many springs left as he thought he had and more on point, has squandered, rather than saved, those moments of meaning he thought would come along again as easily as they did the first time. 

I've actually felt the dullness of the ache in the pit of my stomach and the shocked realization of regret that the next time can easily be the last always brings with it as a constant companion. Like so many over these past twelve months, I've blinked at critical moments and lost sight of the important ones in the rush of the real as the latter became surreal and unreal before disappearing by the dawn's early light. 

This was the year I made a lot of changes and vowed to sort myself out. And here it is, having nearly run its course and my still-to-do list looks a lot like what it was when I started on it as the year was beginning. 

I'm finding no solace or consolation that the coming year will be over even faster than this one, with, I fear, even less to show for it as the distance already traveled never equals the distance yet to go. I'm exhausted, physically and emotionally, and feel like I'm running through soup and sand, my feet never quite lifting from and clearing the ground, as each stride is a broken parody of what it once was with my arms pushing through chilling air I can taste rather than feel. 

The harder I try the farther behind I seem to fall. I started out the year, if I'm lucky, beside you but have spent the year watching you slowly disappear ahead of me, your long and resolute strides taking you over the horizon and when I get to where you were, you're gone with no trace, no track, and no regret. Sic transit humanitas.

This was to be the year we were to do, we were to talk, we were to live large, and to just be. And what happened? We allowed so many others, maybe too many others (who've already given up on their dreams) to creep in as poor players and poison what wells of hope we'd held for ourselves.

Our sense of adventure and excited curiosity has been replaced by dread as the days draw down and this year nears its end. The toast we'll make for much success in the new year assumes both will exist but accepts the implication that neither is promised. But it's what's next that will keep me awake.

-bill kenny

The Importance of Memory

Today is the 83rd anniversary of the attack at Pearl Harbor in whose aftermath the USA redefined itself as a nation and within the world of nations until the attacks of 9/11 to which the former is invariably compared. 

America of 1941, and the world for that matter was very different from our world today, and with that passage of time, I suspect, comes some detachment in looking at that history half a world away for those on the Eastern Seaboard. 

I learned about Pearl Harbor as a child in American History classes, then later at college through my classes and studies, and still later when I encountered men (and women) who had served in World War II, and not always on the victorious side. 

The more I learned, the less I knew, which is one of the positive results of education: when you don't know what you don't know, you're at your most dangerous. 

When the last resort, armed force, becomes the first recourse, we all lose.
I've not yet had the opportunity to visit the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii (it wasn't the only ship that sank and her Sailors weren't the only ones who died), but I hope to do so before I pass, as I suspect waiting until afterward, I wouldn't get quite so much out of it. 

While living and working in Europe I wandered across the battlefields of World War II from Normandy, France (where every single bar is called June 6, or at least seems to be), past the ruins in downtown Frankfurt am Main, (West) Germany, as modern a city as you could otherwise ever imagine. 

I visited Dachau, just outside of Munich, walking through the remains and reminders of the prisoner barracks, trying to grasp that people had lived (and died) there. I never got used to the silence of the place as no birds are ever heard at Bergen-Belsen in the Luneberg Heide, one of the Nazi interim equations as they calculated their Final Solution. 

It was as if God, Himself, had turned His face from us, ashamed of those who insist and persist in our belief that we are created in His likeness while committing hateful and hurtful acts on one another.

All of those spaces and places are connected as if in a straight line to Pearl Harbor, Bataan, the Rape of Nanking, and a thousand other geographic locales (more than 20 million men (and women) fought in World War II and the death toll of those who were non-combatants may be higher than that number) as some sort of a perverse demonstration that as noble as we can be, the depths of our depravity and indifference towards one another may not yet be fully plumbed.

There has been a lot of darkness and a lot of blood and tears since the last Cautionary Tale we think of as World War II. The rush of all the ensuing years may have served to make us numb to the approaching calamity of what will undoubtedly be the Last World War. We won't have to worry about what lessons we learned, or didn't, as there will be no one left to read anything.
-bill kenny

Welcoming the Holiday

Tomorrow afternoon into the early evening, Down City is the place to be for the annual Norwich, Connecticut Winterfest Light Parade. 

No matter the weather, if any and all previous parades are an indication, you'll have a holly, jolly time whether you come with family, friends, or just yourself. 

Scene from a Previous Winterfest Parade

New Englanders have a deserved reputation as a somewhat dour bunch and we Norwicheans (?) have, on more occasions than we'd like to remember, proven to be exceptionally cranky towards one another. 

As seen at a previous parade 

But all of that is bygones, at least for tomorrow.
Come join us and celebrate the season.
-bill kenny 

The Rockettes Meet George Blanda

I had a Two-fer Tuesday medically, seeing both my cardiologist in the morning and then later in the day meeting my new primary care physician (I have no idea what happened to my previous one; she left the practice at some point since my last annual physical and nobody bothered to tell me about it until very recently and when it was too late to do a lot more about it than grumble online).

I remain quite the challenge for my cardiologist as if I were a Rube Goldberg contraption. I have so many things wrong from a lifetime of indifference and over-indulgence (and a healthy dollop of just plain old bad luck) that when one of my physicians (and I have a raft of them: endocrinologist, nephrologist, urologist, rheumatologist, radiologist, in addition to the cardiologist mentioned above and primary care physician) tweaks or changes a medication, the ripples in the pond cause two others to scramble to compensate. 

I watch all of this go on around me like it was happening to someone else someplace else because so far, the cost of leaving still outweighs the cost of living, for which I remain perversely grateful.

I was in the primary care physician's office when one of the practice's nurses, with a pink floral print blouse over visible-from-space pink scrubs (with pink rubber-soled shoes), strawberry blond hair, and my sister Kara's skin (Kara can almost get a sunburn from a fluorescent light), came down the corridor in search of 'Loretta.'

To be clear, this was not the Loretta who "thought she was a cleaner but she was a frying pan" but, rather, a woman of advanced years who was a walking illustration of the word 'frail'.

From the way she walked towards the nurse, I realized Loretta had every intention of remaining exactly as she was, unless or until she improved. No retreat, No surrender looked like her mantra. As the nurse approached, as so often happens in doctor's offices, she asked her "How are you feeling?" not in a diagnostic spirit so much as making conversation between human beings. 

Loretta studied the young woman for no more than two beats, and offered, responding for all of us at some point in our lives, "I'm still kickin', just not as high."
Preach, sister!
-bill kenny