My Christmas Miracle

WARNING: You've read this before and repeatedly (on this date). I never tire of telling this story of my most wonderful Christmas Day and am neither deterred nor discouraged by the deafening silence with which my telling of it is greeted within the walls of my own house by my spouse and children. I care not a whit. 

I tell this tale because I love the telling and have lived within its happy ending for almost five decades. If you've heard or read this before and choose to not revisit it again, then move on and have yourself a merry little Christmas. This is what I called: 
  

My Christmas Story

I first spoke to the woman I was to marry forty-eight years ago, Christmas Night. I had seen her but hadn't worked up the nerve to speak to her a few weeks earlier, but I already knew I would marry her (to this day, I have no idea how I was so smart, but I was). 

I had been in (West) Germany only about two months, arriving shortly before Halloween, which, back in the day, wasn't a holiday of any kind in Germany at all-it was strictly a Yank Prank like Thanksgiving, only harder to explain to people who weren't American. 

Chris and I had started out drinking and feeling sorry for ourselves, me in the lead on that count (for being stuck in Germany for the holidays), earlier in the day in the Frankfurt am Main party district, Sachsenhausen, where what seemed like millions of people made passage from anywhere to anywhere else almost impossible.

Eventually, though I have no recollection how, we came to be more in mid-town, down the street from CBS Germany (though we didn't know that at the time) near Eschenheimer Tor. Because I am relentlessly competitive, I got much drunker much faster than Chris, who did a very good job looking out for me since family tradition, once I get my drunk on, I'm never confused with Mr. Congeniality. 

Chris and I were seated in a booth with a round bench around the table with room for plenty of other people, but they would have to move in as we had decided to remain on the ends. As the evening went on, our table filled up. When the woman who was to be my wife arrived with her girlfriend, there was really hardly any room left, so when she asked if she could be seated, I offered her my lap, and she accepted.

As quickly as she sat down, I offered, "Now that you're sitting on my lap, how about telling me your name?" and so it began, in a moment of suaveness never before (or again) seen on our planet. Cue the swelling music.   

In the decades since all of this happened, I've tried to calculate the number of actions and activities that had to take place, just so she and I could meet, but since I chose to be a liberal arts major, making sure I'd avoid using or needing math in my life, I cannot possibly execute the calculations.

I've long since given up trying to make sense of the world as it was or as it is. I will tell you I believe because that's how I was raised, and habit is often more lasting than logic, that there is a reason for everything we do and everything we fail to do. 

As attractive as I find the 'We're all bozos on this bus' approach to questions about divinity, humanity, and the universe at large, I can't really leave it there.

If Christmas is a time of love, and the night when I found mine, how can I not encourage you to be of good cheer and renew your faith even if you've yet to meet the person who completes you? So keep your eyes wide and your heart open. There's magic in the air if and when you want it.

-bill kenny

No Problems (?)

We just had the shortest day(light) of the year, and not a moment too soon, say I. Winter has barely started, and I'm sick of it already. It's not so much the snow and the cold as the darkness. 

Some people get SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder; I'm more liable to become CRANKED, Chronic Really Annoying Ninny, and the other words are made up, too. Seriously. You thought there was such an illness, and I was using the acronym? What was it Mr. Roark used to say? Oh yeah, got it now: brain so small if you put it in a mosquito's butt, it would roll around and make a noise like a bee-bee in a boxcar.

I'm a little short with people, testy, you might say, as the daylight disappears and that spring ahead fall back jazz didn't do much for me, and according to a person I know who says he's a farmer (he has the overalls for it), it didn't do much for him either. 

So who got helped? The folks who make batteries for the smoke alarms, since the commercials for adjusting your clock always seem to suggest, while you're up on the ladder adjusting the clock, check the smoke alarm and put in fresh batteries. How about if I sell the ladder and just remember to add or subtract an hour from whatever Mickey's hands say the time is, and we'll call it even?

But forty-eight hours from now, with living rooms across the country knee deep in ripped wrapping paper (the ultimate consumable? Sure gets close if it's not), almost imperceptibly the days will continue to slowly lengthen, a few moments at a time to start as we begin the steady climb back towards the light, even if the winter weather isn't prepared to relent or release. 

As a matter of fact, we tend to have the worst of the winter after the shortest day is past, so perhaps it's something more than only the darkness that's troubling. Maybe it's the wanting what we can't have or the not needing what we do have, or worst of all, not being able to tell the difference.

-bill kenny

Feel Like a Number

Rehabbing between doctors' visits provokes introspection on my part. I was counting the number of social networks I'm a member of, and by 'social' I don't mean civil, because for the most part we're not. I was impressed with the quantity, if not the quality, of many of the 'connections.' 

This is who we are. A sentient, self-aware species yearning to be individuals, right along with everyone else. Each of us, heck with that!, ALL of us, all seven billion or so on this planet, want to be able to rush to the shore or scream at the sky, 'Hey! Look at me!'

If there is a God, how do They possibly keep track of us all? I know that I need only look to the lilies of the field who neither toil nor weave, and I realize that not one swallow falls to earth without His knowledge, but am I the only one who has days like those of the fisherman who prays, 'Lord, Your ocean is so large, and my boat is so small'?

I spend more time online in conversation or interaction with real people, though at least in theory, the ones online are as real as those in the flesh and in the here and now. My children are very much at home in this Brave New World, barely remembering the quaint old days of dial-up and now part of the migratory electrons that are so many virtual meeting places. Each of us can stand alone-but it's easier to stand alone when you are together.

Maybe that's part of what separates us from the beasts (and all this time I thought it was these nifty thumbs), our knowledge of our finite future. The realization that tomorrow will dawn for some, though not all, of us, and that there will be a day when the last person who knows of our existence, themselves, passes from this earth, and we cease to be part of the communal context and conscience and become forgotten. 

And someone, somewhere scrolls over whatever has replaced what we now call this community of connectivity and marvels at the primitive beauty of that which we've left behind.
-bill kenny

Spellbound

"The night is darkening round me,

The wild winds coldly blow;

But a tyrant spell has bound me

And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending

Their bare boughs weighed with snow."

"And the storm is fast descending,

And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,

Wastes beyond wastes below;

But nothing drear can move me;

I will not, cannot go."
Emily Bronte

-bill kenny

 

Ixnay on the RistmasCay UsicMay

Starting with Paul McCartney's "Wonderful ChristmasTime," and including The Eagles' "Funky New Year," AC/DC's "Mistress for Christmas," Eartha Kitt's "Santa Baby," Lou Monte's "Dominick the Donkey," John Denver's "Please, Daddy (Don't Get Drunk This Christmas)," Iggy Pop's "White Christmas," (you thought I was making that one up?), Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" Bruce Springsteen's "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," and, of course, most definitely this one, 

And in case you hoped I'd forgotten, but I hadn't, this gem. 
-bill kenny

Attempt at My Annual Excorcism

This was almost the year I was going to step out of his shadow, except I knew I wouldn't because I chose not to. I've had enough reminders this past year that I'm running out of time to continue to not say all the things I always wanted to say to my father but never did. Somehow, I think he heard me anyway.

This is from long ago, though not quite long enough ago. I called it at the time:

And All this Time, the River Flowed

I don't ever remember celebrating my father's birthday as I grew up. Logic dictates that we, our mother (his wife), and my brothers and sisters (his children) must have done so as we did for everyone in our family, and yet every year I struggle and fail to find a single memory of a single moment of that day.

I mention that because had he lived, today would be his one hundred and second birthday (he died forty-four years ago), and I'd like to think he would be something I never felt he was while we shared the earth, proud of something, anything, I'd ever done. 

In this case, as was so true in our shared lives, I would be cheating (oh so slightly) as I'd hope he'd be proud of his grandchildren, Patrick and Michelle, who are my wife, Sigrid, and my children.

My most lasting memory of my father isn't really a memory of him at all, but a reminder of how life goes on within you and without you. Many years ago, while shopping, Sigrid found what she assured me was 'the perfect card for you to send to your dad for Father's Day.' This was all pre-Internet and global village days, remember, and actually it was back when it was only she and me and work (and sadly, not always in that order).

I don't remember the card, though this would be a better lesson for me if I had, but I signed it, after Sigrid had addressed it, put a stamp on it and had me throw it in my work bag (a shoulder-strapped book bag, of sorts, that carried, judging from its weight, most of the world's most curious and heaviest items).

And that's where the card stayed. Months later, and well past Father's Day, she was rooting through my bag, in search of something I had promised to bring home but had misplaced. Her theory, more often right than I'd like to admit, was that whatever it was, it could be found in my bag. The body of Jimmy Hoffa, the other gunmen on the grassy knoll, Weapons of Mass Destruction--check in the bag.

What she found that day, and registered a quiet note of disappointment with me because of the discovery, was the card we both thought I had mailed months earlier for Father's Day. Faced with the reality that I hadn't, all I could do was to mumble a promise to do so 'next year'.

You've guessed, of course, that my father died before 'next year' ever happened. As a self-centered oldest child, stiff-necked and incapable of bending, I had clashed with my father nearly every day of life-I think from the time I could talk, all I said to him was 'no.' 

I don't recall what we fought about or why, but they were bitter arguments, often ending in physical contact that made me more fully appreciate the weight of his hands, but I refused to yield anything at any time, and we passed months, if not years, exchanging as few words as possible for as long as possible. 

I had wished the worst for him countless times, and when notified by the Red Cross (I was still on active duty in the Air Force) that he was dead, my first reaction was overwhelming guilt.

The three oldest children had moved out and away, but our three youngest sisters and brother were left to be raised by our mother in circumstances vastly different from ours when we were their age, and I made no effort to ever learn or to attempt to mitigate or improve. 

I've never spoken to them about those times and know I'll never do so. More casualties in a war that should have ended decades ago, but continues even as I type this and feel the gorge rise in my veins as if "enough" weren't already, and finally, truly enough.

I am, like it or not, my father's son in ways neither of us could have ever seen or imagined. Perhaps he'd be proud of that, and yet I truly hope not. Life is a sum of all your moments--waking and dreaming; everything you've done or left undone; every word, said and unsaid and of all your prayers, answered but, most especially and finally, unanswered.
-bill kenny

Faith Walks on Broken Glass

We just observed the thirteenth anniverssary of the slaughter of innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut (a little more than an hour's drive from where I live).

Over the weekend, two people died, and nine were wounded on the Brown University campus in Providence, Rhode Island (even closer) to include two students who had previously witnessed school shootings firsthand.

Meanwhile, the U. S. Government has banned the use of the Calibri font, but can't do f*ck-all about guns.

Make it make sense.
-bill kenny

Paging Andy Dufresne

Decades ago, when my family and I were new to The Rose of New England, someone told me that 'Norwich will be really nice if they ever get it finished.' The implication was that we as a city were, and remain, very good at beginnings, but come up a little short on endings (in terms of both quality and quantity).

A lot of that is the nature of the beast, the post-truth culture in which we live. In recent years, the only thing we seem to hate paying more than taxes is attention. We've become people who expect a Pop-Tarts setting on our microwaves because the toaster just takes too darn long.

In November, we elected a brand-new Mayor, City Council, and Board of Education, and everywhere I look on social media platforms are gripes and other expressions of unhappiness because 'they' haven't 'fixed things' yet. Too many of us are like those four-year-olds in the second seat of the minivan heading for Grandma's for the holidays, 'Are we there yet?' 

And truth to tell, we're not. But cool your jets-we didn't wind up with a grand list on life support and a forest of 'for sale' signs in neighborhoods across the city overnight, and the way back on the road ahead won't happen by the time I start the next paragraph.

Though that would be cool, I suppose. And, admit it, a piece of you wanted it to be because hope springs eternal, which is good since we need a certain amount of confidence and optimism in the efforts being made by community leaders as they continue to make Norwich a (better) home for those of us who live here and for those who will one day join us.

Too often, too many of us confuse hope (which is a good thing, maybe the best of things; check with Andy) with a plan. They are very different. A plan has specific, measurable, achievable, realistic targets-which is why SMART communities have plans, and too many others have hope but little else. 

Planning involves candor-we need to be honest with one another, to speak in clear language that doesn't need a decoder ring, and where yes and no are clearly and universally understood. We need to accept that it's okay to disagree without becoming disagreeable, to evaluate an idea and not the person who offers it.

We need to trust one another to bring our individual best effort to the rest of our community, so we can more successfully turn your idea into our goal. But we must be here now, in person and in spirit. Questions are integral to the rebuilding process, and sticking around for the answers (pleasant and/or unpleasant), even if that means more questions, is the rest of the equation.

Norwich, like the rest of our country and the world, is becoming someplace else, someplace new and, depending on how we manage change, hopefully someplace better. Whether you arrived on the ship they called the Mayflower, or had it on the side of your moving van, we are all here now, and each of us owns the next Norwich, whatever it is to be. We welcome people who mean well, but more than that, we need those who do well. You may as well start to roll up your sleeves now, because we're going to need everyone's help.
-bill kenny

The Tune We Hum

Snow arrived here Saturday night and stuck around for most of Sunday. We ended with a couple of inches, not that I would know, as I didn't shovel any of it. My failing kidneys mean I get to watch the snow fall, but I would be exhausted if I tried to shovel it. 

Our son hired someone to clear our walkways so his doddering old man doesn't end up face-first in a snowbank (causing the plow drivers clearing the streets to plow around me; they hate that). 

Today's a day of hanging around waiting for the phone to ring and someone to tell me what time I need to show up for a laparoscopic procedure at some point tomorrow to facilitate peritoneal dialysis, which has moved from a hypothetical discussion to an in-my-face reality.   

Yep, this year is winding down in a hurry, and I'm dancing as fast as I can.
When's the music start?
-bill kenny 

You Can't Carry It with You...

In 17 days, the first day of the next year will be drawing to a close. How is that even possible? Two thousand and twenty-five was just arriving, filled with challenges, hopes, and opportunities, and here we are with the remnants of all that tracked across the living room carpet like so much of so what.

We can blame our national leadership for the politics of anger, though there's enough partisan rancor on all sides of the aisle to go around. For my part, I'm exhausted, physically and emotionally. It's like I'm running through soup and sand, my feet never quite lifting from or clearing the ground, each stride a broken parody of what it once was, with my arms pushing through air I can taste rather than feel.

And the harder I try, the farther behind I fall. I started out beside you but have spent the year watching you disappear before me, long 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 year I've had 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 that the shocked realization of regret, the next time can be the last, always brings with it as a constant companion.

Like many these past months, I blinked at critical moments and lost sight of the important in the rush of the real as the latter became surreal and unreal before disappearing by the dawn's early light. 

The year in which I had vowed to sort myself out has nearly run its course, and the next one will be over even faster than this one, with less to show for it, as the distance already traveled never equals the distance yet to go. 

The sense of adventure is replaced by dread as the days draw down and the year ends. The toast we'll make for much success in the new year assumes both will exist but accepts the implication that neither is promised. "The dog days are over. The dog days are done." But it's what comes next that keeps me awake.
-bill kenny 

Nearly There

Despite what feels like the hateful and hate-filled utterances some public figures have offered too often in this Season of Hope, today, Gaudete Sunday remains a favorite of mine (since my earliest school days).

A lot of the warmth of our human hearts, regardless of your beliefs, is reflected by the holiday seasons that fall together this time of year, somehow reminding us, I hope, that we are beyond our differences, very much the same people.

We have too many horns in the cacophony of life and can most certainly use another light, especially in this, the most hopeful of seasons.
-bill kenny

All That Is Left...

Tomorrow is the thirteenth anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, something many of us couldn't grasp when it happened, and I confess, I still don't "get." 

I'm not any smarter now than I was then, except to acknowledge that I'm not any smarter. and am no closer to understanding. That I will never be is of very small solace.

I cannot imagine how long tomorrow will be for someone who suffered the loss of a child, a husband or a wife, a son or daughter, but I do know that in Newtown, Connecticut, everyone trying to heal will hurt again.

For a small town whose residents will always have broken hearts, tomorrow will just be the next day in the unending tragedy which will only end when all memory of what happened has gone. And that will never happen.

Those murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School weren't 'victims,' they were people, mostly incredibly 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.

Even if you have a problem with God, maybe a truce is in order so you can remember the twenty-six angels who entered heaven thirteen years ago tomorrow.

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

Did They Beat the Drum Slowly?

Holidays are when we gather our family closer, no matter where they are. For many families, there's an empty place at an otherwise festive table for one who is serving or one who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country and never came home.

Tomorrow, please consider joining those who will pause to Remember, Honor, and Teach at annual Wreaths Across America observances across our nation.
 

There's a better than good chance that there's a ceremony not too far from where you live, but should you be in my neck of the woods, Norwich, Connecticut, on what will undoubtedly be a cold day, you're welcome to join the American Legion Post 104 Taftville, and friends, tomorrow at eleven o'clock at the Sacred Heart Cemetery in Taftville. 

And while the nationwide annual observance is tomorrow, the Wreaths Across America mission to Remember, Honor and Teach lasts all year long, far beyond the single day in December and wreath-laying ceremonies. All throughout the year, Wreaths Across America works in many ways to show veterans and their families that we will not forget.
-bill kenny

Ice (Not in My Drink)

The last week or so here in Southern New England, the mornings have been brisk (Tuesday it was about fifteen degrees (F) shortly before noon when I took the photo, below, of the Lower Falls at the Yantic River, a short walk from our house). I'm starting to think our children inherited their love for warm temps from me. Where they got their taste for Rastafarian Country & Western music from is a puzzlement to us all. 

The weather's been crisp but with no snow. As I'm not asking for a sled this year, again, I'm not terribly upset about the lack of white stuff. I'm proud of how well I can control my emotions when every morning I look out the window, don't see snow, and don't break down and cry. Inside, our house went from the day after the first Saturday in December to CHRISTMAS in null comma nichts. 

My German wife is the world's most organized person-she has transformed a lazy dullard into, okay, a 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).

Lower Falls of the Yantic River in Norwich, Connecticut

The letter "F" is also the beginning of a word, and part of a phrase, I use a lot from around Thanksgiving through the end of the year (and not fa-la-la-la). I was never good at making or having friends when I was a kid, a lifelong habit as it happens, so when I watch people the other eleven months of the year cross the street rather than talk to me, as 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.

Sigrid addresses cards, organizes the holiday shopping, shops for gifts for all our neighbors, and decorates our small evergreen tree in the front yard with some kind of bulbs and decorations. I help. I stay out of her way. 

In recent years, our family has returned to its 'original size', as our children, Patrick and Michelle, are themselves adults and lead their own lives with their partners. On Christmas Eve, we'll have gift opening complete with oohing and ahhing and lots of 'you shouldn't have' (mostly from her as I shower her with all kinds of stuff I think she'll like, festively wrapped, very nearly). 

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

Hello, I Must Be Going

I've become the THIRD cranky old guy in the balcony of the Muppet Show, along with Statler and Waldorf, yelling at the whippersnappers who walk on my lawn or lean on the hood of my Ford Gran Torino. And from what I can decipher, I'm not the only one in a bad mood.

I'm less than enthused with the current leadership (or what passes for it) in our nation's capital, but I am too feeble and old to do anything more than complain about it. And if you voted for the Grifter and Grafters, put your hand up. Now put it over your mouth. That's how much of your complaint that I'm zinging Trumpelstiltskin I'm interested in hearing (= none). 

HOWEVER, if you're a gig-economy person or a creative type who chooses to not be bound by corporate chains, you might want to check out this link for an easy-breezy (relatively) way to get a long-term visa in a generous number of European countries, where in most of them, Trump isn't spoken.

If you're someone whom people tell where to go, now you have some destinations.
-bill kenny     

Don't Forget Your Books

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." 

Norwich takes great pride in its schools and in the achievement of its students and, as measured by the Connecticut Mastery Tests (CMT)even as the costs to achieve that success continue to escalate. 

We have learned well the lesson that public education doesn't merely educate a public, but also creates one, as our schools have become the centerpiece of their neighborhoods, regarded the same way the fingers of the hand look to the thumb. We may have thirty-plus languages in our community, but we all only have one school.

In the Industrial Age, mill operators looked for rivers to power their factories. In the Age of Technology, companies sought rail, air, and highway connections to ship raw materials and finished products to and from markets. 

Today, in the Knowledge Age, with the convergence of technologies and applications, business, be it government, art, commerce, or science, can be conducted from anywhere, and a successful education becomes essential in creating agile, life-long learners who can constantly and consistently adapt and adopt.

If this doesn't sound like the schoolhouse we attended as children, that's because it isn't. In our day, schools and the communities they served were separate worlds, but today, everything, in many ways, has become everything else. 

Our children enter schools designed for a different world and a different time, where events happened sequentially and not simultaneously; where rote learning was group learning and progress could be precisely mapped and measured.

Today's students bring different learning styles that require flexibility of instruction and classroom interaction as a minimum. What else is needed will be discovered as all of us across the community sit together, and with educators and other key members of our city, to build the next school system, not just from bricks and mortar, but from skills, tools, techniques, and opportunities that both reflect and simultaneously shape the world in which our children and theirs will live.

We have both a new City Council and Board of Education, whose members will grow into their roles and responsibilities. There will be discussions, dialogue, and probably no small amount of acrimony in developing the budgets both for the city and for our school system. Happens all the time. 

There will be a lot of hard work because tomorrow cannot be built in a day, but rather, will be lived one day at a time for the rest of our lives. We all want it to be tomorrow today, but none of us wants it to start at this moment.

-bill kenny

"Think about Me Every Now and Then...

I offer this every year, so if you've been here before on this date, please indulge me. Thank you. 

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, 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 were part of something the British called skiffle, who 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 when so many others had faded away because they had the talent and 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 the 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 a 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 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, but most especially today. 

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 that bastard, Mark David Chapman, so abruptly and completely ended all those years ago. 

For many who never knew the man, except through his music, today 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

Long Hairs. No Hairs. Everybody. Everywhere.

A memory of the season, and the Second Sunday of Advent for me at least.

Somewhere on the way to here and now, I lost my way. Not as in shuffled off the beaten path and got lost, but defiantly chose to not do as those who came before me had so chosen for generations. Too stiff-necked to this day to acknowledge my failings and weaknesses, I'm often in doubt but never in error. At least in my own mind.

Advent is a season of preparation; for the devout, it is for the coming of the Savior. The annual path to the birth of Christ began last Sunday, and I know the calendar and the ritual. But I've never been quite sure what it is people like me are doing or supposed to do as we flail about seeking land and trying to keep our heads above water theologically.

I envy those who bundle up and head out for early Mass, with confession beforehand, and who can then leave the church fortified for their week ahead. I miss the comfort of the ritual and the sense of shared belonging. I fill up my hollow days with noise to distract me from hearing the approaching roar. 

I've never been clear if I should look to the future with anticipation or fear. However, I do understand I'll find out soon enough and far sooner than planned.

-bill kenny