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

Immortal for Immoral Reasons

It was a Sunday morning on the East Coast, eighty-four years ago tomorrow, when the world as we had known it changed and became the world we know now. Our nation, which had struggled for over a decade to recover its economic equilibrium after a worldwide collapse on a now-distant Black Friday, was still righting itself while half a world away, in the early morning hours, war came to America.

On December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. Most of the rest of the world had long been engaged and engorged in what historians now call World War II as German tanks roared across Europe and through Northern Africa, and the Japanese Co-Prosperity Hemisphere spread across Asia.

Shortly after eight o'clock that morning, the USS Arizona, taking a direct hit, sank in nine minutes, killing its entire crew of 1,177 Sailors. When the attack on Pearl Harbor ended, eight Navy battleships had been damaged, and four had been sunk. Also sunk or damaged were three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and a mine layer. Almost 200 (188 to be exact) U.S. aircraft were destroyed, and 2,459 Americans were killed. Another 1,282 had been wounded.

Some sailors were trapped in ships that had sunk. Two days after the attacks, rescuers found thirty-two sailors alive inside the USS Oklahoma, but it was far too late for those aboard her sister, USS West Virginia. Shipyard workers rebuilding the raised battleship discovered marks on bulkheads below decks to indicate some sailors survived for seventeen days after the attack.

All of those stories are part of the larger story of the United States of America, which, after its own War of Independence, strove and succeeded more often than not to be in Splendid Isolation in the world community. Our involvement in World War I, while intense and decisive, had been brief in comparison to so many other nations. That was to not be repeated in World War II.

As a result of the efforts of our grandparents and parents, after World War II, how the world looked at the United States changed as well. We emerged in the aftermath as a superpower and leader of what we called for decades the "Free World." What we are today is all part of a world that came to be as a result of Pearl Harbor.

And we learned again a lesson from throughout our history: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or as Frank Loesser wrote in 1942, "Down went the gunner-a bullet was his fate. Down went the gunner, then the gunner's mate. Up jumped the sky pilot, gave the boys a look, and manned the gun as he laid aside The Book, shouting Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!"

-bill kenny

Adding Some Merry

The skies are getting increasingly more slate-grey while the days get darker and shorter sooner, and the temperatures continue to drop while winter makes its presence felt, despite the calendar, across New England ahead of its official start way later this month. 

I'm not a fan of the snow and the cold, but I will point out that perhaps not so coincidentally, more light and brightness is coming from within and without each of us as the joy of the holiday season starts to unfold a little more and accelerate as each day passes. 

And, as Small Business Saturday last weekend showed, we're just getting started when it comes to celebrating the season. This week, we really get serious because again, as the kick-off to First Friday Norwich, this Friday, it's the 34th Annual Lighting of City Hall, starting at five with Santa flipping the switch, slated for six o'clock. 

If recent years are any indication, we may need a bigger downtown as hundreds and hundreds (and more) of us pour into every nook and cranny around City Hall for the carols, the singalongs and (of course) the countdown to and lighting of one of the most beautiful public buildings in all of New England (and when it gleams like a beacon, flanked by the two churches, throughout the holiday season it is, in my biased, even more lovely). 

And then afterward, instead of heading home, why not enjoy the ever-expanding attractions and activities across Chelsea as the artists and artisans of First Friday show off and share? 

Last Year's "Light up City Hall"

All that chatter you've been hearing and reading about of an ongoing revival and renaissance across downtown isn't wishful thinking, it's concrete and brick and truer now than it was this time a year ago (and the year before that, if you're keeping track) and continues rolling merrily along because so many new people, enthusiastic beginners I like to call them, are staking their claim and working as hard as they can to make their piece of Norwich something special and something worth coming home to and not just for the holidays, though that's certainly a good start.

Sponsored by the Greater Norwich Area Chamber of Commerce, First Friday is a convenient label to write on your monthly calendar, but the attractions and events are an ever-changing delight. It's a collaboration among the galleries, theatres, businesses, and civic organizations allying with local artists to include painters, sculptors, actors, musicians, culinary experts, authors, and photographers to bring each of us a night they hope we'll long remember and strive to equal on any and all of the other nights of the month that aren't First Friday.

If you tend to only go through downtown on your way to someplace elsewhere, you've got an evening awaiting you that won't have enough hours in it for all the exhibits you can check out, places to have a quick (or a leisurely) bite or perhaps to share a glass of cheer, or adult beverage of your choice, and you'll wonder, with good reason, why you haven't stopped in sooner, and more frequently, and longer and (see where this going?).

Gone but not forgotten, the Christmas Rose

And I haven't even mentioned the Winterfest Parade starting Saturday afternoon at four on Main Street near Otis Library, Well, except now I have, I guess, and after I promise to see you there if I don't see you at City Hall Friday night, I'll return you to your regularly scheduled holiday season already in progress.
-bill kenny 

So This Is Christmas....

...And what have you done?

Another year over

And a new one just begun.

 

And so this is Christmas (war is over)
For weak and for strong (if you want it)
For rich and the poor ones (war is over)
The world is so wrong (now).
-John Lennon

-bill kenny

 

When Someone Starts Talking in the Middle of the Song

It's a little weird. I've been retired for a little more than six and a half years, but this morning I have the most important interview of my life, so far. 

I've been battling and losing to chronic kidney disease for several years, with my neurologist using all of her skill and modern medicine to stave off the inevitable.

We (meaning me) have now reached the inevitable.

I met with a physician ten days ago to finalize the arrangements for surgery to place a catheter in my lower stomach, so that in the New Year, I can start peritoneal dialysis. This morning, I have interviews with two different doctors to screen me for placement on a transplant list.    

I have no idea what to wear to the interviews or even what's involved. Between my age and my comorbidities, I'm at a disadvantage in terms of consideration. I hope I can make it up in the talent contest and swimsuit competition (maybe not the latter).

Fingers crossed.
-bill kenny

 

Unaccustomed As I Am to Bragging

Aside from something coming in the mail (or shipped, I don't know which), as of 1600 (4 PM) yesterday afternoon, I have finished my Christmas shopping for this year. A feat I have never in my seventy-three years of life on earth previously accomplished.

I'll pause to let that achievement sink in. 

Thank you. 

My gift wrapping is nearly this good. Nearly.

Okay, I only shopped for our children, their spouses, and my wife. 

I should advise them all in advance that I wrapped their gifts myself. I've become quite adept at this gift-wrapping thing after a crash course at the North Pole under the tutelage of the Jolly Old Elf Hisself.

I'm bracing for an outpouring of gratitude later this month. Bruce is right; it's hard to be a saint in the city.
-bill kenny

Last Month of the Year

As a retiree, I have trouble keeping track of days of the week, time of day, and the minutaie of everyday life. Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, I had a text wishing me a wonderful holiday and had to ask the person sending the well-wishes who it was. It was my oldest younger sister, Ouch.

Anyway. New month, new me, well, not really, but you know what I mean. 

I sprang out of bed this morning at not nearly the crack of dawn (I spent decades getting up in the wee small hours convinced that whoever it was I was working for at the time would collapse if mine wasn't the first car in the lot in the morning and the last one at night. Such a dope.), checked my blood sugar and my blood pressure, then took all my morning meds (it's a full handful in case you were curious). 

I then got ready to do nothing. Not close to nothing, Not nearly nothing, but absolutely nothing while waiting for lunch. Well, except for reading this. 

Don't know about you, but I never realized how arduous time wasting could be unless you practice. The trouble with doing nothing or close to nothing is figuring out when you're finished. 
-bill kenny

Waiting Hopefully

We've had a lot of man-made events this past week as the pace of the holiday season accelerates. 

Thanksgiving Thursday, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and then there's today, the First Sunday of Advent. 

Truly, the embodiment of 'one of these days is not like the other.'

Feel free to use your tablet, smartphone, or that new computer you purchased at a special offer to look up exactly why.
-bill kenny

Like a Break in the Battle

We live in a most amazing age, or could if we could get out of our own way.

As residents of a planet where, via the electric fire of television, we watched the murder of a President, a walk (actually more like a skip) on the moon, the tearing down of a Wall that divided a continent and a nation, and the destruction of buildings and thousands of lives in a flash of jet fuel, steel and glass, it's sometimes easy to forget we are, each of us, skin- covered miracles.

Helping underscore this assumption (actually for me, more like an article of faith) I can offer you only one example as 'proof', conceding I don't know that it proves anything but, everyday we get up and amaze and amuse, often in unequal parts, the other seven billion or so of us on this ant farm (with beepers) we call home.

Some days are so hard, it's almost impossible to celebrate yourself, no matter how important that is to do--it's okay, watch this, and celebrate someone else, and know we can do this, too.
-bill kenny

A Modest Black Friday Proposal

I was going to get up before I went to bed and write something, just in case you thought I might do that in honor of today being Black Friday in US retail, and then I remembered that my Mom raised crazy children, but not stupid ones. 

I was impressed, watching all the TV commercials yesterday during the Macy's Day Parade and reading the papers with all the inserts (the newspapers actually looked like the Sunday newspapers in terms of thickness, didn't they?) at the early hours, so many stores had for today. And the rewards that so many offered for sleep deprivation.

But what if your city hall opened at 4 A.M. and gave you a 25% discount on overdue/past-due property taxes? Would you line up the way you stood out in front of Big Box Joint this morning to get one of the 75-inch TVs they had for under $500? 

Or what if the state DMV office offered a driver's license or vehicle registration at half off to the first 100 folks through the door when they opened at five? Heck with that, what if DMV just let you pick the photo for the license instead of keeping it a secret until after it's been laminated? My photo ALWAYS looks like a raccoon having a seizure because of the black rings under my eyes and how their camera is designed to always catch me in mid-blink. 

Finally, what if the IRS gave you a 10% discount on your earned income credit for stopping in between 4 and 6 AM? Would the line in front of their building look like that hungry mob circling the Target store, trying to score this year's electronic accessory,  or some of those size 44 Triple-E jump boots?

You ponder all of that. I'm heading out to church because if I get there before 5 AM, they have a twofer on plenary indulgences and I need all the indulging I can get. 

-bill kenny

Grateful for this Sheltered Space

Maybe where you live the preparations are already underway. Maybe you're borrowing chairs from neighbors who were planning on borrowing them from you. A search party to locate card tables has been formed, and the aromas already emanating from the kitchen are causing mouths to water.

Thanksgiving may be the only holiday in America where many of us become, if just for the day, math majors as we try to compute how many hours, how large a turkey needs to be in the oven at how many degrees so that it can feed a houseful of family and friends we've invited to join us for dinner. And let's not forget how many side dishes and who's bringing what--all important elements on our national Day of Thankfulness.

No matter how rough times have been leading up to this week, and for a lot of us they sure have been tough, we still make that extra effort as we put a smile on a care-worn face and enjoy the warmth of home and hearth.

Let's face it, the smiles have been in short supply in recent years. Many of us have seen local businesses fade and then close, and neighbors move on and away in search of something more than we have right here, right now. And in those households still here, a lot of us are doing a little more with a little less than we did last year.

Despite what you may think, we're the fortunate ones. When you talk to those who help out at food pantries and kitchens such as Saint Vincent de Paul Place, they'll tell you how the need is again greater this year than it was last year, and we all remember how last year, too many were in need of too much.

And while the big headlines on newspaper front pages in recent weeks scream about the legislative Armageddon to come in Washington, DC, in January, closer to home, many of us whisper and worry about the cost of heating oil and a winter that has yet to arrive.

On a brighter note, next Saturday is the Winterfest Light Parade, followed by Light Up City Hall. 

Ready or not, the holidays are here, and as we gather family and friends closer to celebrate, hopefully in the rush and crush of events we can remember strangers are friends we haven't yet met and light up a life the way we'll light up City Hall as we give one another hope when we celebrate Thanksgiving.

-bill kenny

A Lot of Things Have Happened....

It may be slightly premature, and in light of the year some of us have already had and the forecast of challenging times yet to come, perhaps even presumptuous, but all the best to you and yours as the holiday season begins in earnest.

We can lose sight of the blessings for which to be grateful as events blur as they rush one into the other with tomorrow, Thanksgiving, chased by Black Friday mall sales that start in the middle of the night, as seasonal celebrations intensify and temperatures drop.

Instead of enjoying a moment to appreciate the gifts of hearth and home that we have, we sometimes look to the lives of the famous and fortunate and yearn for that which we don't have. The ringing of the Salvation Army kettle collection bell doesn't cause us to count our change along with our blessings so much as to worry about for whom the bell tolls and when it might be ringing for us. We should be cautious, but not fearful.

We have much to be thankful for as a city. We have hundreds of volunteers, not just for the lighting of City Hall and the Winter Festival Parade, but also as coaches in youth sports, advisors for after-school activities, and members of boards and committees involved in nearly every aspect of our municipality. Each of us has a neighbor who has a community project, and each one of our neighbors can say the same.

We have professional emergency medical services and own our own public utility. We have teachers and schools the envy of cities ten times our size, a community college that calls Norwich home, a spectacular public park, and a location between Boston and New York, straddling two popular casinos in the middle of Mystic Coast and Country here in the Northeast Corridor, like few other places.

We've not yet turned the corner as a city, but we're getting there with every new participant in a neighborhood watch, every new small business that opens, and every time someone new moves into one of our neighborhoods. Norwich in years past waited for the world-now we are ready to be a part of a larger world, and to be more active and engaged with it and one another than we have in decades.

There are challenges ahead, and perhaps not the easiest of times awaiting us. But we should be thankful we have one another and are developing the confidence to live out loud. Don't mourn what we've missed, celebrate what's yet to be. To those whom much is given, much is expected-and we should expect much more from our city and from ourselves, not just this holiday but everyday.
-bill kenny 

A Lesson Learned (Finally)

I've been around for quite some time, and far longer than many might have wished (it's okay, I feel the same about you). I grew up in a 'get along by going along' environment but have discovered as I've aged without mellowing that all of that is just not worth it anymore.

Now, when I hear or see bullshit (insert your own example; in recent years, I've taken to citing the White House), I just call it out. I don't have the time left on earth to waste being patient, polite, or trying to please people. And as it happens, I'm not alone.  

"Neural Pruning." Sounds like a grunge band from Seattle.
The merch is fire, I'll bet.
-bill kenny

Phor Sure?

I love Major League Baseball, not just the season that goes on forever, but also the off-season, or the Hot Stove League, activities. Even when some of the activities that catch my eye have nothing to do with the players on the ball clubs, I'm drawn in. 

Not sure what to make of this headline: Phillies sue to block Phanatic from becoming ‘free agent’

I cannot claim to be a Phillies' fan, unless we're talking about the sandwich shop down the street from my house. And to be honest, I'm not sure how the Phantic could eat an IVO, or down a couple or three of the Cheesesteak Jawns without getting some on his fur.   

I'm hoping that the lawsuit doesn't give Mr. Met any big ideas. New York City needs all the love it can get.
-bill kenny

Phillies sue to block Phanatic from becoming ‘free agent’

A Puff and Stuff

Because I stopped twenty-nine years ago (on 30 September 1996), last Thursday's Great American Smoke-Out Day went by in a puff of --well, you know what kind of puff. I smoked three packs a day for about twenty-two years. I started out smoking Pall Mall Reds (my father had smoked them for all the years growing up as a kid that he smoked before he quit). 

They were cigarettes that other new smokers (we were all college kids, and let's just admit that smoking tobacco was akin at times to a palate cleansing exercise and leave it at that, okay?) were reluctant to bum as they were unfiltered, so you needed to dry lip, or you flossed to remove tobacco from between your teeth.

I'm not a former smoker-I'm a recovering smoker. I don't know if it was the nicotine or the tobacco or whatever chemicals were supposedly put in cigarettes, but I was, and am, addicted to and always will be. Even to this day, I miss smoking a cigarette, despite everything I know and believe to be true about the health dangers associated with it. 

And, hand on my heart but also on my wallet, smoking now is a danger to my precarious financial health. (Now sounding like an old codger, mainly because I am) I can remember back in the day, at the Air Force commissary at Rhein Main, buying a carton of cigarettes for (maybe) six dollars. By then, I'd traded up through Pall Mall Golds to Benson & Hedges. Now, if I'm reading the signs correctly, it's about twice what it was for a pack with well over half of it in taxes, federal, state, and whatever anyone can get away with.

I was in the last generation to watch TV ads for cigarettes and remember slogans like "I'd Rather Fight than Switch!", "A Silly Millimeter Longer, 101" and "Come to Where the Flavor Is". Look at gyroscopes of old TV shows, to include newscasts, and you'll see Chet Huntley (of Huntley and Brinkley) smoking on the news set, on camera. Cigarettes were everywhere-there were "Show Us Your Lark Pack" commercials that eventually provoked the genius who was Stan Freberg to respond as only he could.

I stopped completely because I knew if I didn't, I'd die from some health condition created or aggravated by smoking. That my health is so poor now, but that none of my maladies have anything to do with cigarettes, makes me smile, albeit ruefully, at how the Lord's sense of humor is so often puckish (and 'p' isn't my first choice for the first letter).

The biggest challenge after I stopped was what to do in the car while driving. It was the most natural thing in the world for me after putting the car in gear, just to light up a cigarette, and for many months after I stopped smoking, I struggled. 

It was odd, too, to get used to how food tasted when you finally descended from the cloud of smoke. On the other hand, I didn't miss that 'licked an ashtray' feeling in my mouth when I first awakened. And oddest of all, and to this day I don't get it, all the years I smoked, I couldn't smell cigarettes on someone else, simply unable to detect it, and now, I get almost ill when standing next to someone on an escalator who was just outside on a smoke break.

I try to take it easy on people who continue to smoke, because I appreciate how hard it is to give it up, even for a day, even with all we know about what happens to us if we can't stop. So if you struggled with the nicotine monkey and were able to keep him at bay for the day, good on you, and maybe today, you can take another step. 

And if you tried but couldn't do it, don't worry-you have the power to make any day you want your very own smoke-out day. Nowadays, you can kick the butts in the butt, if you so desire. Save your Zippo for those live shows now that you've sworn off cell phones.
-bill kenny

An Unhappy Recollection

I first offered this some time ago, and because I cannot think of anything better to say, I'll simply repeat myself. I've reached an age when that's becoming more frequent and not unexpected.

A Morose and Melancholy Memory

As I recall, we had already had lunch and recess on the closed-off portion of what I recall was Division Street. The grammar school had been built less than three years earlier in what had been a vacant lot near the high school on the city block in New Brunswick that St Peter's Parish owned. 

The church, flanked by the convent on the far side and the rectory on the near side, was actually two blocks away, down the street and up the hill from the railroad overpass across from Makaronis' Town House Restaurant and next door to Albany Wines and Liquors, at the train station where my father and hundreds like him congregated workday mornings (and for my father, Saturdays, too) and traveled first by Pennsylvania Railroad, later (after the merger of two failing lines), Penn Central and still later (when Uncle Sam 'rescued' rail travel in the Northeast Corridor) on Amtrak into "the city.' 

I was in the fifth grade of St. Peter's School.  I learned years later that, despite the name carved in marble on the front of the building, the possessive case was inaccurate and incorrect. But no one had yet invented industrial Wite-Out, and when I first returned to the USA, I drove through my old hometown one weekend while my family was still in Germany, looking perhaps, for myself and the person I was then in the hopes of better understanding the man I had become. The school name, in all its incorrectitudeness, was still there. There have to be some constants in the universe, I suppose.

Our classroom was in the basement, on the Division Street side of the building (as opposed to the courtyard side, facing the high school). We had been working on our penmanship. Our school was a firm practitioner of the A.N. Palmer method of cursive writing. 

Those of us in third through fifth grade loved the name of the writing style and found it incredibly funny for what it almost sounded like. We assumed the Sisters of Charity (a misnomer of some magnitude, I should note), our teachers, weren't in on the joke.

I can see the classroom. Sister Rosita's desk was in the front, centered and in front of the blackboard that took up the entire wall behind her, facing in the far corner, to her left, the entrance and exit door in the back of the classroom. Our desks faced her, arranged in academic order. 

That is, the student with the best report card was in the far upper left corner at the head of the column, with everyone through to those who failed lunch and recess at the far lower right-hand side of the room, as defined by Sister Rosita. Fifty-two students of varying abilities and enthusiasms--all blank slates waiting to be drawn upon. 

Everything in that classroom was defined and controlled by Sister Rosita with the occasional support and intervention of Sister Mary Immaculata, the principal, whose office was upstairs (no talking in the stairwells! no running in the halls!) who existed, aside from report card day, as a voice on the cloth-covered speaker in the upper left corner of the classroom, above the blackboard alongside the American flag to which we pledged Daily Allegiance. 

Earlier in the week, before lining up to board the buses that took us home (and there was always a snobbery of those who walked home, the townies from New Brunswick, towards those of us from the developments in Franklin Township, beyond the city's borders) we had all watched, again, the Civil Defense film on what to do in the event of an Atomic Attack.

I remember the sound of the film threading through the projector gate almost drowning out the assault music soundtrack laid down by the 101st Airborne String Quartet over the ominous narration of someone like Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (no one had ever heard of Sr.; which being a Junior, I had more than casual curiosity as to how that had happened. I still use the Jr. with my name even though my father died in 1981). 

Orchestra crescendo, vivid orange flash that filled the screen and turned it red and then black, and something about turning away from the windows and putting our heads under our desks. Most of us were ten and eleven and hadn't spent a lot of time confronting thoughts of our own mortality. We weren't thoughtless-we just hadn't thought about it. It made for a quiet bus ride that day.

All of that evaporated as the loudspeaker crackled as Sister Mary Immaculata activated the microphone at her desk. We waited and then waited some more as, instead of her usual imperious summoning of a hapless miscreant for a punishment of a real or sometimes imagined offense, there was the hum of an open microphone and the sound of a radio or television, whose volume was very low. Sister Mary Immaculata was, for the first time in my history at St Peter's, at a loss for words. We all leaned forward as if willing her to speak, and perhaps it was as long as thirty seconds later that our efforts were rewarded. 

She started slowly and softly in a tone of voice I had never heard from her, or I think, from anyone. As I was to learn later in my own life and to use myself, it's the voice we use to explain events and occurrences that defy explanation. 

She started by telling us the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (with whom every child of the Roman Catholic faith in the United States had an unspoken and unbreakable bond. He was our President; first Roman Catholic, the first President who didn't look like our grandfather, a President with a pretty wife whom our moms liked a lot, with small children (younger than us), had been shot in Dallas, Texas. 

All of us at St Peter's School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and (very probably) across the United States and (maybe) around the world, bowed our heads and clasped our hands as Sister Mary Immaculata led us through The Rosary--the entire Rosary, not just a decade. 

That was how I knew something more horrible than what she was telling us had happened, was really happening. I'm not clear if we had completely finished when she interrupted herself, struggling to remain composed, to tell us the President had died. We said another Rosary for the repose of his soul, but my heart wasn't in it. 

I don't think I'd ever wondered until then why God didn't answer every prayer the way a petitioner wanted (I'm pretty sure I didn't use the word 'petitioner') but as the afternoon abruptly ended and we all went home to participate in the national seance provided by the three TV networks (no cable news, no satellite, no video on demand, no Internet) almost all in black and white (color television was a luxury almost beyond measure), I knew without knowing the world as I had lived in it had ended, not changed. 

I looked at the calendar this morning with regret and incredulity in equal measure. I, and everyone who was born, lived, and perhaps died in the USA in the sixty-two years since President Kennedy's murder, will never know what we and our world would have looked like had we prayed harder or longer or louder. 

I'm not sure I ever prayed again, or in the hope of my prayer being answered. And after so many years and tears, I'm not sure I would still know how. I remember that kid, head bowed, at the front of the room, and I envy him for the strength his faith gave him in such a dark hour, knowing the darkness was not only beginning but had already won. 
-bill kenny