Joyce Kilmer Would Approve

Many, if not most, of us are familiar with the poem "Trees." 

I've always enjoyed it for, among other reasons, because I grew up old near New Brunswick, New Jersey, the birthplace of its author, Joyce Kilmer.

Joyce Kilmer, 1886-1918

Halfway around the world, actually 10,334 miles, in Melbourne, Australia it is possible, and perhaps even therapeutic, to do more than look at trees.

Not performative but more transformative and, I'd argue, a better way for us to get along with some of the life forms with whom we share this planet.
-bill kenny

Your Mother Should Know

I came of age before the Internet. 

"Ask your mother," was our generation's "Google it." And if Mom (or Dad) didn't know what you were asking about, it was probably NOT worth knowing. 

Now, with all the information in the history of mankind just a keystroke away, I'm at a loss as to why there's so much UnKnowledge in the world. UnKnowledge is when you believe something to be true no matter how much factual data to the contrary is presented. 

And, yes, the Trump White House would, in my opinion, be Ground Zero for UnKnowledge; from low-flow toilets killing whales who got cancer from windmills while tracking the fifty million one hundred million condoms the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) provided to Hamas. And don't come at me with how those undocumented immigrants are driving up the price of eggs.

Turns out, not even the Gulf of Mexico is safe from UnKnowledge and don't get me started on those hosers from the 51st state, Canada. But even though so much of what is online is wrong, we'll never stop looking stuff up there now.

Sure, we could go to the library and actually research a topic, but in an era (or is it error?) where ignorance is just as good (if not better) than knowledge, why bother? Be like Elmo Muskrat who makes up his own facts, and why not? Who better to support his positions than facts he created himself? I look at that and go 'Why didn't I think of that?' 

It's like Firesign Theatre's "Everything You Know Is Wrong" is actually "America For Dummies." Just watch an hour of anybody's TV news (okay, maybe not One America Network; they're full-on crazy), but anybody else's and you'll feel you're on a Gray Line tour of Hitler's Bunker during the Fall of Berlin while on acid. 

And we're only a month into this version of "Make America Great Again. Again." There's forty-seven (or more if the rumors are true, and why woudn't they be?) more months of this to go. Life in these United States right now is, I suspect, akin to be waterboarded, but with UnKnowledge.  

All this time I thought Knowledge is Power. And now there's an energy shortage.
-bill kenny

And I'm Not Waiting Any Longer

Winter's seemingly endless shades of grey, howling winds, and unfriendly weather make me morose (as opposed to less rose; a little English language joke there for you as a bonus).  

I'm nearing the beginning of my seventy-third year of residency here on The Big Blue Marble. The inexorable march of time and the gallant though losing battle with ailments, illnesses, and injuries finds me more often melancholy than is my wont as my Natal Anniversary approaches.

As a kid, when I had the world figured out, I thought I could be the President of the United States, a baseball player, a cowboy, and an astronaut at the same time. As the years have gone by, the number of people I could be has continued to shrink until it's been reduced to just me, as I am.

Not the most impressive or reassuring sight in the mirror every morning, I'll concede, especially when the wired world brings me picture postcards from paths I could have chosen, but chose not to, despite their breathtaking beauty.   

I'm not anywhere. I'm here. For now and I guess forever.
-bill kenny

Ye of Little Faith (and Even Less Talent)

There are a myriad of things I don't "get." 

Mushrooms in any form at any time. Water Chestnuts as part of a meal, any meal. Pineapple on pizza or, as I've been seeing in my local grocery recently, as pineapple pie. RB Leipzig, period (stop, check please).

And amongst and betwixt all of that, Kanye West, or as he is called now, Ye. <sigh> How can I miss him when he never goes away?

My disinterest, bordering on antipathy, doesn't diminish his success in any way. I suspect he doesn't consider a nearly seventy-three-year-old guy so white he glows in the dark to be in his target demo and that's as it should be. 

There are billions of people on this planet, I suspect for whom I care not a feather to a farthing and yet every once in a while, usually when I've forgotten all about him, or nearly, he pops back up and to my dismay I find myself paying him more attention than, for instance, RB Leipzig covered in mushrooms.  

His music does nothing for me, at all. Again, not in his target demo so that's okay. Never understood the whole fascination with The Kardashians and the struggles he has/had with a diagnosis of bipolar and now, I'm told autism. I wish him well with whatever he's trying to work through but in recent days, I'm wondering why he can't work through it quietly and far away.

Ye, not for nothing: being an A$$hole is not a medical condition, and in your case, there's no cure.
-bill kenny

A Funny & A Fact

But you'll have to decide which is which.

The other day, a brown bear was caught short in the woods and squatted beside a bunny who was also engaged in the same activity. "Hey," said the bear, "I notice your backside is sitting right on the ground instead of slightly elevated like mine." 

"That's true," replied the rabbit, "That's because poo doesn't stick to my fur."

"Great!" exclaimed the bear, grabbing the rabbit and using it to wipe his butt.

In case, you were wondering, that was supposed to be the funny. 

Back in the Cold War, I was on the tip of the Sword of Freedom, metaphorically speaking, as an airman working for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) at Sondrestrom Air Base, Greenland. It was surprisingly easy to get a shaving waiver and yet there were very few beards among the men stationed there, and even fewer among the women ("Oh, now he does a joke!").

What actually happened, at least for me when I decided to get a waiver, was the absolute cold would cause my exhaled breath to condense on my whiskers. Between the pain of the freezing combined with the additional pain when thawing, I abandoned the whole beard thing almost as quickly as I adopted it.

But I've watched enough episodes of Blue Planet to have wondered what's the deal with those polar bears I see punching their way through an ice flow and popping up to the surprise and dismay of a penguin who thought it was safe from a predator. 

Here's that fact to go with the previous funny: polar bear fur does NOT freeze. You don't have to take my word for it, either, nor do you need to ask one of them yourself.
-bill kenny

Do I Stutter?

One of the items I check daily in the newspaper delivered to the house is the obituaries. As I've aged, and badly truth be known, I've measured myself against those who've shuffled off their mortal coil. I never evaluate the lives whose passing I'm reading and sentiments like 'So and So led a full life,' never are uttered as I have no idea how true or false that conclusion is.

Growing up I was always impressed with how old grown-ups seemed to be, especially in comparison to me. And when I look in the mirror now, I don't see a nearly seventy-three-year-old man staring back at me but when I come across photos of myself from 'back in the day' I'm stunned at how decrepit I look now.

Do you remember 'The Magic 8 Eight Ball'? I used to always ask 'How old will I get to be?' And the response was always, 'Answer unclear.' And then I learned our mother's trick, not just for that question, but any and all of them. Don't ask the question if you can't stand the answer.

So, that said, how do you feel about finding out how old you'll live to be? Remember, your mileage may vary and objects in the mirror are older than they appear. 
-bill kenny

All of 'Em

Happy Birthday to all Presidents, from George through the current occupant, since when we say today is Presidents' Day I'm assuming we mean ALL of them and not just the ones some of us like some of the time. Democracy as a buffet!

Like any of us would not head straight to the dessert cart. Not around here, Skippy! When you buy a ticket you get the whole ride. But I do know if you have today off in observance of the holiday, you (and I) are a part of the Presidents' Day Posse, instead of that other posse. And for that alone, I'm thankful.

I understand and appreciate our national devotion to George Washington-and despite some contentiousness south of the Mason-Dixon line, I think we can acknowledge the importance of Abraham Lincoln but all the other Chief Executives just getting lumped together is an improvement over being completely ignored in what way, if I may ask?

I do not know if Martin Van Buren has been slighted by history or whether William Howard Taft, who required an over-sized bathtub in the White House because of a personal misfortune was his generation's FDR (judging by his weight, two FDRs) but this is the one-size-fits-all day celebration that all occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue receive. 

And if you decide to join in and party like it's 1845 I have just the toe-tapper you've been looking for.
-bill kenny

Akai Ito

Yoko Ono's Air Talk is one of my favorite ideas; not necessarily as music but for its thoughtfulness and originality of insight. 

I love the hopeful romanticism that no matter how great the separation we are each joined to the other with air though there's the concomitant sadness that no matter how close we are physically, air is always between us.

I've realized the older I get, the more time I spend ruminating on ideas and concepts that in my youth never even registered, so to speak, on my radar. I tell myself I'm getting more introspective and thoughtful but, I know myself too well and recognize that whole belief as the awful offal it is. 

Most of the time, all I have to show for my deep thoughts is a blinding headache. Who says God has no sense of humor, right? Besides, my deep thoughts would barely come to my ankles.

And then I stumble across something like this.     

Bim! Les moulins de mon cœur.
-bill kenny

"...And Saddle Up Well..."

I am a child of the 50's-not like Robert Klein who came of age in them, but I was born as they were getting started. I used to watch The Dinah Shore Show ("See the USA in your Chevrolet") a fifteen-minute black and white TV program every afternoon sitting on a coffee table in my parent's apartment in Electchester, South Flushing, Queens, New York. 

Despite what you may think reading the above paragraph, America wasn't so poor that we couldn't afford half-hour programs and/or color broadcasts. That was how the world was, and those of us just starting out in it accepted it because we knew nothing else (and some of us know even less today).

The other show I can remember watching was the (Original) Mickey Mouse Club, and most days getting into my cowboy outfit to better enjoy The Adventures of Spin and Marty and all its succeeding permutations. I sang along with the theme song I knew by heart, making up in volume what I lacked in pitch. 

I had a six-shooter that never ran out of bullets and a bandana whose color matched my cowboy hat. I'm pretty sure I didn't have spurs (that jingle, jangle, jingle) not because I didn't go rolling merrily along but because Mom was afraid they'd catch on the carpet and I wasn't the most stable of walkers. Still am not.

Speaking of stable, and horses who hang out in the paddock, that might be when my lifelong (so far) desire for pony rides on my birthday first began. I envied Spin and Marty out there on The Triple R Ranch roping and calf-wrestling, to say nothing of campfire-sitting-around, and, of course, snipe hunting. Yessir, pardner, us greenhorns sure were gullible.

What I can't explain is my studious avoidance of every opportunity to visit a dude ranch and bust a few Broncos (Denver or otherwise) or brand a few Longhorns. Not sure how I would be able to persuade 'those little doggies' to move along, come to think of it, but dude ranches are quite the hot commodity, more so now than at any time since Billy Crystal and Jack Palance.  

Well, pardner, that's enough jabber-jawing for one day. Don't squat on your spurs and I hope to spit in your mess kit. 
-bill kenny

What Scares Me Most Is Losing You

I wonder, in light of the journey so far, if he who travels fastest misses the entire point of the sojourn when he has no one with whom to share it. As someone who was very much, and for a very long, unlovable, this is a day of major import and minor miracle for me all at the same time. I'm celebrating my forty-eighth Valentine's Day with the love of my life, Sigrid.

I look at photos of my wife and me back when we were fab and she was, as she still is, beautiful to me. It took zero intelligence to fall in love with her at first sight and something far rarer than intelligence to help us stay in love all these years later. I do find myself looking at her, then and now, and wondering if she still sees me as I was or as I am now, and if the latter, why does she stay?

We have, she and I, grown old together which causes me to smile as I had nothing nearly so grand in mind when I first saw her. Some who knew me back before the day would be amazed that she kept me nailed to one place long enough for all those years to have become all these years, and to some degree, I echo their amazement. 

We share a life that isn't and will never be the one I thought I wanted when I believed things worked out the way we desired (if we only wanted something bad enough). But when I reach the end of every day, including today, I look at her and at our two adult children, Patrick and Michelle, and know that I love and am loved by them and can't complain about some settling of the contents during shipment. Happy Valentine's Day.

-bill kenny

Is There Nothing More Anybody Can Do?

A snapshot into the light. 

A fellow, somewhat worse for wear judging from his clothes and shoes, but most especially his physical demeanor, sorting through his wallet with one hand, the hand he's using to hold the wallet, for bills to feed into the CT Lottery vending machine just beyond the checkouts in a grocery store.

We're not exactly Vegas (baby), with slot machines tucked in alongside church baptismal fonts, but here in Eastern Connecticut, home to Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, it's always go time. And this is just the next day in the only life he will ever know. 

In his other hand, but not without a struggle, he's clutching a portable nebulizer. The oxygen mask is cloudy and dimpled with condensation from his heavy exhalation. The side of the lotto vending machine asks in chirpy orange and green letters, "Are You Feeling Lucky Today?"

Not so far, at least that's how it seems to me as I gather up the odds and ends I've purchased while the voice of the self-checkout hectors me to 'remember to take your receipt' because the Forces of Mendacity and Mediocrity (sounds like a grunge band, don't it?) could easily spirit it away. 

The would-be lotto millionaire completes his purchase and scans his ticket to see if he's won. He takes himself and his ducat to the 'solutions center' to redeem it and purchase a few more but different variations of the keno tickets the state likes to offer as well. 

He hurries past me through the double doors of the exit and the Blue Rhino propane tank corral, to just make a bus that was about to pull out. Instead, it halts and opens its doors to let him board.

The doors remain ajar and February chilled air fills the bus as he goes through his pockets in search of the loose change he needs for the coin basket that counts his fare. When sated, it's silent as the driver finally closes the doors, the bus pulls away from the stop and back into the go 'cause it's another day for you and me in paradise.

-bill kenny

A Penny for Your Thoughts

When I was a kid, and this was a school day, we had it off. It was Abraham Lincoln's birthday and living in central New Jersey we observed it while hearing that some states south of the Mason-Dixon line didn't.

Lincoln was celebrated as a person who had made a difference in his time and whose shadow was cast through our own lives. Now, he's been rolled into an upcoming three-day weekend and an excuse for a variety of stores to hold a White Sale on bed linens (gotta love the irony!). C'mon down!

There were a huge number of issues bound up in 'slavery' but that's the headline, the casus Bellum. Dispassionate historians and anthropologists agree slavery wasn't an invention of the New World, but an extension of a practice stretching back thousands of years across the entire world. 

We in the USA still have not yet fully faced up to what was done by some to others. Instead of confronting and resolving, we continue to equivocate and rationalize. It's bizarre we would call the War Between the States (its official name, btw) the "Civil War" since historians agree it was often anything but. 

With other nations picking sides to advance their own agenda, the two sides, bloodied and bedraggled, fought one another from 1861 through the spring of 1865, when the Confederate States of America, prostrate and exhausted, surrendered and, say some, Modern America began. 

And the more we've changed, the more we've stayed the same. Given an opportunity to begin again with 'malice towards none and charity to all' as offered by the soon-to-be-murdered reelected Lincoln, instead, we as a nation veered from that path and have continued to settle old scores and create new wounds through the latter half of the 19th, all of the 20th and, now, the 21st century.

We've institutionalized and internalized treating huge segments of our own countrymen as suspects instead of citizens and recent national political developments suggest there's a dark ride ahead for many of us. And 'charity to all' has been replaced by name-calling and finger-pointing. 
-bill kenny 

I Smell Home Cooking

Suspect your house is a lot like mine in terms of activity and hours in the day to accomplish things. We’re already into February and it was just the other day we wished each other a Happy New Year. 

Of course, as we should know by now, it takes more than wishing to make happy happen. And for any number of reasons, ranging from meteorological to and through fiscal, this is seemingly yet another winter of our discontent. 

The challenge of change, here in Norwich as well as everywhere else, is to never lose sight that it’s a never-ending process and not a product; a journey, rather than a destination. There is no Grandma’s House towards which we’re driving. And the road can and does often feel like it, goes on forever.

Every day, city administrators and their professional staff, joined by, and with, volunteers on advisories, boards, commissions, and committees, all of them our neighbors, begin again as every aspect of municipal government’s ability to deliver goods and services in response to our desires for a particular program (sometimes to complement another one and sometimes in competition with it), is balanced against the ability to afford the delivery of those goods and services.

Governance at all levels shouldn’t be a spectator sport, but because of the pace of our lives, we sometimes do not choose to invest the time in much more than glancing at a headline about a state or local issue. That becomes our level of engagement but elevates the degree of difficulty in arriving at decisions.

We should have a general sense this coming budget season will involve still-more hard choices almost pre-ordained to make no one happy. If politics is the art of the possible, without our informed opinions and observations, we’ll watch elected and appointed officials attempt Mission Impossible. When that happens and we look for someone to blame for the results we don’t like, we should look no further than the nearest mirror.

Almost every weekday there are public meetings on the nuts and bolts operating issues and many of the spice of life aspects that define us as a city--be they the Board of Education, the Historic District Commission, Public Safety, Commission on the City Plan, Public Works and so many others-usually without (hardly) anyone from the public attending.

Check the city’s website and pick a meeting. You might want to take a look at the online posting of recent meeting minutes so you are caught up when you take a seat or click on a Zoom meeting link. 

Odds are you’ll know one or more of the volunteers on the board or committee, so the ‘them’ factor disappears immediately, which leaves only ‘us’ which is as it should be if we are ever going to reinvent ourselves and our city. And since we should strive to speak to, rather than at, one another, why not use this as an opportunity to practice listening as well as speaking.

-bill kenny

I'll Take My Sanity

It's been suggested by armies of doom and gloomers that those who wish us ill have been aided immeasurably by advances in technology and adventures in high fidelity.

We tend to see the Forces of Evil and even the Forces of Not Especially Nice always depicted with earbuds and cell phones as they up-link images of kidnapped kittens to the Dark Web while threatening massive mayhem unless their demands are met.

I think someone is missing a good cross-promotion by not signing an endorsement deal involving, as an example, Third-World rebels and one of the satellite phone manufacturers, because when you see footage on the evening news, the former is always brandishing the latter, along with a Kalashnikov. 

I always wonder if it's sold as an ensemble or if you can buy it a piece at a time, and how soon before Bravo has a show about those involved in creating the look and when will Andy start to talk about it on WWHL?

The crazies have their own websites, though for my money they could also have their own domain and separate Internet and I don't think the rest of us would mind. And I'm talking all the crazies, no matter the religion or the politics. Put 'em in a bag, hit the bag with a bat, and you'd hit the right one. I agree with Sir Winston Churchill who opined, "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." 

Sometimes the reliance on state-of-the-art and beyond technology can create an Icarus effect and the moment of too-close-to-the-sun becomes instead forever-buried-beneath-the-earth, when the tool turns on the user and shifts from fulcrum to petard.
-bill kenny

I Nearly Forgot

The only reason I'm mentioning the Super Bowl at all today is because I do not wish to get fined by the National Football League. At some point today, I will lose track of exactly when one of the pre-game shows will stop because of the actual game.

I'm thinking/assuming during one of the post-game shows will be a passing mention of the final score, unless the game has ended in a tie and the teams are playing even as I type the last of this sentence.

The prospect of that happening makes the threatened snowfall for later this week across my region of these Not Quite United States even gooder. Real pizza, real boneless chicken wings, real football, real challenges, and maybe a return to actually important real news and notes now that this pro football season is finally over. Yee Haw!
-bill kenny

Traffic and Weather Together

I will be the first to admit I spend much of my life unhappy with the weather, but I am very pleased to live on a planet with an atmosphere even when the current meteorology isn't to my taste. 

Truth is, I've never lived anywhere that didn't have four seasons (okay, in Greenland, north of the Arctic Circle, some of the seasons were more notional than others; and no one I knew went swimming in Lake Ferguson in July in less than a full body rubber suit) but it doesn't mean I wouldn't like to try it out for myself, at least a little bit before deciding.

My mom, who had a lifelong dislike of winter and, more especially, snow, headed South many years ago. If anyone earned the sun, it was Mom and it warms my heart to know she enjoyed it for the remainder of her days.

We've had a cold but relatively snow-free winter so far (and I'm not complaining about the dearth of the latter. I have another unfavorite four-letter word that starts with S and ends with T that also describes snow) and there may be a not inconsiderable amount still in the forecast.

I just had a memory of a daytime AM station we listened to as kids when my parents had a vacation house in Pennsylvania, WARM, the Mighty 590. No matter how bitter the winter weather, you could always rely on the Ronnie Radio-Voice announcer to pass along the time and temperature in 'DEgrees' while demanding to know 'Is it cold enough for you? It's only WARM for me!' 

Talk about the greatest little station in the nation, not.
-bill kenny 

Alternate Facts for an Alternative Universe

I didn't recognize the number in the cell phone display window and so I was pretty sure I must have looked like someone else when I answered the phone yesterday and I was right. 

From what I could hear of the background, the caller was in a bus terminal or perhaps a cement mixer and was already NOT having a good day before dialing me. I answered with my name as no one has ever accused me of originality. 

'Is Matt there?' the caller asked. No, I said, just me, repeating my name. 'Where is he?' She wanted to know and then, cutting to the chase, 'Are you sure?'

That's the one that stops traffic, at least in my neighborhood. The question of questions. Quite frankly each of us may well ask that of one another every day of our lives for as long as we live and never be satisfied with whatever answer we receive.

Am I sure? Are you sure? How could we be? Why should we be?
In a universe where the only constant is relentless change, how sure of anything can any of us be? 

Turns out, it wasn't quite the existential question I had first believed. My caller had this number for her cousin's boyfriend, Matt, and now she was a little confused because when he'd called her earlier----waitaminit Miss Frisky, I thought to myself. Why is your cousin's boyfriend calling you?

I didn't actually ask that aloud (I hope) because she was still speaking, undaunted by my complete lack of reinforcement (that 'uh-unh' and 'umm' stuff we do because no one can see us nodding our heads so we have an audible but non-word harmonic sound repertoire for phone soliloquies) pausing every fifteen seconds  to ask me again 'is Matt there?' and 'are you sure?' And still, that Mattstard wasn't there!

If I had a bouzouki, I might have admitted yes, indeed, I was Matt, just to see/what would happen next but I remembered Mom's admonition: never ask the question if you can't stand the answer. And since I wasn't sure if there's still such a thing as roaming charges I was more than happy to let the seeker ring off and search elsewhere for Matt.
-bill kenny

...Or Live and Die This Way

I have in my lifetime, on very rare occasions, had a slightly heavy foot on the gas pedal. I have had to offer an explanation to inquiring law enforcement officers as to the approximate location of the fire I was speeding towards, or specifically where it was I thought I was going in such a hurry.

On none of those times was I driving a DeLorean or, for that matter, a KIA. 

But then again, I'm not Logan Mirmozaffari.  

I was VERY impressed with the originality of his explanation of his need for speed and the speed at which he was clocked. To my knowledge, a KIA can only achieve that if it's pushed off a VERY tall building, so bravo! 
-bill kenny

Bloom Where You're Planted

I've reached the age where I don't buy green bananas but as yet another winter of my discontent grinds on, I've got an eye on the calendar, and, at least allegorically, hope springs in my heart. 

When our children were smaller I used to plant vegetable gardens every spring. The squirrels ate most of the radish shoots and the slugs earned my undying enmity by chowing down on my tomato plants, but undeterred for many years I still tended the garden. 

As I've aged/rusted, I've sought advice on what to plant and why. 

You're welcome.

-bill kenny

Questions that Can't Be Answered

Surprise! 

I'm not talking about politics though, admittedly, I most certainly could be.  

Each of us has heard a million or more questions in our lives: "From What do you want to be when you grow up?" all the way to "What the f*ck were you thinking?"

But what is the Most Important Question? 

Maybe this will help. If you had just one question.
So, let me ask you; did it?
-bill kenny

If It Pleases the Court....

Indulge me as I reminisce (as if you have a choice). 

I think it was Mark Twain who wrote, "Every day children are born who will change the world, but we don't know who they are." I had the good fortune to grow up in a house crammed to the rafters with children like that and today is the anniversary of the birth of the completion of "The Joan and Bill Kenny Senior Collection."

My brother Adam arrived at just about the exact middle of my teenage years. And while he has often heard this story, I heard it as it happened.....in St Joseph's Church in East Millstone, New Jersey, with Father Stan who, so far in my life, had been the closest thing to a human being a Roman Catholic priest has ever been, for our youngest brother's baptism. 

Father Stan, some parishioners claimed, once offered during a sermon, 'If you pick a lemon in the garden of love' you should be allowed a do-over. I was there and didn't hear anything like that but I was at an age where if it wasn't a teenage girl asking to give me her number, I didn't hear anything (as it happened I spent my teen years nearly deaf now that I recall.). 

It was in that state of mind that Father Stan brightly asked Mom, as we all slowly circled around the baptismal font in the rear alcove to the right as you faced the altar, what her child's name was to be. "Adam," she replied, evenly, perhaps a bit too evenly I realize now with many decades of hindsight. 

Father Stan asked about a middle name and learned Adam was to have none. "Just Adam?" he asked somewhat hesitantly, shooting glances at our father who was silent throughout all of this, eyes fixed on a point on the horizon somewhere just over the priest's left shoulder and about ten feet from the ceiling.

"Adam," said Mom. "He was God's first and he's my last. You can pour the water or we can leave." Eventually, everyone did both in that order.
As one of the children who changed the world, Happy Birthday, Adam!
-bill kenny

The Return of Phil and Bill

That's Punxsutawney and Murray, if you're keeping score at home (and if so, why; and if not, why not). I know someone who not only was born on Groundhog Day, but was born in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and has spent a lifetime enjoying the looks of incredulity with which that news is met. 

What's a little spooky, to me, as if basing predictions of additional winter weather on the appearance or non-appearance of a furry animal's shadow isn't already goofy enough, is how much time flies and yet also remains exactly the same.

Speaking of which and also having nothing to do with it at all, (think Alternative Facts) my brother, Adam, celebrates his two hundred and seventy-eighth birthday tomorrow (he was born an old soul), and at the time of day he goes running, there are NO shadows of any kind anywhere in this hemisphere. Or groundhogs.

I know we all missed Stephen Tobolowsky at last night's banquet but considering how much the only constant is change but how constant that change has become, I'm sure we'll meet again before that Second Sitting. I'm not sure what happens if someone other than Phil sees his shadow. Six more weeks of chocolate bunnies, I fear.
-bill kenny

Just a Little More Rope....

The expression goes, "It's always darkest before the dawn."

I've always wondered what people named Dawn made of that. No matter. 

Es gibt viel zu tun. Packen wir's an.
-bill kenny

Have You Heard?

“I know that I have less to live than I have lived.

I feel like a child who was given a box of chocolates. He enjoys eating it, and when he sees that there is not much left, he starts to eat them with a special taste.

I have no time for endless lectures on public laws - nothing will change. And there is no desire to argue with fools who do not act according to their age. And there's no time to battle the gray. I don't attend meetings where egos are inflated and I can't stand manipulators.

I am disturbed by envious people who try to vilify the most capable to grab their positions, talents, and achievements.

I have too little time to discuss headlines - my soul is in a hurry.

Too few candies left in the box.

"I'm interested in human people. People who laugh at their mistakes are those who are successful, who understand their calling and don't hide from responsibility. Who defends human dignity and wants to be on the side of truth, justice, righteousness.

This is what living is for.

I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch the hearts of others. Who, through the blows of fate, was able to rise and maintain the softness of the soul.

Yes, I hustle, I hustle to live with the intensity that only maturity can give. I'll eat all the candy I have left - they'll taste better than the ones I already ate.

My goal is to reach the end in harmony with myself, my loved ones, and my conscience.

I thought I had two lives, but it turned out to be only one, and it needs to be lived with dignity.” -Anthony Hopkins

Rhymes with Nifty

I had no older brothers or sisters. Folk music and Elvis Presley never really touched me as a kid.

The Beatles on Ed Sullivan introduced me to rock and roll (though I did already own a copy of "At the Hop" by Danny & The Juniors), and I've been a fan, however it's being defined on any given day, ever since.  

That's why as much as I love retrospective articles on the music I love, they also make me sad as I realize how I've aged (but I find some solace that the albums turning fifty this year will always be forever young). 

"Rock and Roll is the music your parents love to hate."
-bill kenny

Put a Sock In It!

When we were very small children our Aunt Claire, Mom's baby sister, would babysit  us (by us, I mean the oldest three as the younger three hadn't yet been born), and part of the good-night ritual was: 

"Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John,

Went to bed with his trousers on;

One shoe off, and the other shoe on,

Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John."

Not sure it helped us go to sleep faster but the memory of it made me smile just now. 

I got thinking about it because I woke up earlier this week to outside temperatures of five above zero which isn't surprising because I live in New England but even though I already knew that it was still a less-than-happy happenstance. 

I've started to sleep with socks on (in addition to pajamas; mom raised crazy children, not stupid ones, at least after I was born) and am telling myself I am warmer. But I've learned there is a not unserious discussion ongoing as to whether it's healthy to sleep with socks on. 

Shari Lewis may have died for somebody's sins, but not mine. Amen.
-bill kenny

Morose and Somewhat Melancholy

I found this in a jacket pocket of a coat I no longer wear (metaphorically speaking). It's from almost fifteen years ago and stings as much now as it did when I first offered it. At the time I called it: 

Caught in Other Nets

I was helping my wife impose ordnung (look it up) on our basement the other day (mostly by staying out of her way). Not surprisingly, she and I have slightly different perspectives on how things are filed, stored, and saved. 

My views on all three are easy to catalog: wrong. All you need do is ask my wife. There's an eye roll and a medium-sized sigh (I used to only rate a small one) and now, as an added bonus from this sentence onward, there will be a vehement denial of the previous two, but don't be deceived.

We've lived in our house for over thirty-three years-George Carlin is right, it's a place for your stuff. Our container is very attractive and spacious though the basement where she and I were working is, I imagine, a little like limbo but without all the unbaptized babies' souls (just as well as the dust bunnies are everywhere and there's always something you taste on the end of your tongues that you can't quite place or name).

We've been putting things in the basement since we moved in. Obvious items that we weren't yet willing to let go of: appliances that operated on 220 volts and fifty cycles and for which, to use here, you'd need a step-up transformer (I have one, make me an offer). There were less obvious items, more saved by the heart than the head. Neatly packed with contents listed on the outside of the carton were many of the toys and bric-a-brac from when our children, now adults, were much smaller.

Some items looked like they were in the same boxes we used when we moved from Kasernenstrasse across town to Ahornstrasse in Offenbach. Without exchanging a word, I knew we wouldn't be placing any of those on the discard pile (I still have in the garage the chalkboard each child wrote on when they had their erste shultag).

It is amazing what you collect over the years and how much of it you can remember when you see it again (and how much you have NO clue about when reunited). Te disquieting part may be how much you become possessed by your possessions. Sigrid had boxes of singles (little records with big holes as I used to call them while she labeled my album collection, big records with little holes) and each dust cover came with a memory and a moment to match.

I think we both knew, and always did, that 'putting things in the basement' is code for pretending to remember who you once were even when you're less than comfortable with who you became. 

Not having to confront that person is a luxury I can afford though I probably enjoy it too much. For a moment we were as we see ourselves instead of as others do and who we really are. I'd chance again without regret, because the moment (however fleeting) seems to linger and abide awhile before disappearing.
-bill kenny

El Malei Rachamim

Today is the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. which serves as the cornerstone for today's observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. I'm offering words I wrote several years ago to mark this day because they captured then, and now, my feelings and fears. 

As a child when my mother's mother told stories of "The War" her generation had fought, she rarely mentioned the death camps; perhaps because we were of Irish ancestry and Roman Catholic religion, perhaps for reasons she never had the time or the opportunity to explain. Europe was far away and there's too often a tendency to suggest it's good to let the past remain the past. Not this time.

I'm her age now and the cautionary tale that the Ha-Shoah should have been does not seem to be a lesson we have fully learned. There is mindless murder every day in every corner of the globe because of the color of skin, the choice of a God, the shape of an eyelid, and always some variation of the fear of The Other.

We are NOT much better here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, especially just months after a Presidential campaign whose mendacity and bigotry were such that many of us could shower for the next four years and still never feel clean as we impersonalized and dehumanized those with whom we are/were in disagreement philosophically and politically, rendering them abstractions and making them easier to hate and then hating them deeply and completely. 

As we keep Slouching towards Bethlehem we've continued our journey along the road to perdition and that, I fear, means we will persist in writing off one another and the damages we do to ourselves as part of the overhead of being on the planet. It is as if a person's lifetime is worth no more than an arched eyebrow or a shrugged shoulder.

I have yet to purchase this book but I shall because it's important, at least to me, that someone bear witness to who we were and how easily the danger and horror of all of that did happen and can happen again. Growing faint in the face of evil is to do nothing and doing nothing cannot be allowed, especially when we know that silence is consent and the first chapter in the horror story.

About a minute and a half into this trailer, Keri Lynn explains why she became involved in the Paper Clips Project. This is an old clip and I imagine her place has been taken by other bright and shiny young people who, if we're lucky, will not need to build rafts to save us from the flood of our own hatred but, instead, bridges that allow connections despite our differences.
-bill kenny