Nothing a Night's Sleep Won't Cure

Talk about putting the tire in tired. 

I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted.
-bill kenny

Shrinking the Wolf

My mind can sometimes be a projectionist's fever dream as a panoply of cross-generational imagery, historical, hysterical, some mine and some from before my time, coalesce and collide unbidden and unwanted. I can't watch, but I can't look away either.

There's a photo from the Spanish Civil War, depicting the moment of death of a Loyalist soldier whose name I did not know for decades. It's chased by the jumpy, silent footage of Zapruder's film as President Kennedy's head explodes from the impact of a bullet.

There are the grainy picture postcards from a long-ago, hard-fought and hastily forgotten war (though not by those who were sent to fight it), the first of one man executing another, while in the second, a naked child literally runs for her life.

All of those images pale when recalling street-level video of a brilliantly blue heaven over a lower Manhattan skyline on September 11, 2001 and the startling and sudden appearance of a commercial airliner entering one of the Twin Towers about two thirds of the way up, disappearing inside, forever, while the mind struggles to process what the eyes and neural network have shared. And there's this one that breaks my heart every time I look at it.

Who among us doesn't have a story about where they were when they first learned of the attacks on 9/11? Nearly every story that can be told by this, the twenty-fourth anniversary of those attacks, has been told. The shock and horror never dull, no matter how often the tale is told. It sometimes felt as if history stopped at the moment when the first plane impacted. And when time began again, the Age of Innocent Ignorance was over, and that of the Dark Hard World had begun.

The attacks of 9/11 created for every American, regardless of race, creed, politics, sexual persuasion, or color, including those not yet born, a shared memory in which pre 9/11 America becomes almost mythical.

As often as we speak about the way we were before 9/11, there's a strange quiet when we talk of what has happened in its wake. We talk in abstractions about the Global War on Terror and of the thousands and tens of thousands of men and women in uniform deployed across the world in defense of freedoms we too often take for granted here on the home front.

We'll offer thoughts for the victims of 9/11, but to better understand the price of freedom, perhaps we should visit the memorial at Chelsea Parade to remember the selfless service and sacrifice of Norwich residents Jacob Martir-Guiterrez and Keith Heidtman, who died during Operation Iraqi Freedom. 

Their memorial is just a few steps from Norwich Free Academy, where both were students. In such a way does the circle remain unbroken in remembering two young men who ran towards, not from, danger when their nation most needed them because they realized courage is not the absence of fear, but, rather, something more important than fear.

There's a German proverb, "fear makes the wolf bigger than he is." There are already too many wolves in our world without creating more. As Franklin Roosevelt offered to a very different America in a very perilous time, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified, terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

We honor Jacob Martir-Guiterrez and Keith Heidtman, not just today, the anniversary of 9/11, but every day, by living fearlessly and out loud and to help one another become better people.

-bill kenny

Not Forgotten

Tomorrow is the twenty-fourth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon (and Shanksville, Pennsylvania). Torrents of words have been, and will be, written about a day burned into the memory of the world. 

These words are not part of that but, rather, a remembrance of a different anniversary also tomorrow, September 11, but in 1982, in Mannheim, (West) Germany. Two colleagues, Private First Class Bruce Scott, US Army, and Senior Airman Michael Sutton, US Air Force, were among the forty-six persons who perished when a U. S. Army CH-47C "Chinook" helicopter crashed. 

They were very young, as were we all back then, with their careers and lives before them. I work hard to remember them at this time every year, and the hole that will never heal that their absence left forever in the hearts of their family and friends.

-bill kenny 

Thinking about the Other Bruce

Mortality is a tricky thing. We all know, or should, that we will someday die, but when we're forced to focus on that someday and realize the bell will toll specifically for each of us, it gets more than a little tense. 

My family and I are wrestling with that situation right now as I face some decisions (not all within my control) about my health that I would much rather have been theoretical, and which have caused me to become my wife's patient instead of her partner.   

As Tony Soprano so sagaciously observed, 'Every day is a gift, but does it have to be a pair of socks?" Turns out, we're a short time here and a long time gone.
-bill kenny

Devils and Dust

This time Thursday, we will be talking about the twenty-fourth anniversary of the attacks of 9/11. We have a generation growing old that has never known what our nation was like before the attacks.

We will relive every moment of every memory that got us here. Where we go after that, I don't know. I've spent the last couple of days trying to sort out the previous score of years, aware I'm a long way from home, attempting a return to the familiar and the known, even when the sky is bible-black and the direction unknown.

It feels like a dream remembering when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union and its vassal states imploded. So many of us rushed into the streets to celebrate being alive at that historic moment with total strangers who were celebrating the very same thing. We have history books to tell us those feelings are real and that those things happened.

What we forgot when we exulted that now anything was possible was that everything could now be taken away. That those who had nothing to live for would be able to invent something to die for, and then they would want us to die for it, as well.

Each of us knows someone from our school, our work, our family, our town who has served in uniform in the last two decades, probably more often than one tour of duty, and as long as we don't think about any of that too hard or too long, it nearly makes sense. Only when there are moments that you stand stock-still and silent, when someone you know is hurt or worse, do the doubts creep in and you wonder if what you see is really what you get.

How far can we go on faith alone? At least twenty-four years because there's the marker up ahead. Perhaps you should choose to not only remember and make a difference, but be the difference.  
Memor vir, vos es pulvis quod tergum ut pulvis vos vadum reverto.

-bill kenny

Sleepless in Norwich

Watching our two children grow up, I always admired the ease with which they fell asleep. I think they have that from their mother, as I am someone who wrestles every night with every interaction I had the previous day, rehashing them in an effort to resolve them. 

But I'm NOT consistent. Some nights, I just drop right off, and if I dream, I remember none of it. Other nights, I toss and turn, trying to find that just-right position that calms the racing motor in my brain. 

I stumbled across this over the weekend and am keen to see if it works. You should check it out as well and get back to me.
-bill kenny

As They Say in Los Alamos

Some days you eat the bear.

And some days the bear eats you.
-bill kenny

A Little Dusty but.....

When you've written as much in this space as I have, for as long as I have,every once in a while, you rediscover a nugget from the past that still makes sense to you. In light of present political circumstances, this one surprised even me. 
At the time, I called it: 

How Do You Figure the Tip on the Bill of Rights?

When the Founding Fathers, assisted by others, created the Bill of Rights (and this is a marvelous site), they could not have foreseen the world in which we now live. 

For them, freedom of speech, and within that, 'the press', was a matter of newspapers and broadsides (one-sheet exhortations and excoriations on behalf of and in opposition to issues of Colonial America). 

That a growing number of people would choose to get their news from TikTok rather than what an aging boomer like me calls 'trad media,' is more than disquieting. 

We choose 'rock, paper, scissors' on where to turn and tune in for news and information. Truisms are often truths, and perceptions of reality are frequently reality. What we call news, no matter the presentation format, now does more persuasion and less informing today than ever before because advocacy draws better ratings than reporting. 

I can no longer define 'journalist,' hell, most of the time I can't even recognize one while wandering around things like YouTube. But I am chagrined to discover I can't swing a cat and NOT hit self-styled one on whatever platform I choose. Anyone with a keyboard and an Internet connection is a journalist (present typist included), it seems. And then we wonder why there's so much 'fake news.'.  

Most pander to audience 'segments' as long as those segments buy the products those platforms and messages are supported by, from the advertisers who bought them because the demographics deliver certain groups in large numbers.....and round goes the gossip. A self-licking ice cream cone.

You must get as tired reading it as I get tired typing it: the issues we face can't be captured in a seventy-second story with a ten-second stand-up location lock-out. They require our fullest attention, no matter our political beliefs (as a matter of fact, precisely because of our political beliefs). 

Not just Democrats or liberals require health care, and not just Republicans or conservatives are taxed too much. And people who feel that way or who feel differently don't come from another dimension or drink their bath water (or any of the other insults we manufacture when we disagree with each other). The farther out in space you travel, the more we all look alike down here. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
-bill kenny

More in the Mirror

If our lives are like candles, I'm pretty close to being little more than a wick. Great thing about hindsight, it's always 20./20 whether you choose to see what it is revealing or not. 

I was born before we elected Eisenhower as President. These days, he wouldn't get the time of day from the party he led at the time. Sic tramsit gloria, I guess. Struggled to put on a new T-shirt this morning with a tag that told me it was "Made in Vietnam," and going back more than half a century, I'm surprised I survived the world I grew up in.

I came of age with the War in Vietnam, not that I was anywhere near at risk. Fifty-eight thousand (plus) US military casualties and hundreds of thousands of damaged and destroyed lives later, we in the Land of the Round Doorknobs had our precious Peace with Honor. And those of us who were Baby Boomers, both the old enough to serve in the killing fields and those young enough to only watch it on TV, returned to our lives, already in progress.

We, the privileged who remained safe as houses on these shores, blamed our parents' generation and more ominously, those who bore arms in that conflict, for "the war" (the definite article, even then, made me wince). I was shocked--ashamed more than shocked--to eavesdrop on a conversation among service men and women the age of our two adult children recently on Facebook in which they, who have done an inordinate amount of the fighting and dying for almost the last decade in places the rest of us cannot find, turned their gaze on MY generation.

Not very pretty, but I fear, pretty accurate. My cohorts and I were described as the 'most self-centered people to ever walk the planet' with an indictment citing 'their exaggerated sense of self-importance and entitlement is beyond offensive and is why the world they are leaving for us is such a ...(large numbers of Bozo No-No words in combinations I'm not used to reading). I couldn't argue a single point any of the five or six posters made, and after I'd offer, 'but our intentions were good!' I'd have had nothing to say.

We gave the world sex without love or commitment-elevating it to a recreational (if not circus-like) activity that can and often does, when performed unprotected, kill people of every race, creed, and color. We traded blue skies and air you can breathe for BMWs, sub-standard schools, and sub-prime mortgages, then closed our eyes (and held our noses) as we started our descent into the abyss of political and moral bankruptcy. 

We reinvented the financial universe so that no one and everyone has money, and is also bankrupt, all at the same time. Not only did we make sure the toothpaste cannot ever be put back in the tubes, but we also flushed most of what we inherited from our parents down those very same tubes.

The children of the Boomers have already started to clean up after their elders, as gargantuan an undertaking as that will prove to be. A chapter of a book on a faraway shelf has come to a close, but the story goes on, because, as a nation, so, too, must we. 
-bill kenny

Another Life Lesson

If you have children in school, the end of summer is old news. You long ago knew it was gone as you readied them for this first full week. 

Even if your children are grown and gone, you're still aware of school as the buses wend their way throughout town, while elsewhere groups of youngsters of all ages trip and troop across sidewalks and crosswalks, all in the name of learning.

In the days ahead, many of us will be back to managing families the way a horse runs: one footfall at a time, rarely, if ever, looking far enough ahead to see if our path is taking us to where we want to go or, instead, leading us over the proverbial cliff.

Perhaps different where you live, but here in Norwich, now and when city budget discussions heat up next April, are really the only times we devote any thought to education, which is unfair to children, teachers, parents, actually, to all of us. This is not an advocacy for more money for schools-there isn't any more money, but, and it's a cliche, if you think education is expensive, try calculating the cost of ignorance.

You and I went to different high schools together-and, trust me on this one-different elementary schools, too. Our schools were so different from the ones our children attend, they could just as easily be from another planet. 

Actually, without putting too fine a point on it, it was a very different world, and when you look at us now, the society and culture we inherited from our parents and then look at what we are giving to their grandchildren, the 'stuff in the middle' is our doing.

A glance at a newspaper, a TV screen, a handheld device, or a computer monitor is all you need to confirm our world is a dangerous and different place now. Gone or going is the industrial age, being replaced often rudely and without ceremony by the knowledge age. 

I typed this on a workstation keyboard. Our children live in a world of hand-held digital devices that make our desktops and laptops look like Gutenberg's press. Access to information, the how-to, and the what-you-do-with-it-next are the world our children and theirs will live in, and lamentations about how that's not what school was like when we were young help no one at all.

Stasis in life and in learning is foolish and fatal. Everyone with an interest in education, and that means all of us, must recognize that the purpose of education should be to learn the rules of life better than anyone else so that you can change the rules. Always a good thing to remember, especially as the seasons change yet again.
-bill kenny

Leaf Me Alone

Another summer has come and gone. For those who've lived through the winter of our discontent, I'm hoping we have an Indian Summer and then a lovely fall that mysteriously and miraculously blends effortlessly into a beautiful New England spring. 

What's that you say? Winter. Sorry, I can't hear you, and there's no point in speaking up or repeating yourself; I still can't hear you. I understand the restorative powers and the role each of the seasons plays. I don't choose to enjoy winter. Ever since I didn't get that new sled for St. Nikolaustag a couple of decades ago, I'm over it.

Considering the speed with which this summer passed and the number of us who had fervent hopes but few plans for what we were to do with it, perhaps what I should learn is to enjoy the days while they are here.

Anticipation is great (and perfect on burgers), but savoring the flavor of the moment, while in the moment, may be something us old people who think we're not should cultivate and not try so hard to avoid.
-bill kenny

My September Song

Here we are ending the Labor Day Weekend. What's that feeling? The neuralgia of nostalgia? You decide. 

Leave it to the unofficial closing of another summer to make me nostalgic, bordering on maudlin. Technically, I'm enjoying my 73rd Labor Day, though in truth, I have no memory of the earliest ones, and I've yet to get a clear sense, despite a reasonable amount of reading, on how old we are before we have memories.

Is that true for you as well? I'll suddenly flash on something from my childhood and not be altogether sure if it's real, or a remembered clip from a movie--my Mom's youngest brother, Paul, when we visited her parents in Elechester out in Flushing, Long Island, (before the World's Fair and Shea Stadium), always calling me 'droopy drawers' and pulling down my trousers and laughing. I recall being a small child, helpless to prevent it and enraged at my own impotence (though I didn't realise that's what I felt at the time). 

Growing up, I always heard relatives say I looked like Paul, which made me tighten my jaw and hold on to my pants. I think they said that because we both had freckles and lots of them. I know my coloring made me burn up in the sun, as after twenty minutes without sunscreen, I looked like a lobster. And when the burn finally faded, I wasn't tanning, but peeling. 

At times later in our lives, my sister Kara reminded me of Paul, especially when she laughed, which is a little odd because by the time she was born, Paul and his family were living out on the west coast and rarely came east. 

I flash forward to that same uncle in the back seat of my car, with my father's step-brother (an actual priest) in the shotgun seat, as we rode to the cemetery in East Millstone, NJ, to bury my father. I think that may have been the last time Paul came east, as some years later he was diagnosed with I-no-longer-remember-what from which he died. 

I was in Germany, in the era before cheap long-distance phone calls and the Internet, so letters and cards were the bridge from home, and I learned we only read you when you write, and no one likes to write bad news when it's still news, so I learned of his death months, if not longer, after it had happened. 

When I was a kid, we hadn't yet gone back to school; that happened after Labor Day, and when the New Year began, I'd always look ahead on the calendar to see when the first Monday in September was, always hoping for a date that looked like the 5th or 6th, as if wishing would make it so. Thank goodness we now structure school calendars by union agreements and not on any educational goals, requirements, or needs.

I've never attended my high school or college reunion--one of the places I worked for some years used to hold worldwide reunions every two years, in different locations around the globe, and I never worked up the interest or the passion, or, in all honesty, the courage, to attend any of them. 

I have a growing-more-dim-by-the-day memory of being one of 400,000 at Watkins Glen in upstate New York for the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and The Band, but all three of these bands are long gone, members dead. The souvenir tee shirt "Ball 'n' Boogie" went from the dresser to the rag bin to the garbage decades ago. 

My generational cohort grew up in the swamps of Vietnam and in the aftermath of the murders of JFK, MLK, and RFK. We survived Timothy Leary better than he himself did, had parents who didn't understand us (until we became them as it turned out), and stayed up late to watch a man walk on the moon. 

We were what sociologists call the Pig in the Python generation, and yet, I suspect when the last of us has passed (and we will, which, when we were kids, was inconceivable), we'll have left a hole akin to the one in a bucket of water when you pull your fist out. 

It'll be our children's children who'll wrestle with the consequences of our decisions on the environment, on energy, on public financing, and world-wide diplomatic outreaches and these days, as hard as we think they are right now, will, with the gift of hindsight, be viewed as the Golden Ones as they "hang round 'neath the vapor light." 
-bill kenny

Endings. Abrupt and Otherwise

For those of us who see Memorial Day as the unofficial start of summer, this, the Labor Day weekend, in that same spirit marks its end. 

Neither, of course, is true, and that can be easily proven by looking at the calendar, but perceptions of reality and reality are often the same thing, the calendar be damned. 

I benefited during my working career from a lot of people who came before me in terms of demanding and receiving a living wage, a safe workplace, dignified and respectful treatment, and a list of tangible and intangible benefits that runs from here to the horizon. We have people in power right now who are determined to reverse all of that.

Enjoy the Labor Day weekend, but remember what it's about. And why.
-bill kenny

Give Bees a Chance

I have decided that I, too, wish to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, just as much if not more than the current President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, but I'm striving to not be such a whiner about it, most especially after I don't get it (he could follow my example).

Of course, I don't have a brown-noser like Steve Witkoff mispronouncing the name of the committee awarding the prize (it's NOT No-bul, Steve-O, it's No-BELL) serving as my hype guy to boost me as I recount how I stopped a war between Narnia and Oompah-Lumpa Land and brought peace to both Left and Right Twix.

I have my moments, just not particularly lucid, very much like, well, you know who.

But I wonder for a guy campaigning without cessation for a Peace Prize, why he's so keen to rename the Department of Defense. I don't know how Karoline Leavitt can spin that without checking with Edwin Starr first.
-bill kenny 

Cast Upon the Water....

My Uncle Jim (one of Mom's brothers) used to call all dogs 'Sooner,' explaining that they would 'sooner $hit than eat.' My wife and I do not own a dog, or a cat, or a bird, or a fish (descending order of amount of care needed), though both of our children and their spouses have pets.

All of my brothers and sisters, to my knowledge, have pets, mostly or entirely dogs, I believe. Aside from knowing which end to feed and which to pet (for the most part), I know nothing about them or any of the other members of the animal kingdom around the world.

However, I might get interested in a 'static pet,' since all the cool kids (in China)  are adopting them. From what I've gathered from this report, a static pet is the next best thing to NOT having one at all.

Yep, it's the yeast you can do. For companionship and if you tire of it, a snack.
-bill kenny 

Just Me, Huh?

I think I'm becoming a 'Single Issue Voter,' and it's not the one that the NRA keeps mobilizing to stop any meaningful discussion about guns in America. 

Seriously, is no one else sickened by how we're calling it “the first school shooting of the school year?” 

If not, why not? If yes, how do we fix it?

For the ammosexuals in the audience who, instead of working with the rest of us to stop this carnage, keep offering "thoughts and prayers," every time this happens,  don't you think those kids were praying?
-bill kenny 

Sample and Hold

All of my experience with computers has been with non-Apple ones. Like so much else of all the machinery that comprises my scenery, the personal computers in my life have a tendency to do what I tell them instead of what I want. 

I suppose I should be grateful I don't have voice-activated software for them because, in my case, I'd need to replace the Idiot's Guide with the most recent update to Masters and Johnson, since many of my voice commands would be anatomically and electronically nonexecutable.

I stare into the depths of the blue screen of death a half dozen or more times a day-O death where is thy sting, I sing; well, actually it doesn't sound very much like singing when I do it, but you get my drift. I've endured countless admonitions that I've attempted an "illegal operation" as the PC shuts down and goes dark to teach one of us a lesson (all of which is wasted on me).

My favorite PC fantasy in recent weeks (okay, perv, let's try that again) my favorite PC operating fantasy has become the one where whatever I'm doing has stopped doing it-perhaps frustrated by me or just exhausted by my persistent insistence. There's a finite number of times you can hit Control-Alt-Delete (I haven't reached it yet, seemingly, but it's upwards of a hundred because I have done it that often in a single bound). 

There's little in life less worth living than being judged to be nonresponsive. Empires have been overthrown for less, and voyages of exploration have been undertaken to avoid their curse. I used to always click "Send Error Report" no matter what had happened or when it occurred because somehow, I just knew the boys and girls of Microsoft were sitting in their operator cubicles on pins and needles in downtown Redmond, Washington, waiting to read about the background of my latest computational catastrophe. Together, we would become better people and programs.

Not exactly as it turns out.
Slowly, as time went by and the same stupid nonresponsive program messages kept popping up, it crossed my mind that The Gates Gang wasn't especially quick on the uptake, or why else would the same program error keep happening. It wasn't like I was getting any smarter at screwing things up. Nope, not me. I had pretty much flat-lined on the learning curve.

And while I'm still generating computer error messages by the bushelful, I'm no longer providing hours of amusement to those whose pockets are protected from all manner or matter great and small. I always opt now for "Don't Send." It's as close as I can get to going commando in a spam-filled virus virus-infested phishing pool. 

-bill kenny

Johnny Nash Approved

How was your weekend? I bought a new windshield on Sunday. I guess you could call it an impulse buy.

Didn't start the day planning to do that, but while on a short drive past one of the native american casinos, a truck with a trailer in front of me picked up some sort of foreign object and CRACK! went the windshield.

We're leasing the car, and I suspect it's bad form to return it at the lease's end with a cracked windshield, so for the first time in all the years since returning to the USA, I had to file a claim with my insurance company. 

I did it all online in about three minutes, and that includes getting an appointment, at their place, with one of the windshield replacement companies, the one with the catchy jingle, and forking over five hundred dollars as my copay for the glass replacement. 

I spent some time afterward trying to calculate what an automobile might cost if you replaced it a piece at a time. The answer: too much.
-bill kenny

Can See the End

The Germans have a word for it (actually, they have a word for everything and then some, and at this stage in my life, I've heard most of them or what feels like most of them, but I digress). There's a hurry-up in your step now as you try to chase and catch up to you're not quite sure what (but it's covered in fallen leaves). You're afraid of missing it even if you're struggling to define what it is. Torschlusspanik. 

You just awoke with a start from what you thought was a short reverie and learned that those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer are just about gone. When did that happen? A moment ago, it was the second week of June, you were making plans for the picnic and softball on the 4th; the kids, if you had any, were looking forward to complaining, 'there's nothing to do,' after the school year, despite the acres of daylight and sunshine surrounding them. 

And now? Those kids may already be back in school or heading there in the coming days. As for holidays, brace for Labor Day, which puts a bow around the summer. That we all take off (except the mattress stores, who see it as a sales opportunity), instead of honoring the hundreds of millions (literally) whose work and sacrifice built this country, is always ironic, bordering on the obscene at least to me.

I had an appointment for yet more blood tests early (for me) Friday morning. The sky was so blue and cloudless that you get lost looking into it, and the sun was bright and warm on my face. But for the first time since I'm thinking late May, I had to wear a light jacket because of the 'crisp' temperatures. It's about the only time I ever use the word 'crisp.' Unless I encounter someone with a lisp, then I use it a lot because I'm not a nice person.

I had to root around in our hall closet to find it, but now I've moved the hanger into the high rotation area because for the next six weeks or so (fingers crossed) I'll be wearing it more and more, eventually swapping it out for heavier coats until I get to the winterwear. 

Lots of folks rhapsodize about the (approaching) autumn. Not me. I think about how many autumns I've lived through and how very few I still have. As the moroons with their gas-powered leaf blowers resume their annual battle with the inevitability of seasonal changes, I take a moment to think about the adventures I've had and the ones I could have had but for a simple twist of fate and a change of circumstance, and wait for the ever more rapidly approaching dark of evening.
-bill kenny

  

Curtain Call for Summer

It all comes to a head this afternoon at three for the 2025 Little League World Series, and I'm sorry that it has to end because I need to experience the joy of just loving what you're doing, which is what the Little League World Series is all about.

In a world where we pay adult athletes wages that approximate the gross national product of some Third-World nations to participate professionally in a sport our children play for free, there is something about the exhilaration and exuberance of the competition in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, that I find a tonic for my soul. 

The animation and engagement of the television announcers, some of whom, as youngsters, played on these same fields in pursuit of a championship, is contagious and inspiring. If you can listen to the Little League Pledge, almost as old as I am, or even just read it, and not get goosebumps, don't bother checking your pulse; call your coroner, as you're no longer among the living. 

All you can be is reminded of why you chose to follow baseball. Why, in an era of a dozen other sports all grabbing more headlines and world-wide attention, the simple beauty of a contest that, at its most basic, involves striking a small, round leather-bound spheroid with a stick, be it wood, metal or some kind of composite and doing it better than a like number of others attempting to do the same on the other team. 

For a few days, sub-teens serve as role models for adults and an entire team of players, who've just been white-washed and whose run to the Series has ended prematurely and with a drubbing no one would wish on anyone else stand one behind the other along the first and third baselines after the final out and shake the hands of the team sending them home prematurely and tell them 'good game' and really mean it, because the Little League World Series isn't just about baseball, it's about life, as it should be lived. 
-bill kenny

A Post-It Note from the Past

I first offered what follows sixteen years ago, and despite the settling of contents, I still struggle with the same demons. At the time I called it: 

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Papering over Our Differences of Opinion

I keep a wallet filled with foolscap, absolutely crammed. It works out well, unless you were to rob me, as there's rarely any money in it, though not necessarily because of all the foolscap.

Many years ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a little too tightly wound. That gasp of incredulity you may have just heard from people who've known for decades is legit. The me of Back Then makes the me of Now look comatose; I may have actually slept with my jaw ratcheted closed. I cannot imagine in hindsight why I didn't have a stroke, unless, perhaps, it's because I'm a carrier.

I couldn't let go of my anger. The Air Force, to my relief as their employee, rather than dump me amongst the flora and fauna, decided to send me to the head of the Psychiatric Services Wing at the Rhein Main (Air Base) Clinic, Colonel Doctor R. G.. 

He was terrific-and very funny (because he thought I was, if I'm being honest) and very willing to try to rescue a wild-eyed junior enlisted Sammy Glick impersonator who kept wading out into the deep end.

He came up with the foolscap. Every time something angered me, I was to write it down on a piece of paper and put the paper in my wallet. But every time I'd write something down, his rule was that it had to be on its own, separate piece of paper. No doubling up, no lists. 

By the end of the day, I could, and did, have hundreds of slips of paper in my wallet. I had to review all these slips each night and put them on a separate sheet of paper, listing all the items I was still angry about (I could have put those on a single piece of paper). Then, I'd put that list on my nightstand. 

The night before I would go to see him at the hospital, I had to review the six pieces of paper, and transfer anything I was still angry about, to yet another piece of paper and bring that one piece out to our weekly conversation.

Within a month, I had no lists, simply because I'd review all the slips of paper of all the things that made me angry and realized I had no idea what the heck was written on most of them or what the words I could read actually meant or concluded (after reviewing the note and thinking about it, which he told me later was the key point) whatever had happened to spin me up wasn't that important after all.

How about this week or real soon (and I mean real soon) we all decide to use that approach. Watch the news, read a newspaper, check out a column online--we are REALLY CRANKED about a lot of stuff. 

I know people who tune in to certain TV programs just to yell at the talking head in the vapor box who is making a fortune by yelling at them. I guess they watch because it feels so good when the show is over. 

Others insist on reading columnists' words out loud and follow every line of the writer's argument with a scowl, or a gesture, or a deprecation. And we just keep getting louder and angrier about more things, and more people every day. We don't know how to get off the escalator-and most of us don't even know we're on one.

Passion is fine and necessary. If our ancestors back in the ooze didn't care if they evolved to have legs that carried them from the pond and helped us grow lungs, every day would be Friday, if you follow my drift. 

It's the grinding, though, that is wearing us out, the pitched battles we are waging to benefit who knows who or for what purpose. You wanna feel silly about how we now get along with one another, but you don't want to use the foolscap?

Okay--tell me five things this country was PO'ed about at eight AM on September 11th, 2001. Go ahead, I'll wait. Too hard? Gimme three things, then-how hard could that be? No? 

You want to take a break from all this head noise and hate to concentrate on the real and important tasks at hand instead? Go ahead, I'll make a note of where we were, and we can get back to it sometime real soon.
-bill kenny

When Pigs Fly

I spend a lot of time online, and more recently, a significant portion of that time has been devoted to grocery shopping. The jostle in the aisles and more especially the interaction with other folks as we pass one another, elevate my stress levels. 

Besides, the mega stores just keep getting larger as they slowly, like Sherwin-Williams Paint, cover the earth. In the not-too-distant future, I see a moment where you live your entire life in a megastore with an occasional special treat of real daylight through a window if you've been very good.  

A news item like this one does nothing to reassure me about where our world is heading. I guess I should be pacified to learn, "At this point, the root cause of the contamination is unknown, but the FDA is working with Indonesian seafood regulatory authorities to investigate."

I guess the good news about radioactive shrimp would be they're easier to find in the dark. Not that I spend a lot of time looking for them.
-bill kenny

More Gilligan than the Professor

Somewhere, some place, I still have the very first record my mother ever bought me, a copy of Danny & the Juniors' "At the Hop" on ABC-Paramount records. I have no idea why she got it for me.

I was very young, still single digits and short pants (and a Y at the end of my first name), I suspect, and I have no idea where I would have played the single as 'the victrola' as we called the record player back in the day was something we kids were never allowed to go near at the time.

Decades and decades later, I have over 7,500 albums, organized alphabetically and chronologically, a thousand or more compact discs (sorted the same way), and more music streaming services than I have ears with which to listen to them. 

When I stumbled across this article, The 50 Most Influential Albums to Hear Before You Die, I was like a cat with an open box. 

Give my regards to Desert Island Discs. Yes, I have every one of them.
-bill kenny

Beats a Spelling Bee

Decades ago, when I was a college-age human, for a number of reasons caused by a variety of substances, I would often sit up all night watching television. Back in my day, there were some wondrous sights at oh-bright-early in the morning on channels on the dial just above the police calls.

Now that I'm mature, it gets late pretty early around my house, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy the odd TV program, and by odd, I mean the stuff ESPN U sticks on when they think we're not watching.

If you speak German, it's helpful while watching this clip from a program called Beat the Star, though not critical. And yes, they are competing to see who can best place their grocery trolley in the return area, a "sport" that is a lost art for most Americans, based on the supermarket parking lots I've been in. 
-bill kenny 

Altitude vs. Attitude

The greatest thing about unsolicited advice is you're under absolutely no obligation to take it. I had this realization at the exact moment I was offering someone a heaping helping of unsolicited advice, which only made the irony last a tiny bit longer, though I believe I did hear God snicker. Served me right.

Years ago, someone introduced me to what he and I came to know as "The General's Rule" (except it applies to beyond just that rank and pay grade). Simply put: "Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn't have to do it."

Look around here in Norwich, The Rose of New England, as I do on too many occasions when I get on my soapbox and channel Plato, Machiavelli and Lenny Bruce (often at the same time) while offering the finest in unsolicited advice on all manner of topics proving again that the line between surreal and cereal is often a question of how much milk goes in the bowl.

We each have our own ideas on how "they" should address challenges we have here in Norwich (and when you scan state and national news stories, you'll discover we're not so special, unique, or alone in what we face or how we do it). 

To be clear, when I say "they" I mean the neighbors and often friends we know who choose to offer themselves as candidates for elected office because they want to make a positive difference. Until elected to office, "they" were "us." Oops.

Let's face it, the appeal of being on the City Council or the Board of Education doesn't have very much to do with money, prestige, or power. If there are 'perks' to being an elected official, they must be stealth, as I can't see them, and I wear very strong prescription glasses. (Not always strong enough to see someone else's point of view, but close.)

In recent years, across much of New England and here in Norwich, but longer say friends in the Midwest and in the Rust Belt, good economic times have been hard to find, with every 'tough budget' year for cities and towns followed by one that's even tougher.

Trying to maintain municipal services for an ever-larger population without crushing local property owners under an unbearable tax burden or creating incentives to entice new businesses to our community without ignoring those who chose to settle here when there were no rewards requires a skillset few appreciate and fewer still possess.

We may not evaluate those who seek our votes for office in the same way. I choose those whose vision of mission and sense of self convince me their judgment deserves my support on decisions that must be made on behalf of all of us.

You may wish to select those who best represent your position and opinions and who will be your voice in those same decisions. There's no 'right' or 'wrong' way to view or use government, be it local, state, or national. I think the use of the indefinite article as in 'a way' is often preferable to the definite 'the way', but that's a discussion, for perhaps another time. 

What is critically important, every day and not just on Election Day, is open communication and honest dialogue. Anyone can speak-but everyone should listen.
-bill kenny

Checking the Eyelids for Holes

I had a nearly sleepless night Saturday into Sunday. I awoke for some reason shortly after two in the morning with the song, "Itsy-bitsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" going through my brain. 

That led me to remember the first time I heard at a high school football game while I was still in grammar school, which in turn led me to recall classmates from Mrs. Hilge's third-grade class, as well as Mrs. McGarry in fourth grade.

No idea why. And then I wandered mentally through my prep school years, revisiting some champion bastards, some of whom I wished dead at the time, and would be disappointed to learn today my wish hadn't come true.  

I sorted through my memories of college, working for McGraw-Hill, joining the Air Force, and all the folks I served with, followed by all the people I've known since leaving the service over forty years ago. We're talking lots of people. I suspect there were times I fell asleep, as my life, even in retrospect, isn't that exciting,  

When I awoke shortly before eight in the morning, I was exhausted even though I am pretty sure all I did was dream I was awake when I was actually asleep. As I sleepwalked through most of the morning and the rest of the day, I realized all I'd accomplished was to make for an even longer Sunday.
-bill kenny