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

Elevate Your Holiday Spirit

I love offering comments about O'Tis a Festival, which is tomorrow, starting at 9:00 a.m. at Otis Library. For many years, I was a guest parker, although my health no longer allows me to do that. However, it will not stop me from resurrecting a previous entry about the magic of the Festival. 

Here Goes:

Celebrating the Coming Holiday Season and Ourselves

As we head towards Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays, the year seems to feel like it's accelerating (so maybe I should have written 'as we careen towards the holidays'). 

Perhaps because the daylight has shifted, the days are all shorter and more jammed with activities. Personal calendars that were already pretty full are now loaded with holiday parties, travel, shopping outings and all kinds of other activities. 

So I can understand your momentary exasperation when here I am lobbying you to put yet another event into the mix, but trust me on this one, you'll thank me later. Tomorrow is the O'tis a Festival at the Otis Library, a self-proclaimed "Holiday Extravaganza" with many local area artisans offering beautiful handmade items absolutely perfect for gifting to others (and, since charity begins at home, also keeping for yourself).

I've regarded Otis Library on Main Street in Norwich for many years as the last man standing who is just now (finally) being rewarded for steadfastness. A decade ago, there was very nearly nothing in downtown, aside from, we assured one another, lots of potential. 

And now, after a lot of heavy lifting, risk-taking, and plain old-fashioned hard work from a lot of different folks, there are actual (and flourishing) businesses lining the streets leading to the library with the promise of even more on the way. 

There's a lot more happening in Down City than many of us once believed would be possible. And at just about the middle of the intersection between promise and performance is the Otis Library.

As urban planners and developers from across the country have repeatedly insisted, because it's completely true, Otis and countless libraries nationwide are not close to the same places we went to as kids, wherever that library was. Here in Norwich and elsewhere, city downtown districts look to the library the way the fingers on the hand look to the thumb.  

Saturday's O'tis a Festival is another instance of a library not staying in the box we may have mentally constructed for it. When the festival began over a decade ago, it was sort of a book fair with a smattering of 'other stuff.' 

But as the years have progressed, the local and community artists and artisans have turned just about all the free floor space in the library into an arts and crafts market (think Rose City Arts Festival, but indoors, because it's November and not June, and without the bouncy castle (I think)).

There will be over three dozen vendors, free take-home crafts for the kids (I'm not sure that means in exchange for your children or just something for them to do), displays of Native American artifacts, and eats. There's entertainment, raffles, and a visit from Santa throughout the day. 

We always talk about having a 'community center' and, at least for a day, tomorrow, we shall be in the Otis Library, bustling with more activities than either of us could otherwise imagine. And since nothing succeeds like success, the more of this we all support, the more of this we will all have to support (it's science, I think). 

Vibrant downtowns are all about feet on the street, and O'tis a Festival is another way of putting our best foot forward. So step out and step up. Celebrate the coming holiday season and yourself.

-bill kenny

John Kincade's in Mourning.

We in the United States recently said goodbye to the one-cent piece. I guess Honest Abe should be happy to no longer have a connection to the current leader of his Republican Party, 

I'm kinda excited as I'm hoping that jar of change I've had at close to full for years now might actually be a storage place for one-cent pieces, but more especially of valuable ones, that, like everyone else, I call 'penny.'

I'm glad I saved so many since I pass wishing wells all the time, having earned a lot of them for my thoughts.

I'd hope I'm financially well enough off to have nickels rather than pennies placed on my eyes at my final rest, but Venmo is looking pretty good right about now.
-bill kenny

Picture This

I used to take a lot of pictures with the camera on my cell phone. I would never call myself a 'photographer,' mainly because I'm lucky to have acquaintances who are actually photographers, and I wouldn't want to insult them with the comparison.

Two years ago, I bought a drone whose controls were supposedly an application I loaded onto my then-cellphone. I never got it to work. I still have that purchase sitting in a box on the mantel above the fireplace that isn't really a fireplace. 

About a year ago, I bought another drone, this time with a separate controller that has nothing to do with my cellphone. I still haven't worked up enough nerve to open the box it came in. I'm waiting, I suspect, for one of our technologically gifted children to visit us, and then I'll ask them to set it up.

Why? Because of pictures like these.
Not that I will ever capture images like them, but I can tell myself, I might.
-bill kenny

Even the Dog Can Shake Hands

I'm a Boomer and I like my universe to be well-ordered. I enjoy spontaneity, provided it's planned two weeks or so in advance.

I eat my peas with honey; I've done it all my life. It makes the peas taste funny, but it keeps them on my knife. 

That's my way of explaining I still have a landline phone (and a cell), and while we have an Amazon Fire TV Stick and subscribe to Prime Video, I also have a cable TV subscription with the same folks who handle my landline and my internet. 

Our children and their spouses long ago cut the cable and stream all manner of entertainment and other programming materials. My standard question is 'what channel is that on?' as I am not nearly so adventurous. There are demons and dragons out there if you wander too far from shore. 

Illinois' only shoreline is with a Great Lake, but it still has demons.
Hey, Bulldog!
-bill kenny

The Start of the Odyssey

I got ahead of myself late last week (doesn't happen that often; I'm tempted to savor the flavor). Last Friday marked the arrival, very late at night, thirty-four years ago, of my family from the only home they'd ever known, Germany. 

My wife and our children landed at/close to about eight at night in Philadelphia International Airport (I'm tempted to say in the W. C. Fields Arrival Terminal, but I usually resist. Until now). They were the last people to be able to leave the lounge.

I had learned the day before that they would be flying into Philly. Their first arrival had become ensnared in red tape as various people offered their unsolicited opinions on visas and other matters, and our reunion had been delayed by close to two weeks. It seemed to be a turbulent end to a chapter in our lives that I never really enjoyed as much as I should have.

The first year of the decade and a half plus I was to live in Germany seems mostly black and white to me. It was only after I met the woman I was to marry and started to make friends among those with whom I worked that color became part of the pattern. 

Thanks along the way to Lee, Chris and Moni, the other Bill, Roger and Rik, Darlene, Sara and Marge, Bob and Gisela (absent but always remembered) and to the too many others I've forgotten who join my wife's mom and dad, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and more neighbors than I could count even then, for opening their hearts and hearths.

I hadn't fully realized how much there had been home until I came here a month before my family arrived. My best achievements were as a husband and father-I just didn't know it, until I didn't have them on my resume anymore. My wife had successfully concluded the Deutsche Kapitel in our life story, perhaps to be continued at a later date, while her stumblebunny husband struggled to gain a toehold in New England.

I drove 95 South forever into Philly, where, true to form, I got lost twice coming off the interstate trying to find the airport (and yes, I know you can see the former from the latter and vice versa). Both times I asked for directions and the folks whom I hailed were as kind as could be, leading me to believe, if just for that night, it was true, 'you've got a friend in Pennsylvania.'

There was a glass wall in the arrival area so you could see everyone for an eternity (or so it felt) before you could touch them. I watched our son, who had turned nine that summer, two steps ahead of his mother, who carried our daughter, whose fourth birthday had been in May and whose eyes were as wide as saucers, clutching a mechanical pink pig as if it were her prized possession. Slowly, they made their way towards me as I rushed to locate a door and when we finally found one another, I nearly crushed my entire family as I embraced all of them.

Our daughter, peering out the lounge window, offered 'Amerika is sehr dunkel, ' which was more prophetic than I'm comfortable admitting most days since her arrival. We piled into a stunningly non-descript POS I'd bought a week before (the German specs BMW sold for a song to a relative of a neighbor) and we began the long drive back to Southern New England, stopping on the Jersey Turnpike for food, and lots of it, especially for a nine-year old boy with hollow bones and secret pockets (I always assumed) as slowly our American Adventure began.

All those years on. If  I could be here and now, I would be, I should be.Only with you. Always.
-bill kenny

You Are What You Eat

When I was a wee slip of a lad, I was an omnivore (and more). Food pyramids, suggested serving sizes...pish posh! 

In my prime, they couldn't make junk food fast enough; that's how quickly I consumed (more like inhaled) it. But here in the Air Age of the Twenty-First Century, with macros and glutens and biomes, as Dylan once rasped, 'the times they are a'changin'.' And then we wonder why so many of us need a forklift to get up the stairs.

For decades, the best part of eating Doritos was ending up with orange-colored fingers (how many would you have to eat to be totally orange? Send your best guesstimate to 'Donny the Fat Boy,' c/o The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C., 20500). That's why Gawd invented Wet Wipes, and if not, He should have because they work great. 

But, news headlines lead me to believe those days might be over. Cheetos and Doritos Go Naked with New Products Free of Artificial Colors and Flavors. You may have to hurry as I suspect the vending machines at the cannabis dispensaries are already sold out.
-bill kenny

Leaf Me Alone

One of the downsides to living where there are four seasons is the transition from summer to autumn, especially for the trees and their leaves. I am very much of the 'live and let live' persuasion, which translates to the 'lie and let them lie' position on leaf gathering. 

I've noticed again this year in my neighborhood, some of us have gathered so many leaves, it's as if we're waiting for them to fall from the trees and nab them on the first bounce. We rake them up, and some of us, maybe you have the same kind of neighbors where you live (maybe you are that neighbor where you live), place them in black plastic bags awaiting pickup by the trash folks.

If it happens around here the way I watched it happen yesterday in Waterford, the dustmen empty the plastic bags into their trucks and discard the bags. This caused me to wonder what the point of the plastic bag was/is. 

Elsewhere, I've seen these VERY large paper bags filled with leaves-in theory, because the paper is biodegradable, all of it can go directly into the landfill--or do you think they're headed for incinerators? Around here, we have trash-to-power incineration units though I've no idea how much energy we get from such an operation.

For millions of years, I estimate, we as a species did nothing with the leaves as they fell. You see all that dirt all around us? I have a funny feeling where some of it might have come from, and I'm not sure what we're accomplishing by how we're operating now. 

While I wasn't looking, compost has become a lost cause, it seems, perhaps even a dark art. In its place, we have created a first-class annoyance, the leaf blower. We went from devices that looked like vacuums and picked up fallen leaves and plopped them into bags (do you remember those?) to a gadget that hangs from your hip and can be used to blow leaves that have fallen on your property into someone else's yard or out into the street.

I think leaf blowers are a much more accurate and contemporary symbol of America in the 21st Century than either the Bald Eagle or the Stars & Stripes. There is nothing that says "Wha?!" more than a guy on a Saturday afternoon working a leaf blower wearing dark shades with iBuds in both ears. 

And I'd ask him why he's doing what he's doing, but he's as oblivious to me right now as I am to him for the rest of the year. Ahh, Sweet Suburbia. We've got Mother Nature on the run--now what?
-bill kenny

An Inconvenient Truth

We lead very sheltered lives here in The Land of the Round Doorknobs. 

Most of us can't name five world leaders aside from our own President, and many of us have trouble naming our Congressional representatives, Senators, and in some instances Governor (met just such a moron yesterday). 

Many Americans don't know the difference between North and South Korea, and we currently have a Chief Executive Officer in the White House who apparently doesn't know the difference between South Africa and South America. 

I lived, loved, and worked in (West) Germany for fifteen years and remain very interested in all aspects of German life, sport, culture, and politics. In West Germany, the political parties were SPD, CDU, CSU, FDP, and the Greens. 

With the fall of the wall in November 1989 and the subsequent reunification of East and West Germany, additional political parties sprang up to include a rebranded Socialist Unity Party of Germany as the PDS and eventually as 'The Left.'

Germany, in my experience, is to Europe what the United States was to the world in terms of welcoming immigrants (that changed and not for the better when the USA elected a thirty-four-times convicted felon as President, but we can agree to disagree on that, I guess.). 

The USA has MAGAts, and the Germans have the Alternative for Germany, or Nazis (because that is what they are), and now, the white supremacists in charge of the USA would like to import a genuine German Nazi, fearing we don't have enough home-grown ones.  

Naomi Seibt is exactly what we don't need, now or ever, in the United States.
-bill kenny

Jail to the Thief

"Please allow me to introduce myself

I'm a man of wealth and taste   

I've been around for a long, long year

Stole many a man's soul and faith."

"Just as every cop is a criminal 

And all the sinners saints 

As heads is tails just call me Lucifer

'Cause I'm in need of some restraint."   

-bill kenny

What's the Word?

Your choice: 
maru mori (“the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things”); 

apolytus (“the moment you realize you are changing as a person, finally outgrowing your old problems like a reptile shedding its skin”);

the wends (“the frustration that you’re not enjoying an experience as much as you should… as if your heart had been inadvertently demagnetized by a surge of  expectations”);

anoscetia (“the anxiety of not knowing ‘the real you'”) or 

dès vu (“the awareness that this moment will become a memory”).

Or perhaps you'd choose Agnosthesia or Zielschmerz?
They're all there, waiting for an English Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
-bill kenny

Veterans Day 2025

Not everyone will make it to the Veterans Rally Point in the Norwich Business Park this morning at eleven minutes after eleven o'clock for the Veterans Day observances sponsored by the Peter Gallan American Legion Post #104 Taftville, CT, and the Norwich Area Veterans Council, but I'm sure there's a remembrance near where you live.

This is not Memorial Day-we honor everyone in uniform, living and dead, past and present, today. When I was a kid, today was called Armistice Day, because it began as a commemoration of the end of The World War, which was later known as World War I for the sadly obvious reason that we had a World War Two. There was always a moment of silence to mark the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Our servicemembers are often out of sight and out of mind, scattered across and around the world. Heroes and heroines in uniform are making a difference every day in more ways imaginable, allowing all of us to somnambulate with our eyes open, as we don't see the lives we could have led because of the incessant assault we endure.

It's a new world and a new generation, but those making the sacrifice are the old souls who have always borne the burden--not just those at locations marked with dots on the map of countries we cannot name, but all those who whet the blade of the sword they wield in our name in defense of everything we are and will ever be.

As a nation, we are more filled with self-doubt and profound conflict than at any time in at least my lifetime. There will always be light and dark, but we shall prevail because we must. For anyone, anywhere, now or then, in uniform who placed service over self, whenever and wherever that is and was, thank you.

Sometimes we forget the very words we meant to say-but as long as we don't forget those who earned that gratitude, we will always be worthy of their sacrifice.

-bill kenny

Lettuce All Take a Deep Breath

I have a celery problem, sort of. 

Whenever I'm at the grocery store, I buy a head of celery because I enjoy dipping the individual stalks into ranch dressing or covering them in Aldi peanut butter (my favorite brand). 

Except once I'm home and have put the celery away, it tends to stay away until at some time down the line, while rummaging through the refrigerator, I discover a wilted and dessiscated head of celery that I'd forgotten about.  Ewwww.

I know, 'so stop buying it!' But it's healthy and good for me, when/if I  remember to eat it (maybe not so much with the peanut butter on the stalk, but it's so good!), and eating it makes me feel pretty. And not just celery, and not just feeling pretty. 

Between us, I know it's science, but that article doesn't make scents.
-bill kenny

A Lesson Seemingly Unlearned

For us, on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, it's a weekend after a non-holiday holiday (Halloween) and before an actual holiday (Veterans Day) that many of us confuse with a different one (Memorial Day). Good luck wrestling with all of that.

A trans-oceanic flight east away, on the continent where both of this earth's two world wars began, Europe, today for Germany, sitting in the middle of Europe, the ghosts of its past have never been nearer or more real, and the danger greater when we speak of Kristallnacht.

What lessons its citizens and, by extension, the rest of us, learned (and continue to learn) from it should tell each of us perhaps more than any of us is comfortable knowing. Speaking only for me, I very much like to learn, but I will also concede that I don't always enjoy being taught.

If the above-mentioned is your first encounter with Kristallnacht, by all means, use the link provided and start on your journey. And understand you are staring into Konrad's Heart of Darkness. It will look and sound familiar, as it should, because its twin beats in each of our own chests, and no matter how far and fast we run, we will never outdistance our own past.

What follows are some thoughts on Kristallnacht, an event that, having stood (a lifetime ago) in many of the spots where atrocities happened, I still cannot grasp or comprehend. I hope, should you read on, you will agree 'never again' is the only conclusion that can ever be drawn, and resolve to remember that.

If the Shoah, The Holocaust, was an unfinished symphony of genocidal annihilation for Europe's Jews (and it was only unfinished because the rest of the world finally wrested the controls of the killing factories from the True Believers before they achieved their Endlosung), then November 9, 1938, the first notes of the overture to that murderous symphony, Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), were played.

When you listen to the softly told tales of survival, often by the purest of coincidences, if you have a heart, it is sickening, and if you have a conscience, it is outraged. But to keep the next exercise of extreme intolerance from ever reaching this point, we all need to retain the memories of the events as well as the circumstances that allowed the events to happen.

The Nazis did NOT leap out of bed eighty-seven years ago, causing the German nation, the land of Luther, Schiller, Liszt, and Beethoven, to lose its collective mind and forfeit forever its own soul.

For decades leading up to this day in 1938, and not just in Germany, but all across Europe, East and West, the systemic and systematic marginalization of Jews, apartheid before that word was in fashion, was in practice and a part of everyday life. The Nürnberger Gesetze of 1935 helped dull all Germans to the slaughter to come.

The ability to use language in reducing those who are the object of your animus to something somehow less human than yourself, so that the acrimony and injury inflected upon them has no more consequence than stepping on a bug, is a critical tool in the creation and construction of the crematoria and concentration camps and no less vital to that than the jackboots and the armbands.

You have a lot on your plate today-it's the weekend and the holidays are coming. Finding the time to go online or to your local library and invest an hour into researching the decay and depravity that began with Kristallnacht is asking a lot, I know. So how about a deal?

What if you and I promise one another to take an additional breath before using a racial epithet to characterize someone on the other side of the political spectrum with whom we disagree? Or to refrain from suggesting (at the top of our lungs) what a person with whom we are arguing may attempt to do with her/his logic and conclusion, as anatomically difficult as it might prove to be.

Instead of counting to ten, we try to count to eleven, and then twelve, and just keep counting until the gorge in our veins recedes just a bit and our blood has gone off its boiling point. And, most importantly, when we see someone else in mid-screed, we mitigate and mediate to help assure a more rapid return to civil and civic discourse in our interactions with one another.

Germany was not a nation of Nazis on Kristallnacht-they were in the minority even when in power. It isn't so much just the sins committed on this day that should live in infamy forever, but rather the sins that could have been prevented had two or more people joined and raised their voices in opposition. We must never forget the lesson of what happened next.
-bill kenny
 

Fine Line Between Pot and Brothers

As a Boomer, I fall for every urban legend and internet factoid about Gen X/Gen Z/who-knows-what-this- current-crop-calls-themselves, and one of my all-time favorites is that wrist watches are for old people (said by those who look at their phones to tell the time).    

I have no clue if it's true. I now wear one of those smartwatches that tracks steps, activities, hours, and minutes slept (and the quality of that sleep; I'm currently a Turtle, downgraded from being a Bear (and no, I have no idea what that means. Perhaps that's why it's called a 'smartwatch?')) but for decades I had a Timex that told me the date (NOT the day) and with any month with other than thirty-one days, you had to wind the stem backwards and then forwards to get to the right date.

You read that correctly, 'wind the stem.' No batteries, no USB charging cable, just a little tiny mushroom-like button (sorry, Stormy) that you pulled out ever so slightly with your thumb and forefinger so that every day you could wind up the mainspring and keep the watch ticking. (JCS died for somebody's watch, Lord, but not mine. I still have it somewhere in my nightstand drawer in my bedroom.)

I have encountered people, not just young ones, who cannot read an analog watch or clock face. Whether or not they think a flashing 12:00 means "Emergency, (also known as power blinks)" I don't know, but it reminds me of an article I stumbled across online, "Why Do Watch Ads Always Show 10::10 Time?"

Pretty cuckoo, huh?   
-bill kenny

Sweet Dreams

As I've aged (badly), I'm stunned at how my lifestyle changes are adding up. For decades, I got up at three in the morning and didn't go to bed until 'late' (the time varied). 

And now, I sleep most days until at least eight in the morning, and by half past nine at night, I'm climbing into (metaphorical) footie pajamas and calling it a day. 

Something I've started to spend a lot of time thinking about: 'where does sleep come from?'

Adenosine and volcanoes. Who knew it was such a powerful combination?
-bill kenny

20/20 Hindsight

In the warmth of the post-Election Day glow, if I may inject a short infusion of pragmatism: with all the money spent on campaign literature, signs, advertising, pony rides, campaign events, and--you caught that, didn't you? And I was trying to be so clever....so now what should I do with the saddle? 

Anyway, with all that money spent on the electoral equivalent of fireworks or party favors, how is it that there's never enough money budgeted by anyone's campaign to pay for the pick-up and clean-up the day after they burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away (and how come there's never room in the van for all the crazies that were howling at the moon throughout the campaign)?

Tale of two days near where I live in Norwich: a major intersection of two highways where traditionally, the Monday before the election candidates and their supporters cluster and hold up their campaign's lawn signs as commuting motorists whiz by in, and towards, every direction as the lawn signs are waved and horns get honked (or vice versa for all I know). 

In the thirty-four years of living here and speaking with all kinds of folks who've sought office and taken part in this ritual, I've yet to meet any candidates who've suggested they've gained even a single vote by so doing.

I've asked voters if they have ever changed their minds about a candidate because he/she was standing out on the intersection in the rain, fog, locusts, sleet, or chill (see pony rides, above, for inclusion of locusts), waving a lawn sign, and the answer is 'nope.'  And yet there was the whole gang on Monday waving signs. No one knows the reason, only the history.

Join me now on that same corner, same time of day-but yesterday when all the laughter had turned to sorrow. Solitude (and carbon monoxide) as far as the eye can see. Meanwhile, the other lawn signs, the ones in front of houses that neighbors are losing to mortgage companies and banks and foreclosures, will wave in any breeze at anyone.....

-bill kenny

Time for the Prose

Disclaimer: I had no personal stake in the outcome of yesterday's elections here in Norwich. I wasn’t running for anything, or from anything (with my knees, always welcome news), and I had no bets riding on how the votes turned out.

I know for whom I voted and why (and hope you did the same) but I believe by this dawn's early light, whoever we chose for City Council and Board of Education will have a difficult job, as will almost all of those across this country, newcomer and incumbent, who serve in our millions of communities, townships and cities in a variety of offices. 

Sometimes the passions during election season can blur that perspective, and, speaking for myself, if they have in recent weeks, be it thought, word, or deed, my apologies.

I once read (and remember) someone telling me, ‘We campaign in poetry but must govern in prose.’ I’d like to think that means while we use words to excite and perhaps incite supporters during a campaign for office, once the morning after Election Day arrives, we must attempt to govern by summoning the best from within ourselves and hoping for the same from the other side of the aisle.

Offering me a bigger perspective on this idea earlier this week, though I suspect that was not necessarily their intention, were lawn signs on neighboring properties I passed on New London Turnpike, supporting candidates of both parties for a variety of offices..

I've driven past these houses for years with little to no thought and wouldn’t be surprised to learn that in all those years, the very same people have been living there, leading whatever lives they lead, together with their families. 

I can imagine the members of those households sharing flag football games in the fall that spill across each of their yards, enjoying summer barbecues and winter snowball fights, and going trick or treating together or organizing whiffle ball tournaments that begin on lazy summer afternoons shortly after mid-day and don’t conclude until the last of the light has faded from the sky in the evening.

What I saw in these houses were neighbors who had different views on who was best to assume leadership positions in the city each of them calls home. And not just here but all across this country, today in the aftermath of the ballots cast before polls closed yesterday evening, discussions and conversations on that topic will continue even as each of those neighbors starts their day by opening their front door this morning to retrieve the newspaper, for one of them, their candidate for office will have been less than successful.

And perhaps later in the morning or maybe tonight after putting the car in the garage and walking the dog, they will go out to where those lawn signs are, pull them out by the stakes, put the metal frame holder in the garage for another day, and fold the cardboard sign in half and place it in the recycling box.

And their world, and ours as well, will continue, as shall we. Because the sun also rises, learning to see it is both a skill and an art.
-bill kenny