If Dreams Were Thunder

For me, this is the roughest time of the year. The calendar says Spring is here, and when you look outside, you're inclined to agree. Except more often than not, it's brisker and crisper than we'd like, and the breeze is more of a shriek than a whisper.

Major League Baseball 2025 edition has already started in a season that will, as has been the case in recent years, end in November, which is way too long for anything other than a fantasy involving cooking oil, satin sheets and a lady named, well, I'm not allowed to detail any more of that in this space today (or any other).

I love baseball, though I have close to no idea what kind of a Grapefruit League season "my" New York Yankees had, and because the games don't count, I don't either. I've rooted for them most of my life, with a brief interlude elsewhere as I was entering double digits when Joan Payson owned the New York Metropolitans.

I sort of still root for Mr. Met for many of the reasons as first chronicled in Jimmy Breslin's masterpiece, Can't Anybody Here Play this Game? The latest version is a much better team, and its loyal fans should be proud of them.

But that's not really important. What is important, I believe, on MLB's Opening Day, is everyone's team, whoever they are, starts the season in first place. Every pitcher's earned run average is a Hall of Fame worthy 0.00, and you can't help but believe 'this is the year.' All of us know that no one wins the World Series on Opening Day, but, conversely, no one can lose it. And that's as it should be.

The season is still in its infancy, and more so than in recent memory, we need all the optimism and enthusiasm we can gather from whatever sources for as long as we can keep it. 

Opening Day has whetted our appetites for the months ahead. We get from Point A to Point B in a variety of ways but in the same number of days. Whether we live them in hope or in dread is a choice we make and then must own. 

-bill kenny

Show of Hands

Forgive me if I channel my inner Martin Niemöller and then compound that by encouraging you to find yours. With apologies to Thomas Paine, these are times to try any person's soul. 

If you had turned off the news since the November election (my hand is up), you might not have realized the Greedheads are stripping our US of A and selling it off for parts.

It has to stop. Now's as good a time as any. 

Think globally and act locally.
Norwich is doing both, and you can do it, too; just look around.

So much for compromise solutions, summer soldiers, and sunshine patriots.
-bill kenny

So Many Questions....

It's a reflection of her curiosity and her calculation. My wife has a lethal set-up for getting what she wants merely by asking for it. It makes no difference if you and she have met just for the first time in this life or if you've known her for all the years I've made her know me. 

Simple, direct, seemingly without artifice (but with much deliberation and delivery), she opens her eyes just a little wider, tilting her head slightly to her left as she leans forward and offers with a soft Hessicher dialekt, 'I haf a kwestion.'

At least, that's what it sounds like to me. And she always gets an answer and assistance-from the hardware store guy, the shelf-stocker in the refrigerator case at the market, or from one of the swarm of white-coated jargon-spewing health care professionals she fences with on the phone as part of her one woman crusade to understand and overcome the complexities and contradictions of the American health care industry.

She raised two children to adulthood for the most part in a culture and society thousands of miles from where she, herself, had been raised, with the barest of assistance from a man whose heroes, he told her the night they met, were Peter Pan and Yossarian. She heard me clearly but decided to not make an issue of it.

Forty-eight years ago today I asked her to marry me. Both Pete and Yo-Yo would be pleased. She and I find it difficult to believe that it's been that length of time. I still can't believe she said yes. She says 'it feels longer'. I'm thinking that's because the Germans use the metric system. At least, that's why I'm hoping she says that.

My recollection is, after her assent, I asked her if she was sure. Which, come to think of it, sounds exactly like something I'd say. As has happened so often ever since, she assures my recollection is entirely inaccurate. Wie du meinst my dear.

I do remember promising her a marvelous adventure with large amounts of laughter and, I believe, elaborately big dance numbers with Busby Berkley choreography. I may have oversold, ever so slightly, the upside of the matrimonial state with me, but she's never complained at how the movie's turned out, even now when we're closer to the last reel and the closing credits than the previews.

Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. Another reason why I love her; she's experienced all of me there is and still loves me. Yay!

-bill kenny

Time to Care if You Dare

I realize I sound a lot like one of those curmudgeons who complains about all 'those punks on my lawn,' but that's only because I am. 

I can remember in past decades when annual City Council hearings on the school's budget requests were shifted to a middle school gymnasium because so many people wanted to attend, and you'd have thought the governor was speaking.

Those days are over, and, not surprisingly, no one is expecting them to return. The expression 'think globally, act locally' works only if we are willing to act and accept the responsibilities of our actions locally. Let's face it, when we look to Hartford and Washington D.C., there's a lot more confrontation and much less collaboration on almost every issue we can imagine.

At the state and federal level, the attitude has become 'for me to look good, you (the other side) need to look bad', always forgetting the dangerous part of the phrase 'zero-sum' is the former. 

To acknowledge we can't afford to continue to do business in Norwich the way we always have is a blinding glimpse of the obvious, but based absence of encouragement or even feigned interest for so many issues ranging from the City's Plan of Conservation and Development, through suggestions on improving the downtown revitalization programs to department work-ups on the annual budget, we have to do better at owning our future.

We must accept the realization that we are the ones who make the final choices on our future and the paths we walk to get there. These are our children, our downtown, our neighborhoods, with our businesses, schools, police, streets and sidewalks (and the thousands of other moving parts that make Norwich, Norwich). 

No one else will care about any of this the way we should. We must stop waiting for someone to step up and, instead, become the someone who does. 
-bill kenny

Thanks for the Pranks

Today, April Fool's is observed around the world and has been with us for the better part of a millennium (Falcon by Ford; to say nothing of Harrison). The origins stretch back to the time of Geoffrey Chaucer, and Canterbury Tales. 

Based on headlines across the globe this week, we've been practicing for today, except no one was aware we were supposed to only be practicing. On every page in every paper and on every screen that flickers are stories that it's reasonable to assume are simply made up, except they aren't. 

It feels like a nightmare at times, from which we should awaken and ask how we are here instead of why. We're even more lost because "if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." And to some extent, that's become the modus operandi. 

Years ago, I abandoned the phrase 'that's the most f*cking stupid thing I've ever heard' because I was saying/thinking it practically non-stop. Today, you can stand the world on its head, and by tomorrow, no one will remember because nothing you did today will seem out of place in a vulgar and venal vale of perdition. 

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. Except now.

-bill kenny