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