Hello In There

Yesterday afternoon I shadowed a group of active duty military people, actually Sailors studying to become submariners at the school on the base in Groton, who've been collecting canned goods and other non-perishables since Thanksgiving and who were bringing a goodly portion of their collection to the Saint Vincent de Paul Place in downtown Norwich near the Otis Library.

It's a community meal site and food pantry for people many of the rest of us have either forgotten or would like to. You and I speak these days about 'tough times' as if either of us have any idea what that means, and maybe you do, but I have a job and my family has a hearth and home. Many of those helped by Saint Vincent's have none of that-and for them, the struggle is holding body and soul together today until tomorrow and then they start again.

The sailors were delivering about 3,500 canned goods and boxes of non-perishables to Saint Vincent's and to the Norwich Vet Center over on Cliff Street. In a way, both places bracket and bookend a downtown in small-town New England struggling as hard as those who live in it to remain relevant and vital as America of the 21st Century hurries by with hardly a sideways glance.

We have holiday decorations in downtown, but there aren't very many people around and about, which is pretty much the same story across the country as the enclosed mega malls, built a generation ago on cheap land near the highways, replaced village greens and downtown shopping excursions before, they themselves, were obviated by virtual malls and on-line shopping sites where you click, pay and ship without ever exchanging a word of conversation with anyone.

This time of year, perhaps because of the religious overtones or maybe the philosophic atmospherics, you'd think we might be a little more gentle with one another. We are, after all, somewhat fragile as a species and while some settling of contents takes place as our lives unfold, there are secret places each of us have for memories and moments others will never share. But the kindness of strangers is like most everything else, in short supply these days, though it was cheering to see all these young faces, like bright and shiny pennies, forming a chain to unload groceries to help those in need.

Instead of the rush and crush of the crowds at the mall and the big box store, where we all collide in pursuit of the same bright and shiny must-have holiday item, here were friends we'd never met before helping neighbors they may never see again-and while it was happening in my town, help like this is going on all over even where you live, even as we sit and discuss the notion that our social contract should have more contact with one another, regardless of race, sex, age, creed or need. Maybe this is the time we should start to make that happen.

We spend too much time alone in private plots of frozen space and all the news just repeats itself like some forgotten dream. We no longer see the poor, the halting, the lame and the lost. Any sympathy for the battered and beaten has vanished and our indifference makes no distinction between old and young, have or have not. And the reason for the season is in danger of being lost as the Three Kings are marked down for quick sale and there's a manger clean-up needed in aisle five slouching towards Bethlehem.
-bill kenny

Hello In There

I took a day off yesterday to celebrate my own holiday, the 6th of July, and to actually give me a break from my routine work-a-day life. I am fortunate in that I enjoy what I do for a living (I'm not sure the people with whom I come into contact feel that way) but sometimes, probably like you, I get so caught up in the 'doing' I stop seeing the reason or I supply different reasons than the ones that brought me here in the first place (and making enough and having enough money is certainly a valid reason for working, it's just a lousy reason for excelling at work; sorry).

If you're a shift or a flex-time worker you've already discovered this, but I'm always surprised when I'm off on a 'regular' work day as to how much of life goes on within you and and without you. I went for a walk around the Norwich Free Academy track, which I try to do normally in the early evening,and there are always a considerable number of other folks out and about, but at 9:15 in the morning, I pretty much had it to myself.

This morning, because I was home, I had the luxury of being to read both morning daily newspapers at my kitchen table instead of on-line, and that means I read everything to include the obituaries. Suspect if you read them, you feel the same way sometimes: I'm always impressed with how long so many people live these days (and hope I and everyone I know and love will be in that number for quite some time to come). Yesterday's papers had folks passing who were in their nineties and all of their families were far away, if listed at all. That so many had so few made me wonder if the parents had outlived their children and suspected they had.

That got me thinking back to something from a long time ago in the third or fourth grade at Saint Peter's School in New Brunswick, New Jersey with Sister Thomas Ann. What happens to you, I asked her, when the last person on Earth who knew of you during your life dies as well after your death? I don't recall thinking I'd nailed anything to cathedral doors in Wittenburg (I'm pretty sure I didn't even know where that was at the time) but I found out when you ask questions like that you spend the afternoon in Sister Immaculata's office (she was the principal) and your mom gets a call at home and your father has to write a note, actually a letter, apologizing for your question even though, as I walked the track at NFA yesterday and thought about those obits in the newspapers, for the life of me, I couldn't understand why I was sorry or for what.

I have a smart phone-or said another way, my cell phone has a stupid owner. I can listen to music from a variety of sources while doing a task such as walking around an oval track in Southeastern Connecticut. In this case, I listen to slacker as it augments the albums I've stored on my phone's memory card (albums? I'm not sure that's what we call music anymore; but it's what old guys like me call it). Sometimes life imitates art and in this case makes me promise to return the favor, which may disconcert some of those whom I pass on the street as I walk in the late afternoons from now on. Through my headphones, came my favorite John Prine song-a song that if we could somehow adopt it as a second national anthem, or as the foundation for foreign policy, this planet might not find itself in the mess it so often seems to end up in and maybe one less person would die all alone in a world with over six billion of us stepping on one another's toes.

"So if you're walking down the street sometime, And spot some hollow ancient eyes, Please don't just pass 'em by and stare, As if you didn't care, Say "Hello in there, hello."
-bill kenny