Under Milkwood

How many words do you have? If you paint pictures, how many canvasses do you imagine you have in you? If you're a legislator, how many efforts comprise a lifetime?

I started thinking about this last night driving home from Billy Joel at a sold-out Mohegan Sun. There was a woman on the opposite side of the stage, floor level (stage left) holding up a sign that said 'Billy Joel Concerts 50, 51, 52, 53, 54 & 55' which I'm suspecting means that she has tickets for a number of his performances at the Mohegan Sun and she has a great deal of passion and cash (because the seats are/were not inexpensive).

It was a little disconcerting last night--my face I see in the mirror every day so as it sags and puffs and ages, to my eyes, the changes are so gradual as to be imperceptible. I stopped listening to Billy Joel seriously (I was and will always be a fan) after The Nylon Curtain which was a great album and had a bookend to Springsteen's "Born in the USA" in his "Goodnight Saigon". After that elpee for a lot of reasons, we went our separate ways.

Undeterred by my lack of interest since his 1983 release, he's had another two plus decades of fine music and, for my part, I've gotten older if not better. I just hadn't realized until last night that he'd gotten older as well and at least as fast. At one point earlier in his career, he had built a band he took into the studio and that traveled with him--I'm hesitant to say his version of the E Street Band, because comparisons aren't valid across genus and between species (you can compare an apple to an orange but not successfully), but sort of.

Since our paths last crossed, he's swapped out his musicians--and his band last night was fine and played well, albeit (remember my ears are 56 years old) a bit louder than suited his material becoming such a sonic wall he eventually had to yell, practically, over it. Not that we minded or really noticed. We came to enjoy him and celebrate ourselves as well as him and he came to be embraced and enthused and we did that.

A lifetime ago I thought of two musicians associated with New York City who were auslanders, outsiders to Manhattan but who were perceived as such. I wasn't considering Lou Reed or Willie Nile, both of whom are true New Yorkers and who have a different take on the Great White Way than the starry-eyed weekenders. The two I thought of, of course, as I mentioned him the other day were Springsteen and Joel. And the reason why I wondered about the number of stories to be told, or songs to be sung, is in the aftermath of the horror that was 9-11-01, I and so many others returned to Springsteen who responded while Billy Joel, at one time in the same weight class, chose to develop and deliver a brilliantly played and staged two hour and ten minute package of musical memories, available for all occasions guaranteed to get us feeling all right.
-bill kenny

O'Sullivan's Sweater

My mom is celebrating her birthday today. A gentleman never tells a lady's age, and while I am not a gentleman, my youngest brother is and feels very strongly there's much to be said about saying nothing about age. Fair enough.

Both my wife and I were raised in two-parent families, though not the same family (see: Cheney, Vice-President; joke about West Virginia and relatives) with fathers who filled up the room when they entered and who, when they departed, left vacuums. With both Moms, I think, at least for me, I never fully appreciate how marvelous they were and are, as people, until they weren't sharing a spotlight of attention. My wife's Dad passed a couple of years back after a number of years of declining health, and the distance from here to Germany, compounded and exacerbated the heartache of that moment, I know.

My father died before my son was conceived, much less born, and all of that seems like it was in another lifetime. Mom awoke to find her husband of over thirty years dead in their bed from the final in a series of heart attacks he never acknowledged even having, with three children younger than sixteen still at home and in need of a home. She and my father had, as was so often the case for people of their generation, two families: I am 56 and my baby brother is forty. The 'munchkins', as the oldest children called the youngest with whom we didn't share the house, were in a precarious predicament but we, those who had flown the nest, never fully appreciated the severity of the dilemma Mom found herself in.

But, she worked like a coal miner for years, without comment or surcease, to make sure those still at home never wanted for any of their basic needs. Whatever any child needed, they would receive and she did without until she had saved enough. And if another child wanted something, then that's where her savings went and she started yet again. She and the munchkins have a very different relationship with one another than her oldest children have with her or with one another, and some/part/all of that dynamic was shaped by those moments, and the decisions made in them, all those years ago.

I can always call her for advice about my children-she never volunteers an opinion, but is there when I ask. She's always seems reluctant to do so, as if somehow her offering an insight to someone to whom she gave life could be overstepping her bounds. As the Amish say, 'the older I get, the smarter my parents are.' I can only hope that the wisdom is hereditary and in a box someplace on a low shelf in the basement--because I sure don't have any wisdom on or near me right now-you can check with my kids. Happy birthday, Mom!
-bill kenny

You ain't just whistling, Dixie

My wife and I are going to see Billy Joel tomorrow night at Mohegan Sun. Based on the number of sold-out shows he's doing there, it's possible everyone in New England has, or will have, seen him by the time his residence (if that's what it is) is over. I don't pretend that he has the vitality or applicability a contemporary (or at least always thought of as a contemporary) Bruce Springsteen has, but I have always been very fond of him and we have a history even if the only one who thinks of 'we' is me.

I first saw Joel perform in 1973 at the Rutgers University Field House, not the RAC-the old field house with the Olympic pool upstairs in the balcony behind the stage. He was touring behind Piano Man which was his second album, though he was reluctant to talk about the debut, Cold Spring Harbor, because the master lathe for the pressing had been a tad too slow and unless you had a variable speed turntable (like we did at WMMR-FM) he sounded kinda whiny and squeaky.

Anyway, halfway through the encore, he was joined on stage by Springsteen who was still struggling to rise above "the Next Dylan" label that had been slapped on him with Greetings from Asbury Park and for about six minutes on stage, neither one of them seemed to care what had been written about them. They were Elvis and Jerry Lee and they hit all the high points of that whole "Good Rockin' Tonight" vibe like two twenty-something guys, full of sass (or other four-letter words that end in double s) and vinegar going for it and loving it.

We roared for more and got it. It was a great night for everybody on stage and everybody in the audience and the only bummer was the realization the following day that the WRSU-FM engineer (the station was closed-circuit in those days and had no transmitter) had left for the night and NOT threaded up and started another reel of audio tape so NONE of the encore was recorded.

I saw him twice in Germany in later years-once in the Frankfurt Palmengarten (he was, to put it mildly, underwhelmed by the venue, calling it a bus station and having short words for Bettina and Dagmar from CBS Germany backstage like they had had anything to do with booking the gig) for The Stranger and in the Jahrhundrethalle for Glasshouses. He was a great interview, deeply in love with Phil Spector's Wall of Sound (whom he, and another Phil, Ramone, successfully channeled for some classic elpees and a greatest hit, "Until the Night" that was never a hit but was a perfect evocation of The Righteous Brothers).

I was working for American Forces Radio and he had a great line that he wanted me to believe he'd come up with when he failed to graduate high school, 'back in the day.' He told his mom "I'm going to Columbia Records, not Columbia University."
As for dealing with fame and fortune and all that it brought, he observed, "if you look up 'star' in the dictionary you'll find that it means 'a ball of gas, surrounded by flames'-helps me keep things in perspective."

I look at recent photos of him and in the mirror and am grateful that if one of us had to be married to an Uptown Girl, better him than me (and talk about 'don't ask the question if you can't stand the answer', eh?). But I'm not really looking at the present or the future when I go to see him, and I don't think anyone else is. He was an important part of the soundtrack of my life at a specific point and place in time so if all I have are memories, leave me to enjoy those. They're the faces of The Stranger and I love to try them on.
-bill kenny

Even Martha Finds it Warm

These last few days have made me remember Mom's advice about 'be careful what you wish for.' When we had all that rain and chilly weather in May, was I alone in wondering 'when will summer get here?' All that snowy, sleety stuff we had back in February, when we hated the weatherman/woman for telling us about the three to five inches we'd be clearing tomorrow (like we'd have hated them less had they lied to us? Talk about confusing cause and effect. I always forget they report the weather, they don't actually make it)--where is any of that now? (and will we not whine piteously again next February when we're sneezing and freezing?)

Let's not get distracted by the rising mercury-we wanted this weather. We longed for a heat index so high we would break a sweat just reading the thermometer. That's why we traded that wind-chill index in for something tactical, yet decorative. So, for the last couple of days we've been sticky. C'mon, as we used to say in my old neighborhood, you can't make an omelet without beating a monkey with a baseball bat (we moved when I was very young. Thank goodness!). Push comes to shove we can always go to the beach or to the movies....

When we were kids, that's how our parents handled hot summer temperatures. The movie houses used to advertise they were air conditioned (with banners that always said "KOOL inside" with icicles hanging off the letter "O") and patrons would to flock to see anything as long as we could sit in the cool and dark of the cinema. (Explains why all those Elvis Presley movies were hits and why they were always released in late May and early June.).

Malls and stores didn't really get into air conditioning into the late Sixties and early Seventies--until we had an extensive network of nuclear powered electricity providers, merchants were reluctant to attempt air conditioning. And the cost of the original window units was staggering. Your parents always installed the first home air conditioner in their bedroom, accompanied by a lot of huffing and and puffing and torrents of urgent, angry whispering (dammit! I told you to hold that foam rest! I almost dropped this thing!) that consumed most of the two hours or so it took to get the unit in, and get it turned on. You used to invent reasons (actually excuses masquerading as reasons) to go into your parents' bedroom so you could cool off.

When/if the day came that your house had more than one air conditioner, your popularity on the block went through the roof (and if you had pool, either in-ground (a/k/a 'a real pool') or above ground, double Yahtzee!) and everyone wanted to hang out with you. And every time somebody came in or out your dad would bellow, 'how about a little faster with the door? I'm not air-conditioning the whole backyard!' Except, of course, he was.

Forty-five years on, the characters have changed and it's all on a Blu-Ray DVD instead of Super Eight film. And look at how life-like the color is! The parts of the huffing and puffing mom and dad struggling with the a/c units are now played by my wife and I. And there's no pool because whenever we go outside we're covered in suntan lotion so thick it would leave a slick in the water like the Exxon-Valdez (get that gull out of there before it drowns! Oh no, the PETA folks are here!) and who can afford the water or the electricity to drive the A/C.

Meanwhile Martha Reeves is on the City Council of Detroit and there's alternate side Dancing in the Street (except on Thursdays when there's sweeping).
-bill kenny

The Man in the Mirror

You read or watched it last week-dateline Hartford, CT about the hit and run victim who was more or less left on the street by passers-by. The link with the video I found is from from the LA Times and, as is so often the case these days with web videos, is sponsored and begins with a commercial for Chevy trucks, using John Mellencamp's This Is Our Country.

That cuts a little closer to home and truer to the bone than many of us would like, I think. Quite frankly, and I apologize if you feel I'm crass when I suggest this, I was more than a little surprised we didn't see people robbing the person prone in the street--so many are shocked that it seemed to take so long for anyone to even get close enough to see if Angel Arce Torres, the victim, was even still alive--I just assumed someone would take advantage of the moment.

I wasn't yet a teenager when an attack on and murder of Kitty Genovese in Kew Gardens, NY, told all of us just where we were in the Spring of 1964--that it was forty-four years ago, but in so many ways is so similar to the violence visited upon Mr. Torres and the reaction to that violence, doesn't speak well for us having learned very much or very well, despite all those years. The police chief of Hartford was quoted as saying 'we have lost our moral compass' and because of who he is and what he and his officers have to see and do everyday, I defer to his assessment. But I don't think it happened yesterday, or the day before.

I'm not sure we can stop the descent into the abyss--I'm not even sure we can decelerate the speed at which it is happening and make no mistake, it is. Listen to how we talk to one another now-both the tenor and tone of the conversation. Pay attention the next time you hear two people having a disagreement and count the seconds before they go from disagreeing to being disagreeable.

Next time behind the wheel of a vehicle, watch yourself or one another as we all work together in traffic. Me, yield so you can get in front of me as the traffic jam worsens? Not on a bet! Cut me off, willya? Didja see that guy? He just flipped me off, that son of a bi---! Or even worse, we go from angry words and gestures to road rage and uncontrolled violence.

It didn't happen overnight-but a bit at a time every night and every day for decades. We've gotten a little coarser and little cruder--we have had a little less patience and a bit more irritation with our fellow travelers on this Big Blue Marble. And then, suddenly (except it really wasn't that sudden) we're watching Angle Arce Torres get hit by a speeding vehicle on a street in the capital of the State of Connecticut and trying to understand how such a thing could happen.

The public safety camera provided not only surveillance video, but in a terrible and twisted way, a magnification mirror whose reflection shows people we'd rather not meet but whose every thought we already know, because we are these and those people.
Is the image I'm making the image I see? When the man in the mirror is talking to me?
-bill kenny

If

...you're going to drink all day, you have to start in the morning. I saw that stuck on a car window yesterday, sort of in the area where you might have a campaign slogan--and realized it might just be the driver's idea of just such a slogan and I smiled.

Perhaps like you, I always assume a 'drink' is something with alcohol but it's possible that's not what the sticker is all about. Perhaps, it's really just another way of saying 'do what you do, but do it well.'

Professional baseball games are nine innings-American football has four quarters, golf has eighteen holes in a round, etc. We rarely if ever watch only the first twenty minutes of an athletic contest (unless it's the hundred yards dash and in that case, if we're still watching now might be a good time to release the 'pause' button the TiVo) so maybe the 'come early, stay late' approach works in more of our lives than just, well, just on bumper stickers.

As we hit the summer season, we'll have lots of distractions that will keep us from the hard work of evaluating the people who are standing for the general elections, at all levels of all tickets this fall. I'll nag enough about it as we go along that I don't want to harsh your buzz today (we've got Euro 2008 matches to watch, my friend, and some of that is best accomplished starting early) but in the coming weeks and months, unless you're planning on moving to your own country on your planet, we'll need to look into, and at, who we are and where we want to go as this election draws nearer.

I'll defer to minds greater than mine (= everyone else) but while it's not sitting for a course final, how we decide, alone with our thoughts and a computer scanner in the booth this November will have an impact on us, our families and beyond. The butterfly's beating wings can do more than create a Storm Force Ten on an alien, distant shore and we may well have to set a course into the wind in order to escape the conspiring currents.
-bill kenny

For Whom the Road Tolls (E-Z Pass Uber Alles?)

John Donne, the long-distance drugstore truck driving man who handles the big rigs from Omaha to Oahu (keep the windows rolled up and the wipers on full), was telling me the other day about how the price of fuel and other ancillary costs was causing him to rethink his career options.

One of the concerns he has, and it's shared by more and more opinion leaders across the Nutmeg State, is the reintroduction of tolls on the major highways that cross the state. A lot of folks see a lot of dollar signs and know there's a lot of good that can be done with that money, especially if it started out in someone else's pocket.

Admittedly, the cold light of sobriety in the morning can be a bit scary. Newspapers in the last couple of days had started to pick up on some of the subtle nuances that would have taken effect when the next CT fiscal year begins Tuesday, 1 July had the Governor and the Legislature not agreed to cancel an increase on the CT taxes for gross receipts (and people say bi-partisan cooperation is dead.) Diesel fuel taxes however will still go up as planned. All fuel, as you have noticed, has gone up in recent weeks quite nicely without a jet-boost from the state, but, in comparison to almost everywhere else on the planet, it's still (relatively) cheap.

Here's why I'm disquieted about toll roads, despite having grown up in New Jersey where we have the 'Pike, the NJ Turnpike (and, before you ask, Exit 9) and my favorite private highway, the Garden State Parkway (now partnered with the 'Pike-sell my clothes, I'm going to heaven) both of which collected tolls for a million or so years, to pay for their own construction and now continue to collect tolls to pay for their maintenance: what are once vices become habits in the blink of an eye.

My family and I arrived here just as Connecticut was starting on the State Income Tax back in 1991, explained, as was its Federal counterpart almost a century earlier (unless you count the Revenue Act of 1861 to pay for the Civil War) as a temporary solution to an extraordinary situation---there's no other way . Between you and me, it looked in 1991 like the extraordinary situation was the state had no money and too many bills. We called a tourniquet a band aid and decided an amputated leg was a scratch and hobbled on down the road. And we haven't stopped since.

What happened here, and it's happened everywhere, to include our homes and households, as our incomes have increased arithmetically, our appetites have exploded exponentially. I'm making I have no idea how much more money than my dad, but I'm worth it (I don't even get paid for my modesty! Hard to believe, isn't it?) but I'm in a bigger and deeper hole than he ever was. Seems no matter how much I bring in, it goes out faster. Seems to be the case across the nation and, most, definitely, here in the Land of Steady Habits where you'd think we'd frown on profligacy.

And frown we do, but spend we must and that we do hand over fist. You know how when you exercise, the next day you ache from muscles you didn't know you had? That's how it is with money. It's amazing how many things migrate from the 'nice to do' column right to the top of the 'must do' column when the dollars start rolling in.

And in Connecticut, let's not forget a decade and a half ago, there were no gaming compacts, now all handled by the Division of Special Revenue (a champion of understated department names if there ever were such a thing!) pumping unimagined amounts of money into state coffers. It seems there are indeed money trees in New London County, Connecticut. And you can take a state highway or an interstate to drive on by and give 'em a shake.

So the problem is what it has always been--we want what we want and should you figure out a way to give us the moon we'll still cry for the stars. If only we weren't so much like Milo with the propensity to be Alec Bings choosing between the Doldrums and Lost in the Flood! Then the only tolls we'd be collecting would be from The Phantom Tollbooth.
-bill kenny