With no provision but an open face

I tend to place almost all of my life experiences in terms of music, because musical expression in nearly any form has been part of my life for practically my whole life. In childhood, I listened to Broadway soundtracks albums my father and mother preferred, in an era when 'the hi-fi' was a piece of furniture and you worried more about the wooden cabinet the guts came in than the equipment itself.

My father always bought his stereos from Liberty Music on Madison Avenue in Manhattan and they were nearly the size of the island. As teenage audiophile, I realized form and function didn't correlate when I discovered the speakers were one, each per side, three inch mid range cones and the Garrard turntable was gear-driven.

That awakening happened almost simultaneously with the accidental exposure to The Beatles, The Kinks and all the others who crossed the bridge from Britain. I had no older brothers or sisters, so Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins and that whole generation left no mark and what little I heard of folk music left me unmoved. I had no bad habits to unlearn, I guess.

Years ago on Ally McBeal, Tracey Ullman was a therapist who wanted the series' heroine to have a theme song and I smile thinking about those episodes because I see the world as clips--before there was MTV or Miami Vice, which, let's face it was a long form music video pretending to be a TV show, I heard music when I saw events.

I mention this because if there's one thing, even as we've spent ourselves broke in The Land of Steady Habits, that we're proud of, it's our girls (even though they're not ours and none of them are girls), the UCONN Women's basketball team who have, as they pursue their seventh national championship, won seventy-five consecutive ballgames, all by at least ten or more points.

As a father of a daughter in her early Twenties, I cheered for the program as Michelle grew up because it seemed to prove everything I, and fathers of daughters across the state and the country, wanted our daughters (and sons, or that matter) to learn as life's lessons--always do your best, never give up and work on your left-handed baby hook (okay, maybe the last of those is a bit more specific to basketball than life). Michelle has, by the way, done wonderfully well growing into a woman of whom both her mother and I can take great pride. She is also not a fan of basketball, UCONN or otherwise (but she is an extraordinary musician, so who knows?).

Watching Geno Auriemma's team in action yesterday, I saw the lyrics before I felt the bone-crunching melody. "Talk and song from tongues of lilting grace/Whose sounds caress my ear. But not a word I heard could I relate/The story was quite clear.They talk of days for which they sit and wait/When all will be revealed." There's a lot of teams, men and women, left and many more songs to sing-the words, we know; the tune, we'll hum.

-bill kenny

Faith of Our Fathers

As a child, this was a big deal Sunday in my house. And I have to be honest, I was almost a teen before I even fully grasped why--Palm Sunday was up there near, though not quite at, Christmas Mass and Easter, and when my first name still had a 'y' on the end of it, I never really followed the reasoning as to why. Behold the Man, indeed.

Palm Sunday always seemed to be the deceptive handshake. The New Testament has accounts of the triumphal entry of the Son of God into Jerusalem, being welcomed by those who (as John Lennon would offer later), were 'lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working overtime' as part of the inevitability of a week that had Him crucified on Friday (a more excruciating way to die at the time was unknown) and resurrected on Sunday.

I never impressed any of the nuns at St. Peter's School (now called Saint Peter the Apostle I guess to distinguish him from the St. Peter who played shortstop for the Newark Bears in the middle seventies) in New Brunswick with my scholastic aptitude or ability to interpret scriptures (I was almost married myself before I caught on to the importance of 'for I know not any man' and Joseph not having Mary stoned and why) and yet I still experience a dryness in my mouth dreadful foreboding as the events of the Passion Week unfold.

I couldn't stop reading about it as a child and I couldn't look away. When Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber cashed in with Jesus Christ Superstar, if nothing else, they linked the inquisition of Christ forever in my mind with a jaunty little music hall number that I can hear even as I type this. Another reason I'm confident of my destination in the next life.

Today is a day for many to visit the church of their choice. Sidewalks are crowded as families make their way to retrieve fronds of blessed palm (my mom's mother had a piece that never left its location, behind a framed black and white photo on the wall. Only now do I realize I have no idea of whom the picture was, nor any idea who I might ask). The blessed palm that doesn't end up scotch-taped to auto rear-view mirrors or suspended by a thumbtack alongside the front door will be collected after all the Masses today, at least in the Catholic Church of my youth, and then burned to become the ashes used on our foreheads for Ash Wednesday.

Intro ibo ad alteri Dei. I think I still know the words and know that I always will. I once had the faith to believe in their meaning but I lost that, or perhaps threw it over the side to help speed me on my way, and then I lost my way. I have the charts and maps spread out on the floor, but it's starless and bible black and I can't find my way home.

-bill kenny

Potato Weather for Sure

I should feel terrible about complaining about all the rain we had this week in Southern New England. If you experienced most of the first week of Spring getting soaked then you know exactly what I mean, but you know what? I don't feel any better knowing your weather was lousy like mine. And if your weather was better, I really dislike you a lot. And if yours was worse (plague of locusts, rain of frogs, that sort of thing) then it sucks to be you but I still don't have very much from that.

Yesterday frazzled me because when it wasn't raining, which wasn't very often, it was cold. I'm such a myopic ingrate I seem to have lost sight that it is March, we have had snow this late and later on this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this (New) England and may well have it again in the days remaining. As for the temperature, doh! (Together now) It's March.

I don't think I'm alone in being spoiled stupid or perhaps I'm stupidly spoiled (I often cannot tell them apart and even close-up they look about the same) as we may be a nation of self-centered somnambulists (and that might be an understatement). And then we realize, "that's what it's like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know-that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and Blindness."

You're thinking Wall Street banker, too-big to fail CEO. Think smaller. Think Simon Stinson.Think each of us, think all of us except in moments of extreme duress when we have to be nearly coerced into finally thinking of others. We cry over what we don't have and weep in vain for the moon, oblivious as we reach and fail, that from our grasp slip the stars.

-bill kenny

Bazooka Joe and the Poser Posse

Wound up one table over yesterday at lunch from young people enjoying their spring break from high school (I think; I have little ability anymore to tell much more than height about people) and who were quite taken with their own extreme coolness. In fairness, I'd like to think when we were that age, we were more circumspect and behaved, but we weren't-our, or my, saving grace was that I was a dork as opposed to a thug.

I knew fun time awaited when the young man, leading the parade was asked by the extremely thrilled-to-be-making-minimum-wage-cos-I'm-worth-so-much-more-except-for-that-dope-bust on-my-record employee of the week behind the cash register to please remove his sunglasses and ball cap. There's been a crime spree in the area and, as I understand it, people wearing sunglasses and ball caps are suspects. I fully expected to see Alex Rodriguez try to beat the check and dash out to the parking lot with his bag of food where Stevie Wonder was waiting to step on it as his getaway driver.

Phew! Sorry. Must have been overcome by all the naturally occurring glutamate in the fries .Was momentarily light-headed, now I'm permanently so. Seriously, I understand the concern and I also understand when you give impotent people even the smallest and most insignificant piece of power, they'll bludgeon you like a baby seal with it. Anyway, point made and the Pranksta Gangsta doffs his cap and slips his shades and pulls his tee-shirt up to just below his nose in a startling, to me, homage to Bazooka Joe (without the eye-patch). That I'm the only person in this scarfing establishment, and possibly the hemisphere, who sees this should be more sobering than it is.

Speaking through his shirt, Bazooka Joe orders with meticulous attention to detail, your basic burger and fries lunch (I find it amusing to imagine the grill master knowing what to make of an order of tartare for a hamburger as if that would happen). The duo behind , but somehow with him, Ursula and Zena (if you're gonna go Bazooka Joe go all the way, okay?), spend as much time talking to the menu and to one another about the menu as they do to the sartorial sheriff at the register all the while holding hands, and twisting one another's arms behind their backs. The sixteen year old equivalent of 'look at me! look at me!'

All three, I suspect, have waited for their parent(s) or guardians to leave for work before rolling out of bed, finding the clothes they're wearing and lounging in this joint while hoping that term paper someone always assigns for the break actually writes itself (in these modern times it's possible). I am a simple lad who orders simple food.

I actually have mine and am seated when theirs is ready and they walk away from the counter. The sole empty table in the entire establishment is next to mine and they mark their territory by having a brief, albeit loud, food fight with french fries (damn glutamate again?). My theory on their surreptitious outfitting is probably true since I hear one of them suggest they need to hurry up and finish so she can get home because if 'my Mom sees me dressed like this, she'll go crazy.' As if that were all the reason necessary.

-bill kenny

Putting the Coarse in Discourse

When I saw the headlines in the newspapers on Tuesday, and the follow-ups yesterday, I had a lot of shadows to jump over. After all, I live in a small Northeastern state regarded as one of the more liberal politically in all fifty of these United, and yet, here was proof positive that we cannot outrace our own prejudices and fears.

If, like me, you thought the Connecticut White Wolves, were a semi-pro football team, feel free to claim your dunce cap from our lovely assistant and grab a chair in one of the corners of our state, possibly The Quiet Corner, and think about what we have done, or, more importantly, not done. Understanding that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, the fellows of Battalion 14 have been allegedly busy doing what so many others only talk about. And that's the reason for my disquiet.

All of us can recall vividly the heat and hurt in the volumes of invective on ALL sides of the health care debate (assuming you define 'debate' as screaming at one another) over the last fourteen months. As a kid in New Jersey, we had a rule for our cut battles (the put-down contests we gnomes and trolls engaged in to make us feel like we were somebody): no mothers. It served us well, but it looks like we've abandoned that for the more universal scorched-earth approach that's been the default since the dawning of the time.

In recent years we had a 'village idiot' as President, a person many insisted had grifters and grafters for advisers. As a matter of fact there were days, if not weeks, at a time when it was hard to find anyone who had voted for this man-much less voted for him twice. But, in a way, that was okay because on the other side, we had liberals (I don't have a keyboard with a sneer font, because that's how some always say this word ) who somehow tricked us into electing a person whom some claim isn't even an American (GASP!)

Of course, all of the above is hyperbole and purple prose and it should fall under the heading of 'sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me', except words do hurt if you pile enough of them on top of one another and never correct, rebut or refute any of the mischievous misstatements or lies loosed in the heat of the moment.

Which brings me (back) to the Battalion 14 Book at Bedtime Group. When did we, a nation of as diverse a group of people as have ever been in one geographical location, become these people? When did the melting pot reach the boiling point and of more immediate concern, what are we (ALL) willing to do about it?

We have too many challenges facing us as a nation right now to return to the Gangs of New York Nativist Know-Nothing Nihilism that looks oh so fashionable in sound bytes on the evening news and solves NOTHING. We are not so much a nation as we are a revolutionary idea-a proposition so absurd on its face that almost no one, anywhere on earth at the time we told His Majesty to pound sand, gave us a snowball's chance in Hades of succeeding.

And yet here we are, not just an idea, but an ideal for the rest of the world, but so filled with self-hatred we cannot and will not encourage or improve ourselves at a moment so precarious, that we haven't been here in close to eighty years. And what are we expending our energies on? Gotcha with guns, it seems, when words fail.

We didn't invent this form of government-but we are its poster child to the world. Remember the faded slogans on the walls from back in the day? "Ballots not bullets. Choose or lose." What happened to the power of ideas to change lives? When did we decide to stop believing in the majesty of the thoughtful voice? Too many men and women for two and half centuries have sacrificed their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor so that we could claim as our own, the right to be disagreeable and hateful towards one another, to EVER dare to decide to behave that way.

Each of us knows better. We must learn, or learn again, to respect the opinions and beliefs of others even when they are different from our own (even when they are wrong), and return civility to our civil conversations. Intolerance of others has led to insanity in our past on this planet. It doesn't take a lot for it to happen again, or many to make it so. Nein, sie brauchen keinen Führer nein, sie können's jetzt auch alleine. Leider.
-bill kenny

The Wings of Time in Flight

We're fond of history around here but we may not realize we're in danger of allowing who we once were to prevent us from becoming who we need to be. I've lived here in Norwich for a skosh more than eighteen years, which, for many people I meet, is no more than an eye blink, or so it seems.

I've heard a lot, though by no means all, of the 'back in the day' stories about Franklin Square, the sea captains who built houses on Laurel Hill, the Sears and Roebuck (whatever happened to Roebuck, anyway?) store that was downtown and Thursday nights so hectic in the center of The Rose City that small children clung tightly to a parent's hand lest they find themselves in the street and lost in the throng.

These stories, if you will, always have a sepia tinge to them, at least to me, and a soft focus in terms of detail. They make me smile because they always bring a smile to the face of the person telling me the tale. And then of course, we end up in present day and no one seems to know what happened, how or why. People woke up and downtown was a ghost town-the stores were all gone and so, too, were the people who shopped in them. Might I suggest the devolution involves progress and planning-one of which is relentless and inevitable and the other conspicuous by its absence.

My Norwich history starts (and stays) a little more black and white, with extreme contrast and hard shadows, coming over the Laurel Hill Bridge into a downtown with plywood for windows and not a soul on the sidewalks in the middle of October of 1991. That was the year of the petition drives at the local supermarkets to 'Keep the Boat Afloat' as Electric Boat was facing massive layoffs in the aftermath of the Seawolf submarine construction cutbacks. The same region that had no plan for the post World War II migration of the textile mills to the Deep South had no clue what to do with the Peace Dividend as these jobs are going, boys, and they ain't comin' back.

Almost two decades later, what are we still discussing? The same old same-old. We all realize Eisenhower isn't still the President and that your father's advice about never paying more than $15,000 for a house without a basement doesn't even get you a good used car but we're hobbled by our past, even when we weren't here to live it or remember it. Instead of it being a step on the ladder to tomorrow, it's a hurdle on the steeple chase we've made of our our lives.

Experience is what we get when we didn't get what we wanted-we should have, by now, all the experience anyone could ever need but we refuse to plan our work and then work our plan.

Like (too) many of our neighbors, Norwich doesn't suffer from Future Shock. We are smothered by Present Shock and the fear of taking action and having to own the consequences of that action. Maybe tomorrow will be better we sigh. Unless and until it's not, and then still we sit and wait because if we do nothing, we can't do anything wrong. Nothing ever happens, if you don't make it happen. Silence is NOT agreement and we've been too quiet for too long.

-bill kenny

Jean Paul-Sartre, Clean-Up in Aisle Two

Our local supermarket, feeling the competitive pressure no doubt of an Arkansas retail chain in a business where profit margins often disappear, has gone to a form of robo-shopping I find fascinating. You've probably have had it for a while but out here in the woods of Southeastern Connecticut where men are men and sheep are nervous (I offered that as a slogan for a recent municipal anniversary and was turned down cold. Humor-it's in the ear of the beholder, I guess), we have a bar-coded rewards card we sweep across a reader/scanner that releases for our use a handheld device that's tied to our card. That I should live to see such a day...

You wander the aisles, grabbing stuff you want, scanning it and putting it in bags (if you bring your own recyclable bags, you get a nickel credit per bag on your order). When you're done shopping, you head to a checkout and scan one final bar code that tells your handheld sidekick you're past tense, and it transfers your order to the register with the total amount in the display. You pay for your order and out the door you go.

I feel so brave new worldish every time I do it, assuming I can get it to work at all. I don't have performance anxiety, but my rewards card does. I can be a little slow in getting the master scanner to release into my care one of the handheld devices and as other shoppers start to pile up behind me, I have to do my best Coolhand Luke impersonation to compensate for the failure to communicate.

This whole process is a bit like Tom Sawyer getting people to paint his fence for him. It's not that the groceries cost less if we do all the heavy lifting, they don't. But this system isn't designed to make our lives easier. Once upon a time in grocery stores of a bygone era, there were actual employees who took the items a colleague was ringing up, placed them in bags (eggs and loaves of bread on the bottom, canned goods and automotive supplies on top of them) and placed those bags in your shopping cart and, if asked, would help you get that cart to your mode of transportation and then back to your abode where the unloading and putting away were your job.

Here in the new now, we've still got cashiers, baggers, courtesy desk employees, the whole kit and caboodle, who stand around as we wander the store with what look like Star Trek weapons at the ready. All we need are the communicators over our left breast pockets. And pointy ears, I suppose (check aisle four behind the breath fresheners).

The only part we're missing, but it's probably coming soon, are announcements over the store PA system that the Metamucil truck has arrived at loading dock two and twenty-of-those-of-us-formerly-known-as-customers-but-now-called-morons, are needed to unload it, and to stock the shelves in aisle eleven. Don't laugh-that day is dawning. We'll end up playing rock, paper, scissors to decide who's unloading the home pregnancy tests (they go at the header in aisle twelve beside the KY jelly display).

Yesterday, underscoring the perfect beast isn't quite yet where the Grocer in Charge would like it, I grabbed and scanned (in one motion; I've gotten quite proficient at this) a jar of lightly salted (with sea salt, no less) dry-roasted peanuts but, instead of a little peeps and a small green light, I got an electronic squonk and a near zen message in the device display: "The item you have scanned does not exist within your order." Oh? Hell is, indeed, other people, JP. Will that be paper or plastic?

-bill kenny