Like a Watercolor in the Rain

I've told you I have a smart phone and it, in turn, has a dullard as an owner. I don't feel sorry for it since I get to carry it around all day long and not vice versa. Many of the things it does or is able to do are beyond my comprehension which is another reason I'm thrilled we had children, because one or the other of them can usually explain my phone to me.

As long as I don't call them because that's one of things I'm not really good at with this phone. To be honest one of the things I learned how to do, maybe the first thing if I were being honest, is listen to music-not just the kind I've loaded onto the phone via an SD card or whatever they're called, but also via a service I pay for every month, in my case Slacker.

There are a variety of services-I had this one on my Blackberry and I have the version designed for an Android phone because that's what I have now. There are hundreds of stations to choose from and I tend to pick one when I'm toddling off to the gym in the morning and maybe switch to something else while still there. I enjoy various styles of music unlike Carl with whom I worked years ago in Germany who liked "two kinds of music-country and western." And meant it.

A couple of mornings ago, in the middle of a station of artists like Fountains of Wayne, Al Stewart's Year of the Cat surfaced--an anomaly to be sure, I thought. Yesterday, while listening to a channel modeled on bands like the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Al and his cat made an encore appearance.

I very much enjoy Al Stewart and have a not inconsiderable number of his elpees, but I was puzzled at how we were finding one another after a long time gone. I still remember the first time I'd heard, and heard of, Al Stewart. It was about this time of year almost thirty-five years ago, Jack P., an Air Force Technical Sergeant who lived down the hall in the same barracks at Sondrestrom AB, Greenland, had returned from two weeks leave back in the world with a present for each of the AFRTS jeeps, Kim Q, Joey H and yours truly.

We three worked for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, AFRTS, and listeners disassembled and reassembled the letters making up the abbreviation to form other networks to include the Far Arctic Radio and Television Service (my personal favorite). All three of us showed up on the same day and were the most junior guys on the base for at least five months until, thank gawd!, the Tower of Power, the ATC shack (air traffic controllers) got an influx of new meat and we three jeeps in the FARTS motor pool were now old hands.

I don't remember what Jack brought either Kim or Joey-but what he brought me was 'the record everyone at your station was talking about and playing' (my station was WNEW-FM, today less than a ghost but for years a presence like no other in the world's largest radio market) and the 'the record' was Stewart's Year of the Cat. I smiled remembering how really fine, new and fresh the music on that album sounded the first time I played it in my barracks room and what a good friend Jack was to each of us.

It didn't do him too much good, the warmth of our friendship, I mean, since a few days after he returned he hiked out to the Polar Cap with Stu and Pat from the Cop Shop and something. somehow, somewhere went very wrong and Jack wound up disappearing in one of the myriad of (sometimes) roaring rivers the melting ice cap produced, though the water was nowhere near as warm as the sun that had created it.

The recovery divers who were flown in from Iceland to find his body (and failed) estimated he could have lived no more than thirty seconds with that water temperature. They themselves could barely last ten minutes in their insulated gear as they searched. Everyone on the base lost a good friend when Jack drowned, exactly thirty-five years this past Thursday.

I'm not sure the universe operates like a great clock and I appreciate that some would wish me to believe that such a clock requires a Great Clockmaker. That's as may be but it would help me understand and accept as real the bridge of memories built by a song from back in the day. "I'm not the kind to live in the past. The years run too short and the days too fast. The things you lean on are the things that don't last. Then my line gets cast into these time passages."

-bill kenny

Running (Barely) on Empty

Spent a lot of time yesterday downing Tylenol and it was my own fault. I was hoping for the burn and ended up waiting on the worms. The years have not been kind to me as aches, pains and auto-immune weaknesses have done their darnedest to slow and hobble me, not without success.

I've been building a gym rat regimen at a rate of progress that would not cause a glacier to hurl. The big thing for me, says my rheumatologist, is to constantly exceed ten thousand steps a day and make more than half of them count for core strength. I have no idea what that means-he says it every six months and I don't want to disappoint or upset him so I nod my head as if agreeing. And maybe I am.

Meanwhile, a couple of hours drive south from me my younger brother, Adam, is running shore relay races and other such stuff, to include marathons. Not only am I not going to be Last Man Standing I've been assured by more than one specialist after finding more arthritis in the x-rays of my hips and spine, I won't even be the Last Man.

So yesterday morning, still tired and actually too tired to talk myself out of it on knees that are well and truly shot, I ran for an entire thirty minute session on a stationary treadmill. Let me be clear, if you are 5 and 10 K race guy, you are trying to be polite and not smile as you read that. I do appreciate the kindness, since in our much younger days, I changed your diapers and have incredible stories I am willing to recall or make-up (it's hard at my age to tell the difference anymore) if I don't feel the warmth of inclusion. But that's ochsen scheisse and even I know it.

Seriously-the pace wasn't much faster than a brisk walk, 4.2 miles an hour but when it's been six years since an upper compartmental right knee replacement and two plus a smidgen for a left knee Total Knee Replacement, you feel every step very quickly and more intensely than you realized (assuming you did any calculating at all; the Feast of the Assumption was this past Monday). Actually what I felt was like I was on my knees running in broken glass.

As I finished up, I became aware that a noise like a fire siren I was hearing was actually the sound of my voice screaming. My theory in the cold light of the following day was that I was trying to drown out the screaming coming from my knees. If so, I succeeded as I didn't hear them though I certainly felt them. I was disappointed to learn the gym doesn't have an ice-filled whirlpool and then angry and hurt that the local supermarket will not allow you to wade into their bag o' ice walk-in refrigerator up to your knees for ten minutes after you take off your trousers and give them your wallet. Point in fact: their security guy won't even let you put your own pants back on in their store and I had to hop with one trouser leg still a work in progress empty-handed back to the car. Bastard.

I'm not a Tough Mudder-I know someone who is (or will be in a couple of weeks) and she isn't, if you follow my drift and it's not my goal to ever get there. As a kid I used to run all of Harvey's Lake (Pennsylvania) everyday. Now, I'd be lucky if I could drive it and not get lost (except in the memories). I'm pretending I'm auditioning for SYTYCD, Jungle Rules Edition, but with my luck I'd actually make the cut and have to worry if those tap shoes make my butt look big. What do you mean 'too late'?

-bill kenny

Who I Did Over My Summer Vacation

Can't blame yourself if you missed the start of this story and don't jump to conclusions as to why I would have remembered it. Admit it, for just a moment you had a film clip of Dustin Hoffman and Ann Bancroft spooling through the projector of your memory. Katherine Ross got her happy ending (pun intended) in the movie (no thanks to Alfa Romeo), Simon got Garfunkel, and, turns out the protagonist in today's Crime Stopper's Textbook got served.

As a parent of two children who've grown into adults, I'm keenly aware die börse sind immer und überall but I have to arch an eyebrow, based on my dim memories of being fifteen and lust-filled (or something like it), when the parent of the young man, a wee slip of a lad at the time of the infamy, offers I assume with a straight face, “this defendant took his high school years.”

For guilty-as-charged Sandra L., I suspect it means no more involvement as a member of the Thompson Recreation Committee, though I imagine some of the suggestions for activities, not to mention positions, that were offered at their meetings would make even Maggie blush.

-bill kenny

The View from Here

I was reminded the other day that the greatest thing about unsolicited advice is you're under no obligation to take it. That I had this realization at the moment I was offering someone a heaping helping of unsolicited advice only made the irony last a tiny bit little longer, though I believe I did hear God snicker, if only a little.

Years ago a colleague in the Air Force introduced me to what he and I came to know as "The General's Rule" (except it applies to well beyond just that rank and pay grade). Simply put: "Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn't have to do it."

Look around you here in The Rose City as I do at least once a week when I stand on my soapbox and channel Plato, Machiavelli and Lenny Bruce (often at the same time) in offering the finest in unsolicited advice on all manner of topics proving again that the line between surreal and cereal is often a question of how much milk goes in the bowl.

We each have our own ideas on how "they" should address challenges we have here in Norwich (and when you scan state and national news stories, you'll discover we're not so special, unique or alone in what we face or how we do it). To be clear, when I say "they" I mean the neighbors and often friends we know who choose to offer themselves as candidates for all manner of elected office because they want to make a positive difference. Until elected to office, "they" were "us." Oops.

Let's face it, the appeal of being on the City Council or the Board of Education doesn't have very much to do with money, prestige or power. If there are 'perks' to being an elected official, they must be stealth as I can't see them and I wear very strong prescription glasses. (Not always strong enough to see someone else's point of view, but close.)

For the last three years across much of New England and here in Norwich, but longer say friends in the Mid-West and in the Rust Belt, good economic times have been hard to find with every 'tough budget' year for cities and towns followed by one that's even tougher.

Trying to maintain municipal services for an ever-larger population without crushing local property owners under an unbearable tax burden or creating incentives to entice new businesses to our community without ignoring those who chose to settle here when there were no rewards, requires a skillset few appreciate and fewer, still possess.

We may not evaluate those who seek our votes for office in the same way. I choose those whose vision of mission and sense of self convinces me their judgement deserves my support on decisions that must be made on behalf of all of us.

You may wish to select those who best represent your position and opinions and who will be your voice in those same decisions. There's no 'right' or 'wrong' way to view or use government, be it local, state or national. I think the use of the indefinite article as in 'a way' is often preferable to the definite 'the way' but that's a discussion, for perhaps another time. What is critically important, every day and not just on Election Day, is open communication and honest dialogue. Anyone can speak-but everyone should listen.
-bill kenny

The Feces Collides with the Ventilator

The New York Times prides itself on a self-created sobriquet, "America's Newspaper of Record" and has striven from its beginnings two hundred and forty-three years before the letters of the alphabet were invented and decades before the creation of movable type (EPA estimates; your actual mileage may vary) to offer readers "all the news that's fit to print."

Yesterday, the Gray Lady tore the roof off the sucka' with a Bouncing Betty Op-Ed piece from the less famous but vastly more financially successful Buffett Brother, Warren. He advances a pretty straightforward proposition in and among the prepositions, "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich." Really nothing there that many of us, along with a pal or two after a bucket of chilled ponies on a work day night, haven't concluded while watching one of the talking heads on cable news.

Except, as F. Scott noted, 'the rich are not like you and me,' and Warren E. Buffett (I appreciate the use of the middle initial in the piece just in case you thought it was someone else) is an hellaciously rich person. It's a good thing for some of us, Warren doesn't know Lemmy-because we might otherwise have had a toothpick shortage after reading his observations.

I can't imagine how the dwarfs and the trolls (that was sheer meanness for which I apologize except it's true so they have to apologize as well) who are seeking to redecorate the White House are feeling about getting broken off at the knees by one of the folks whose need for greed they perceived as their cause. Buffett's editorial argues just the opposite, or seems to, at least to me. His perspective is stunning and his math is breathtaking.

As Dylan noted, 'money doesn't talk, it swears.' I'm wondering how many of those still left in the electoral demolition derby in the coming weeks will be swearing even louder than the money Warren has in such evident abundance as more and more people read his words and wonder just why we break the backs of those least able to defend their rights when it comes to the filthy lucre. It's small solace I know that God must love poor people, since He made so many of us.
-bill kenny

Monday Morning Always Comes Around Too Soon

Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans said John Lennon a very long time ago and while the long, hot summer may account for some of the slowing down of life as we know it in small towns across America, the rest of the reason, my Dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves.

If all we're willing to do as the Jell-O wrestling in the Halls of Congress comes back to the home districts during the recess is watch, we'll never get ourselves back on track. For things to work well at the national level, we've got to keep the machine in order at the grassroots level and that means you and me, in the here and now.

This afternoon at 4:30 in Room 335 of City Hall is a special meeting of the Ethics Commission, actually a public hearing on a pair of complaints that the Commission has been charged with investigating.

At seven, in Council Chambers at City Hall, is an informational session on Harbor Area Improvements, to be funded by a publicly approved bond (should the Council so decide), that has generated an enormous amount of heat though, so far, very little light. Maybe we'll get some of the latter at the informational hearing. Come early, bring a date and dine by the whites of their eyes.

And remember, kids, the seven thirty show is completely different! Actually at seven thirty it's a regular meeting of the City Council-you may want to bring Sunday's front page story from one of the newspapers with you to keep track though I'd suggest a review of the meeting minutes from August First and a glance at tonight's meeting agenda. ("New Business, Item 1" underscores the criticality of growing the grand list especially to support an essential function of government, education)

Tuesday afternoon at five-thirty in the Central Office (across from the Norwichtown Green), it's a special meeting of the Board of Education-with a relatively short agenda one item of which should be of interest to everyone, even those of us without school-age children (and, no, I'm not talking about renting the auditorium).

Also at five-thirty, in the Latham Science Center on the Norwich Free Academy campus, it's a regular meeting of the NFA Board of Trustees.

At six, in Room 319 of City Hall, it's a regular meeting of the Personnel and Pension Board-here's their meeting's agenda, and here's their previous meeting's minutes. My motto: if you're gonna go, go informed.

At seven, in the Planning Department's conference room, at 23 Union Street, it's a regular meeting of the Commission on the City Plan with an opportunity to preview the next generation of the Norwichtown Mall.

Wednesday morning at nine in The Dime Banks' Community Room on Route 82, it's a regular meeting of the School Readiness Council (Children First) who did such a marvelous job in facilitating new student registrations for the Norwich Public Schools over this summer but whose website is so outdated and obsolete it's impossible to know what other projects they are working on or how any of us can help. I'm hoping maybe Jill B will intervene and persuade them to maintain a current informational bridge.

Don't forget, even as the summer days dwindle down, there's the Norwich Downtown Farmers Market at Howard T. Brown Park every Wednesday from ten until two with a few more folks stopping in to visit with every passing Wednesday, which is good for the vendors and artisans as well as our downtown. Think of it as a fruits and vegetables adoption service, for money, if that helps.

At five thirty in the Norwich Arts Council Coop Gallery, it's a regular meeting of the Downtown Revitalization Zone, whose initiative also include the Farmers' Market, but whose meetings continue to NOT make it to the city's municipal website (so I guess there's a consistency thing going on there). The city's website has all the members' appointments as having expired anyway so perhaps I should take the hint.

And because of a rain-out on a previous Wednesday, the Rock the Docks concert series continues tonight at six with Jay Dempsey and Highway Call who are here, it seems, for the party (hopefully without folks walking in front of your view of the stage) so consider yourself warned.

Thursday afternoon at three in Room 319 of City Hall, it's a special meeting of the Committee of the City Council who, I expect, will go into executive session because of the rights of personal privacy and nature of their discussions right after convening.

At five, also in Room 319, it's a regular meeting of the Historic District Commission. And at six, in the conference room at The Rink, it's a regular meeting of the Ice Arena Authority, whose members' appointments expired in 2007 and last meeting minutes are from April.

Friday morning at nine, in Room 319 of City Hall, it's a regular meeting of the Chelsea Gardens Foundation and that's all the information on the meeting or the foundation that's available, which does seem a little skimpy in terms of folks receiving public funds, but maybe that's just me.

Saturday morning, it's a One City Forum at nine in the Central Fire House with an opportunity to ask (more) questions about the proposed Harbor Improvement Program, get an update on the Downtown Redevelopment or the Norwichtown Mall Rehabilitation, ask about the more aggressive collection of delinquent taxes, plead for pony rides for bloggers who have April birthdays and/or a myriad of other items.

Or you can stay home and wonder what's going on where we all live and hope a neighbor will stop by and tell you. "I was getting more frustrated at the longer that I waited...Monday morning always comes around too soon." Though for some of us, never soon enough.

-bill kenny

Lazing on a Sunny Afternoon

I had a boy's night out yesterday except I was by myself, almost, and it was afternoon. My wife and daughter, Thelma and Louise, were off gallivanting because that's what they do and I don't tag along on those jaunts because I get saddle sores and when they're together there's always a critical sympathy shortage for doddering simpletons.

Instead, I had an invitation from our son, Patrick, who lives in Mystic, to stop by and sample some of the 54th Annual Mystic Outdoor Art Festival (a/k/a The "If we had polo ponies, we would be entirely unbearable" Festival by neighboring towns). I have missed in their entirety the previous fifty-three festivals and since I feared starting a trend, I figured I'd give it a whirl.

I managed to find Mystic which, in light of having lived in the region for nearly twenty years and travelling to an internationally famous destination may not sound like much of an accomplishment to you, but I have the sense of direction last seen, briefly, by the Donner Party. So approaching Mystic from the exact opposite end from where I thought I was, thus finding myself looking at all my landmarks and navigation points bassackwards, I still figured out where I was going without anyone having to tell me. And yes, I know exactly how that last sentence reads and you and your Literacy Volunteer can STFU now, okay? See, that wasn't too hard, was it?

Patrick's business, Advanced Improvements, was hosting friends on the front lawn, Kismet Letterpress, who, in turn, were putting free art into the the Art Festival and I came away with a nice card that I hadn't lost by the time I got home (major progress) and I got to finally meet Elissa B currently of Patch (in addition to Where's the Remote?), and as a bonus (a twofer as they say in the biz) also Kristina D, both of whose writings I have enjoyed for years though they are still the same age as they were when they began (I almost stepped in it right there, didn't I? Phew!).

Saying hello to Elissa got me some swag (it did nothing for her but she was a very good sport). Actually it got me and Patrick some swag since he was showing me around and actually needed to have a conversation with the Patch folks whereas I got to stand there and do my Rainman social interaction simulation. If they ever make causing people to feel ill at ease for reasons they cannot fully explain or even grasp an Olympic event (I'm thinking Winter right now, but am open to summer, too) , you will see me on the medals podium, looking awkward of course and trying to not fall off.

I would think there will be a better than average chance I will have my Patch water bottle with me not just because it's BPA free (British Press Association perhaps?) but because it was free and it can come in mighty handy when you're working up a thirst. If I were marketing them I would have a slogan like "Thirst things Thirst" and next thing I'd know, I'd be on the medals platform and somebody would be playing the national anthem.

The Outdoor Art Festival is also going on today, and it is really cool and very much worth a trip from just about anywhere. Even if you have other things to do, actually, especially if you have other things to do, I think it's worth visiting because you're never too old to have a happy childhood, even if only a day at a time.

-bill kenny