Making Me Bullwinkle, I Guess

This year we've had a mild winter-that's an observation and not a complaint. I don't plow driveways or sharpen skates for a living and I didn't get a new sled for Christmas, so I'm not unhappy we came away from the winter months as lightly as we did.

What it meant at my house was that the squirrel feeding went on basically unabated. Years ago, our daughter, Michelle, discovered if you overcame your fear of the unknown long enough to allow the neighborhood squirrels to overcome their fear, you could hand-feed them until they ran out of enthusiasm or you had exhausted your supply.

I smile when I see the ones on my block climbing the overhead wires or making their ways out from under parked cars always heading in the same direction, towards my house on Lincoln Avenue when, for reasons they cannot fathom, at some point daily the back door will open and Michelle will have a container with perhaps as many as two dozen peanuts. And so it will begin.

We've been at this so long, to my mind, the squirrels seem to be a little larger than their brethren from Williams and Sachem Streets. That's what good living will do. Feeding was easier to justify during harsh winters past that, somehow, we were helping the squirrels and now we just feed them year-round. They've been at this along with us, and I suspect many of those stopping by are the children or grand-children of the original group, one of whom would walk up a trouser leg because it could smell a peanut in a front pocket.

The squirrels do not always get along-they tend to chase one another as the feeding gets started as if my daughter would run out of peanuts. Their behavior is comical but illogical. The first squirrel with a peanut has to quickly run or he will be chased by one or more of other squirrels who will pursue the first one running past other nuts our daughter has thrown to distract and reassure them. Ignoring the available (and plentiful) food, they continue to pursue that which they cannot have.

There are other times one with peanut in his mouth, will chase away other squirrels though there's no way he can bite them without sacrificing the nut he already has, something that will never happen. And yet everyday, the same tableaux play out in our backyard, until the last peanut has disappeared.

I think of us when I see them, when I'm being less than kind, because they oftentimes behave towards one another much as we do in terms of what we have, what we do with what we have and how we plan for our future. No fugues or fantasies, just no foresight beyond the end of a whiskered nose as we look no more than one footfall ahead of where we are.

We're not as gray as they are but our thinking is sometimes as fuzzy as they are furry. I worry about what they, and we, will do if habits need to change in order to continue to be successful. Plus, there's just so many recipes for peanuts I can come up with.
-bill kenny 

You'll Need a Good Companion Now

If you've visited here before, you've learned I am passionate about rock and roll music in a way only a white guy with NO sense of rhythm (and sometimes of spelling) can be. I have seen Bruce Springsteen many times since our first encounter at The Ledge (the commuter student center on the main New Brunswick campus of Rutgers University) in the fall/winter of 70/71. I think of myself as a fan.

I think the first time was a night he performed under his own name, vice other Friday's where he and what was the embryonic E Street Band played as "Steel Mill" or "Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom." All of us, on stage and in the crowd, were displaced persons, emotionally if not geographically, looking for something and someone to call home. To some extent he was Peter Pan and we were the Lost Boys cruising the highways along the shore with Wendy and her sisters. I forget all of that was nearly forty years ago, not an eye blink.

In the space between then and now I grew old, though not so much up, fell in love and stayed there. We have a boy of our own now (and a girl) who are, themselves, adults. And Springsteen has evolved from a skinny, frenetic kid who wrote songs about hemi-powered drones to a choice for a voice of a generation (and beyond).

When I came home last Friday in my mail, as their text had promised me, was my copy of his newest work, Wrecking Ball (Amazon.com not only texted me that it had been delivered but boast I had saved an additional thirty-six cents because of their price guarantee!!!) an album my brother, Adam, is enjoying and he is not alone (nor should he be).

I have spent the last couple of days listening to it-sorting it out (as he's matured, his use of language has become more direct and less ornate; more art with less artifice) and I think in a world of bookends and equal and opposite reactions, its closest cousin in his catalog of work is Born in the USA.

With yet another 'new' producer, and without the E Street Band in the studio, there's a sense of space between the instruments and the sounds they make unlike any of his work I can recall but I believe the most impressive aspect isn't the themes or their treatment but it's being able to see/hear the journey of his life, and by extension, our own, in this work. It's hard for us, looking in a mirror, to see ourselves age but we can see the passage of time much easier while looking at a friend or loved one.

Wrecking Ball is more window than mirror but its reflection, in its lyrics, subject and musical treatment helps me to realize whether or not it's done gracefully and thoughtfully, as Springsteen has done in the nearly forty years he has been making music for the same record company or closer to the five decades he has been performing in public, we all age as part of our passage on this planet.

The distance from My Hometown to Death to My Hometown, I'd submit, is made more sobering by the realization the singer in both songs is talking about the same place. No man, suggests Springsteen, steps into the same river twice because both he and the river have changed. And elsewhere you learn his hero, long past that point where the boys try to look hard has to concede "I been looking for the map that leads me home" while acknowledging he has "...Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go."

This is all we have and all there is, suggests the music and lyrics of Wrecking Ball. And his tone and tenor lead me to conclude Springsteen and the rest of us, assuming we'll 'be there in that chair when they wrestle her upstairs, 'cause you know we ain't gonna come" can be still standing on the other side if we're willing to find a dream to call our own and hold on with everything, and I do mean everything, we have.
-bill kenny  

One of Life's Little Mysteries

Today, despite my decades-long wheedling, cajoling and lobbying, is NOT a national holiday, though we do celebrate it pretty large at my house. Today is my wife's birthday. That she has spent a vast majority of her years on this planet in my company is a testimonial to her patience and deep love rather than a refection or implication of any skill or ability on my part.

I won't go through the how we met on Christmas Day evening story again (well hardly), or how as I was proposing she at first thought I was suggesting we go our separate ways (even then I had a gift for speaking in tongues other than my own) and there are few around who know just how awkward and expensive the question "where do I sign?" actually can be as well as I and my best man, Chris, the day she and I wed.

Suffice it to say, the first time I saw her I knew I would marry her and from that day to this, I have enjoyed the life she has created for us and our children because she was the one so doing. When we met I didn't eat chicken and I hated rice (private joke) among other foods I now enjoy on a regular basis. My life is proof positive that anyone, no matter how crippled inside, can be transformed through love.

Little did she knew when she said 'yes' that when you buy a ticket, you get the whole ride, but she's been around for all of it, and, as far as I'm concerned, been the best part of it for me every day, sometimes the only part worth anything. I cannot imagine anyone more perfect with whom to spend my life and cannot help but marvel at how smart(er) I was back in the day to so rapidly realize how truly marvelous she is and to always hold her  in my arms and in my heart.

"It must be something only you can see, because I feel it when you look at me. So tonight I'll ask the stars above how did I ever win your love? What did I do, what did I say to turn your angel eyes my way?"
-bill kenny

Burnin' Daylight

If you are recently risen from bed and slightly out of step with the rest of us, perhaps you failed to advance the clocks in your house before retiring (aside from *). If it's of any consolation, you are not probably alone. Some of us deal with the annual 'spring forward/fall back' routine better than others. Some, not so much.

To me, it's another way we're separate from all the other lifeforms on the planet. Animal, vegetable, mineral, most everything else adapts to the 'gets dark later/gets bright earlier' hot and cold parts of life on the Big Blue Marble, but not us. We impose, or attempt to, ourselves on our environment and surroundings.

We create a concept we call "time" and then work on its division into seconds and minutes that added together we call hours and then gather twenty-four of them (no other species does, aside from the rabbit in Through the Looking Glass), pronouncing that to be a day.

We then line up a bunch of days into something we call a week, combining them in various clusters of varying lengths called months  concluding here, my dear, with that which we call a year. Not bad for bi-peds with big brains and opposable thumbs (and basic cable).

For the next couple of days, most of us will be out of sorts and/or out of sync and will blame it on shifting of those damn clocks. I'm not sure that's valid for anyone other than the people working the 11 to 7 overnight shift (who had an hour shaved off their day today, but work nine and get paid for eight at some point this fall), but it sounds great and we all do it. Why we really should be ouchy and grouchy is that so few of us have a plan for what to do with the extra daylight. More's the pity.

We could start a garden, read to a child, go for a walk, visit with a friend, spend more time with a loved one, fly a kite, ride a bike, paint a fence (or a masterpiece) or write a letter. Of course, you could say, we don't need more daylight to do any of those things. And you're right-we don't. So why don't we just do them?
-bill kenny  

If Knowledge Is Power

There was a time in this world when you said Uganda people thought of Idi Amin and the Raid on Entebbe, That recollection got reordered earlier this week by a presentation that, perhaps, said as much if not more about the power of social media, Facebook and youtube especially, until this video was all you could see and hear.

There are still those who can defend Stalin and rationalize Hitler and it didn't take long for some to take offense at what they saw as an over simplistic explanation to a national tragedy. Perhaps, and perhaps not. For millions the Lord's Resistance Army could have been the Denver Broncos' offensive line protecting Tim Tebow.

Hyperbole aside, my point is we here in the Land of Way Too Much ain't real good at picking out the bad guys from the quick and the dead when we spin the big wheel and land on "foreigners" (that is, people who are NOT like us). We've seen 'em on TV but we don't visit them and try very hard to not know them either. We're usually pretty successful with that.

It's not so much that we get confused-more that we don't care. This week, based on the traffic to the Kony 2012 video, it may have looked like we did. From your lips to God's ear. By Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest, the next game will be afoot and our momentary interest in perhaps the most evil man alive today will have waxed and waned. We'll be on to the next cause, but don't kid yourself and don't get fooled by the hullaballo-Joseph Kony is a right bastard as a quick read of his CV will show.

Our culture expects solutions in the 48 minutes and thirty seconds an hour's entertainment actually has as a program hour, ideally with credits rolling over happy endings at the top of the hour. This guy and his murderous thugs aren't the Happy Endings type. With them, when you buy the ticket, you get the whole ride. So strap in and hold on. It is a very dark ride.
-bill kenny  

Truth and Consequences

Today is a day of history and foreshadowing, of looking back and of looking forward and in both instances perhaps not seeing what was, is or will be. Such is the tragedy so often of our species, we see the danger without ever grasping its depth. And depth is a deliberate choice of modifiers in this case

On this date, before any of us were born, an indecisive sea battle was fought that shapes, to this day, the world in which we live.  It was 150 years ago today, in a clash of ironclad vessels, The Merrimac, a ship of war from the Navy of the Confederate States of America engaged in a ferocious fire fight of over four hours with a vessel described as ‘cheesebox on a raft,’ the Monitor of the United States Navy.

Man had, since close to the dawn of time, sailed the oceans of the world in wooden ships-plain and grand, slow and fast, puny and powerful. Much of the commerce conducted along the shipping channels of the Atlantic between the old and new worlds was done in all manner of frigates and clipper ships, beautiful and majestic and, in time of war, armed and dangerous.

The day before, The Merrimac (the Confederates called her “Virginia”but history has allowed her to keep her maiden name) in succession engaged The Cumberland which it sank by ramming, then dispatched The Congress whose barrage of cannonballs bounced off its deckplates before being driven into the shore and catching on fire and, finally, forcing The Minnesota to ground itself to avoid being attacked and sunk.  Hundreds of Union sailors died. 

As I said, a century and a half ago today there wasn’t much to see in the waters off Hampton Roads, Virginia (I was down there not that long ago and it still holds true). Play by play was a refinement and innovation of the late 20^th Century. By all accounts the two ironclads traded shots for hours with some damage but no extensive destruction as most of the crew struggled to keep their respective vessels afloat. The Merrimac concerned about approaching low tide and her rapidly diminishing ammunition stocks chose a tactical withdrawal and the Monitor, its Captain blinded by an onboard explosion, decided half a loaf was better than none.

By the time both vessels had made safe harbor, though no one of either crew could have yet known, war on the high seas would forever be different. There are six navies in the world with nuclear powered submarines-the most complicated and complex platform, perhaps second only to the International Space Station, ever conceived and constructed by a mostly hairless bipedal species with opposable thumbs. The same thumb that so tightly  clutched a rock it chose to use first as a weapon instead of construction material. Every choice has a consequence, even the choices you choose not to make.  
-bill kenny

The Other Half of the Sky

Today is International Women's Day. I'm reasonably sure holding a celebratory repast at the International House of Pancakes is not considered appropriate, if that's what you were leaning towards. I'm neither an expert on, and certainly not myself, a woman-but more of a visitor, a beyond-interested bystander, on an extended and extensive tour of their world.

I live together with two adult women under one roof, my wife of thirty-odd years (don't get her started on how odd) and our recently-completed-college adult daughter. I am very aware of the importance of closing previously shut closet doors when through rummaging around inside. I know well the notion of turning off a light I turned on when entering a room when I leave it. And there is nothing about a well known lid on a well-known seat in a particularly utilitarian room about which I have not been thoroughly schooled.

In recent days, in this country, women of all ages, and the people who love them and live with them, were reminded of how far along the road to equality they have come, but how long, still, the journey ahead is, thanks to a medical coverage discussion that morphed into a political litmus test and then became Searching for Hester Prynne's Goodbar before being doused in gasoline and set aflame by a prescription drug addict with a microphone. However, this, too, will pass.

Those who celebrate our continuing advances in achieving equality will eventually revel in triumphs that today are unimaginable but by tomorrow will be commonplace. I came across a thought the other day (I have so few of my own I almost didn't recognize what it was) from Joseph Conrad (Mistah Kurtz, he dead. That Joseph Conrad) which captures, I feel, the moment and many of the moments so many women live through every day: "Being a woman is a terribly difficult task since it consists principally in dealing with men." Perhaps speaking only for me, thank you.
-bill kenny