The Good Is Oft Interred

Starting today, I’m gonna start to be a lot nicer to my wife and children because I now have a greater appreciation for the power of having the last word. Wow. Talk about Joan Crawfordesque. Not a lot that’s unknown about that fire’s origin. I may have to get up even earlier to fill in that hole the size of the Grand Canyon I must’ve dug by now.

I’ll make it a point to avoid my brothers and sisters since I have a lifetime of ‘boss in charge of the dog’ and other remarks to atone for, though for K, J &A on the far end of the chronology, I’m hoping more for a ‘which one was he again?’ reaction. That may be as close to forgiveness as West Virginia is to heaven in my case, I suppose.

It’s an amazing obituary and I would hope each of us should and could be inspired by it to attempt to both do better and be better. As for me, I’m doing what I can with what I have. I’m brushing and flossing more so, if nothing else, people remember my diamond smile.   

-bill kenny

A Bullet for Your Boyfriend

I’m as big a patriot as the next person and considering my relative size and mass I could make the argument that I am, in fact, a bigger patriot than most. I tend to not push the wave-my-flag-in-your-face button too much or often.

I never met George Bernard Shaw but I am both keenly aware and inordinately fond of his observation that “…(P)atriotism is fundamentally a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…” 

That knowledge and his delivery of it tempers my enthusiasm to purchase a red, white and blue foam finger with “We’re #1” on it whenever we visit NYC and find ourselves in front of the United Nations building.   

In the course of six plus decades here on The Big Blue Marble, much of it spent in the 48 contiguous more or less United States, I’ve benefited from and enjoyed immensely a large percentage of the rights and privileges enumerated in our Constitution and Bill of Rights and guaranteed by the toil and tears of generations of patriots and matriots. (did you see what I did there?)

Some, such as freedom of religion or freedom from religion (as more than a few have suggested) are seemingly more clear-cut and less contentious than others to include pony rides on your birthday and  the right to bear arms or bare arms (I’m not a big fan of homonyms but I sure do like cinnamon and syrup on my French toast). Perhaps the right involves arming bears-I’m never sure.

I didn’t grow up on Walton Mountain and while the wilds of Franklin Township, New Jersey, seemed vast and scary when I was a child, I concede that had a lot to do with my being a child and not so much with any actual scariness, especially now when the only fear might be running out of Grey Poupon.

We didn’t have guns in my parents’ house and I never had dealings with weapons of any kind until I joined the Air Force (mainly because I was assured they were the branch of the US Armed Forces least involved with weapons, mostly at the request of the other branches; it worked out that way for me).

For many of us, God and Guns are a way of life and as I‘ve always understood life in these United States, as long as your rights aren’t infringing on mine, and vice versa, we be cool and ships. And yet, despite that when I came across this article, I paused to ponder. I’ll point out, though you’ll realize it for yourself, this isn’t a new law in Iowa just folks having a second look, no offensive pun intended.

I will concede if I were a bad guy, the idea of a visually impaired person with a lethal weapon and a willingness to use it might color my decision on making a house call. Unless I were a ninja or a mime, I might be deterred if for no other reason than a fear of ending up interred. As for rubber ducks, the orange sauce does nothing for them at all.  

-bill kenny

Jeff and Rod Were so Right, Touch Wood

I originally wandered around in this space in the ether about all things (not really but it made for a grand statement) Friday the 13thish a number of years ago. Funnily enough a mirror balanced on a ladder fell and landed on a black cat but nothing adverse happened to me so I figured I'd revisit that earlier meander and hope to heck that history repeats itself. What's the worst that can happen? Really? Well, I stand corrected then.  

It's interesting that there are so many more concerns about Friday the 13th in a nation of fifty states, founded from thirteen original colonies than just about anywhere else on earth 

From the notion of seven years of bad luck if you break a mirror while crossing the path of a black cat and not throwing salt over your right shoulder, to dozens of local and regional variants, we all know people who, today, are as quiet and immobile as they can, 'just in case...'

And before you or I tsk-tsk those concerns. Have you ever actually tsk-tsked anyone or anything? Me neither. It requires a permit in some jurisdictions, and can only be accomplished in the presence of consenting adults. As I recall, your mileage may vary. 

Here's a puzzler, filed under 'Things from England' (with apologies to the late Scott Muni), that suggests if you worry enough about anything, you can, and will, get sick. Like that old saw about how paranoids are convinced people are out to get them and when, because they alter their behavior, people are indeed out to get them, does this mean they are cured?

I, like so many others, tend to visit the snopes.com website for all the latest in debunking junk I see on TV, mostly on Faux Gnus. That's where I can check out topics ranging from 'the public option will grow hair on your knuckles' to 'Amelia Earhart is Barack Obama's Secret Santa' and just about any combination of either of those we could think of. But Friday the 13th is a slippery slope even for snopes. 

So after I've suggested you not step on a crack, or do anything else with it, or have any interaction with a ladder of any kind for any reason, I'd offer, in a half-full glass kind of world, perhaps we're all better off if we consider today as the second coming of Thursday the 12th, only supersized.
-bill kenny

Sleeping Beauty

I had a day off yesterday in the middle of the week, a rarity for me and an unfortunate accident for many with whom I had contact. My wife and I had an errand to run at the Mohegan Sun casino, down the road (ten minutes or so by car) from our house and got that accomplished around mid-day.

As we walked from one point in the Grand Hall to another to get done what we needed to get done I was cut off, pipped at the post so to speak, by a relatively young man in a white dress short with dark blue jeans pulled up to around his armpits.

I hadn't heard radio or TV reports of flooding and was somewhat shocked to see how how high the water gets when the levee breaks. He was also wearing a brown engineer's hat, indoors (yeah I'm that old that such oafishness annoys me) and a white tee-shirt with dark black lettering worn under the white shirt.

The tee shirt said something about ninja, though obviously not a very good one or I wouldn't have been able to see it under his dress shirt. To characterize him as 'a thrown together look' would be to malign thrown together looks entirely. Dumpster projectile vomiting is closer to what he resembled as opposed to a denizen of one of the most successful and poshly appointed casinos in the world.

All I could think of was a (shanty) Irish expression I heard from my childhood, I'm thinking was never used about any of us growing up but which on some days might have been true, "first one up is best one dressed."
-bill kenny

On a Day Just Like Today

Today is more than just a somber day of the calendar, a moment of poignant pause and quiet reflection for what once was and what can never be again. There are losses we shall never overcome and scars that will always be visible no matter how much we cover them.

It’s been a dozen years since the first, halting and somewhat confused news reports of airliners crashing into Manhattan’s Twin Towers shortly before 9 A.M., and then the Pentagon and the carnage, and courage, which followed those catastrophic events.

For family and friends who suffered losses that day, September 11, 2001, the years have been as if an eye blink. And the once searing pain of grief has now become the dull ache of a forever broken heart.

Epochal events on a world stage become historic but personal and private recollections of those who are now gone always live on, in, and through, each of us.

Despite the time and distance separating (but somehow joining) Norwich to New York, the Pentagon and a forlorn field in Pennsylvania, the service and selfless sacrifice we remember today extends beyond the buildings and lives broken and shattered on a crisp and clear nearly autumnal day that was so filled with promise when it began.

A dozen years on, we learn everyday just how heavy the burden of the past weighs on us and how it continues to cast a shadow not only on today but on our tomorrows as well. Habits and customs passed from one generation to another changed in the roar and flash of an instant, leaving us only memories and the need to begin again. And so we have.

In towns and cities, large and small, in a thousand different places and spaces across our country today, millions will remember just as we promised one another we always would.

For volunteers of the Norwich Post 9/11 Memorial Committee today is a reminder of their efforts, now crowned by success, begun more than two years ago at the request of the City of Norwich, to remember two young men, soldiers both, who will never grow old.

The committee designed a permanent remembrance of the two Norwich residents and students of Norwich Free Academy, US Army Specialist Jacob Martir and US Army 1st Lieutenant Keith Heidtman, who died during Operation Iraqi Freedom. That memorial at Chelsea Parade will be dedicated two weeks from this Saturday, September 28 at six PM.

Both were still nearly neighborhood kids when the events we mark today occurred and yet both responded as grown men do, with the fullest measure of devotion and sacrifice, doing what they felt needed to be done.      

Jacob was killed by small arms fire in 2004, while on patrol in the Sadr City district of Baghdad, and Keith died in 2007, when his OH-58 Kiowa helicopter was brought down by enemy fire in Diyala Province, northeast of Baghdad.

The dedication of the Post 9/11 Memorial should afford their families, friends and former classmates, with as many of us as will fit in Chelsea Parade a celebration of their lives and the gifts their sacrifices helped preserve for all of us.
Please join us, on a day just like today.

-bill kenny

Ritalin Rulz

I love social interactions where we'd have to work hard to overlook or excuse a child's childish behavior but, luckily, we never even get to that part of the transaction because their designated grown-up was boorish beyond belief.

When you have difficulties spotting the parent in that kind of combo pack, I always silently thank my two long gone Grandmas for raising their children to have manners. It gave me somebody to learn mine from.

Take Simone Baker and her six year old son, name redacted by the AP (sure hope when he's older and falls in love, the object of his affections keeps her name or this will be terribly awkward). She obviously never met my grandparents, any of them, nor my parents. Her loss.

Her son, it will appear after you reach the end of the article, invented an explanation that Tiger Mom, in rushing to aid her cub, believed wholeheartedly. Or.....she just really wanted to beat some kindergarten teacher's butt and this pretext was heaven-sent.

I especially liked the champion understatement that the equally-unidentified-in-this-story teacher 'wasn't up to talking.' Or filing, I imagine, or combing her own hair. Or eating food which required chewing. I will not be surprised if she displays little appetite for ever returning to a classroom stocked with miniature people. Awkward.

As for Simone, well, she's still out and about apparently. It was, after all, the weekend and I'm wondering what she did with herself with the schools closed and all. I'm sure the Kansas City, Missouri, police have John Langley and a film crew in tow to restart that TV franchise and have it hosted by a former politician before he was a former actor before he was a former body-builder.

When it comes to turning his back, he'll show that Kansas City Kitty how it's done. -bill kenny

Syriassly

One of the most powerful rights we have in our country, and one that makes us the envy of many elsewhere, is to disagree publicly with our government and not disappear unter Nacht und Nebel never to be seen or heard from, or of, again.

Saturday, the President of the United States, a man for whom I have voted twice, offered in his weekly address to the nation his best explanation, so far, on why he feels the nation he leads must take action.

Quite frankly, the blush has been off that rose for me since the Bush Administration lied about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, and we all jumped on the bandwagon and off the cliff lemming-like to bring 'freedom' to a portion of the world where the advanced nations are in the 17th Century, yes Saudi Arabia, I mean you, and others, like Afghanistan, are so poor and so broken and backwards they could cease to be in a blinding flash and no one not living there would notice they were gone.

I appreciate the President's concern and recognize it is both genuine and sincere when he says "We cannot turn a blind eye to images like the ones we’ve seen out of Syria."

Except over 80,000 Syrians have been murdered in a fratricidal orgy of death from March 2011 to March of 2013 by one side or the other of blood-thirsty lunatics but it's the 1,429 who died as victims of saran gas who have caused the President to lose his fear of red lines and their crossing.

Sorry, sir. We have two hundred times that number of casualties in this country going to bed hungry every night, sleeping under bridge trestles, victims of domestic abuse, substance addiction, an-in-the-crapper economy for anyone hoping to earn a living wage and two hundred other challenges we need to marshal our resources to solve. Screw the sideshows in the sandbox.

Might I suggest I, and you, have watched us create a military power so expensive to maintain that not only do we rank #1 in dollars spent on defense but we outrank the next 24 nations on that Top 25 list. We, you and I, have no idea what victory over global terrorism looks like. We know, despite the war criminal Cheney's bland assurances, that no one anywhere is throwing rose petals at us.

Better they throw whatever it is they have at one another than at us. The Hezbollah, the Al Qaeda, the Friends of Assad, the Assad-Sucks-the Big-One groups, all of them-a plague on all their houses. We cannot fix them-we should have learned that in Bosnia nearly two decades ago-if not there, then in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

We have sent the flower of a generation with more talent, spirit and energy than any cohort before them and a genuine desire to serve in the wake of the horrors of September 11, 2001, directly into the blades of the meat grinder. Without a second thought or apology and covered up all the stupidity with the usual chest-thumping patriotic pap about the glory and the good of the country.

If all these talented folks' lives are worth sacrificing then why don't we, you and me and those of us NOT halfway across the globe killing strangers, work harder to make this country worth their sacrifice and return us to the head of the table at the banquet of nations.

Yes, Sir, no Sir; three bags full, Sir. Full of what is open to speculation.
-bill kenny