Picture This

This was/is my weekend to do nothing. The first one of the month where I didn't know before the week started what I'd be doing when it ended. And, it felt good to sleep in yesterday morning until shortly after seven o'clock.

Admittedly, I felt I was wasting the day but most of the morning the weather in our parts did its bit to help me feel less guilty about the time frittering as it was something close to nothing but different than the time before. And there wasn't a raspberry beret in sight.

I like taking pictures-I don't take good ones so I make for it by taking lots of them, but sometimes I get lucky and the picture turns out okay and I have enough photo treatment effects to approximate magic without committing anything close to art.

So that's what I did yesterday and, between you and me, I also watched Rutgers come back and beat the Arkansas Razorbacks, so life was pretty sweet.
Yeah, pretty as a picture if you must know.

-bill kenny

I'm Thinkin' of the Days

As sorely as I am tempted to rant about the governmental kamikaze pilots in a particular part of the House Republican Party, and their determination to bring this country to its knees, I'll save that for another time because those muttonheads aren't going anywhere. And if you doubt me, give Newt Gingrich a call and ask him how the last Potomac Pissing Contest worked out for him and his posse.

No, today, but not for long because your devotion to the New York Yankees may not be as heartfelt as mine and I would hate to call you stupid even though if you don't root for them I think you are, I'll mourn the closing of an age as two of the Four Amigos, and three remaining ones, call it a career while the Yankees close out their 2013 final home stand against the defending World Champions, but not going anywhere this year, San Francisco Giants.

Far more importantly, Mo and Andy ready themselves to ride off into the sunset.
Mariano Rivera, Mo, we knew about from the moment it was clear he would return from last season's injury. He'd take a victory lap around Major League Baseball and then, ever the gentleman, would take his leave of us.

Andy Petitte, he of the brooding deep set eyes, peering balefully over his glove with the mitt shielding most of his face, many figured would call it a career at the end of this season. And physically, the man of summer was not treated kindly as he spent time he, and we, would have preferred on the mound, instead in rehab and on the DL.

In fairness, Petitte had plenty of company as this year's Yankees should have been sponsored by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of The Bronx. It's much easier to list the starters who didn't spend time in rehab than vice versa. And the 2013 season is ending more with a whimper than a bang as the only chance the Yankees have to be a wild card playoff team is more mathematical than even whimsical. That's always a part of baseball and why spring is always the season of hope.

Too bad for those who hope as it would have been terrific for the most successful pitcher in Major League playoff history, Petitte, to have had one more ride on the carousel and, aided and abetted by Mo, forming the most successful starter and reliever pair in the game, and to have gone out in a blaze of glory that would have eclipsed all the lights on Broadway.

But, man proposes and God disposes and though they often think and behave otherwise, the Steinbrenner Family are men after all and like the rest of us, especially I fear on Sunday afternoon in what will in all likelihood be his last home start as a Yankee, ever, Joe Girardi having caught and now managed Petitte, will give him the game ball for one last time.

And am I being nostalgic or greedy, or both, if with the game hanging in the balance in the late innings, the call goes out for Mo to shut the door one more time and bring it home.

Spring training 2014 is less than 160 days away and all I can hope is youngsters somewhere if not over the rainbow then down on the farm on teams toiling away in the late summer sun after a seven hour bus ride to East Squeegum in the International Tractor Pull League realize they have some big cleats to fill and a tradition of quiet and exceptional excellence to make their own.
-bill kenny

Somewhere Old Shadows and Shades Shuffle Down the Street

Today is Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Remembrance Day. In terms of the barrels of ink expended on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, this is more of a quart size observance than gallons.

Today has its roots in the late Seventies when Congress still did things other than kvetch and bitch about the other party, creating this observance in 1979 as the nation worked to rebuild its psyche after Vietnam. As long as we have had war, which is nearly as long as we've been on this planet, we've had the fog of war and its shroud too often on the real costs of conflict.

When I was a wee slip of a lad in prep school, I had an English teacher, Mr. Castle who had survived the Bataan Death March of World War II. He was a shattered man because of that experience.

And yet, not that many years ago, I met a long since retired Navy Lieutenant who had been a junior enlisted submariner whose sub had been sunk in the Pacific and he and others on the crew had been captured. He, too, survived Bataan but he was mentally and emotionally a completely different person than my school teacher and is, to this day, one of the most positive people I have ever met.

It's been years, decades actually, since I last watched the Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Washington DC. One of Mom's brothers, Jim, was assigned to the guard detail but I was very small and have no memory of watching him stand the duty, but I still carry the recollections of the ceremony and its significance and can attest as well to the emotional impact it has on the observer.

For friends and families of POW's and MIA's there no finality, no neat but sad, ending or the conclusion of a chapter. Memories of loss fade, and life goes on, even if the number of guests at the banquet changes while the dull ache remains.

Perhaps the best we can do today is pause to honor the lives and sacrifices of the thousands of men and women who were/are prisoners of war or missing in action and vow if only to ourselves to demand of those who so blithely send our armed forces into harm's way as if it were a holiday package that our causus belli be always just and our accounting of losses be forever full and complete.

We owe those who are absent no less and far more.
-bill kenny

There's Always Someone Looking at You

In light of the calamity and catastrophe in Washington D.C. this past Monday, and I will not get into a ‘there’s too many/not enough guns/gun control’ argument because this is neither the time nor the place, how in the name of everything good and holy could this ever be an appropriate or even vaguely  rational response?

Go home, Alex Jones, not because you’re drunk though it might be better if you were but because you’re hateful, hurtful and seriously stupid. If you don’t find an imbecile who insisted (and still insists) the Boston Marathon Bombing was a hoax to be intellectually offensive, wrap tin foil around your head and sit very quietly in the center of a darkened room in the bunker you’ve built in your basement.

Wait until ‘the government’ rounds you up and if it takes a while, don’t leave whatever you do and wander out into the general population. As we demonstrated again on Monday we are sold out on crazy and don’t need anyone else drilling a second hole in the boat to let the water out.  

–bill kenny

Use What Ya Got to Get Whatcha Want

This Saturday has the potential to be both historical and hysterical here in The Rose City, as events coalesce to provide us with a more than reasonable amount of much ado about quite a bit.

At Dodd Stadium, seasonal home of the Connecticut Tigers and professional baseball under the lights, we'll have a plethora of (k)nights all during the day as the Connecticut Renaissance Faire takes up its new residence in this, the opening weekend of its fall 2013 offerings.

If you've ever wanted to spend time in days of old (aside from when we debate the Reid & Hughes building in City Council Chambers), get thee post-haste on any Saturday or Sunday between this one, the 21st, and the 20th of October (as well as Columbus Day) to Dodd for a classic good time.

And Sunday, there's reduced admission for Norwich residents (and you've heard people complain about being from here? Here's a switch.).

Also this Saturday, and for some perhaps more hysterical than historical, it's the return of a man no one wants to acknowledge, precisely because he is from here, Benedict Arnold.

Okay, Arnold himself is NOT returning, so take it easy with the eggs benedict memorial breakfast preparations, but a likeness of his left leg, the one severely wounded during the Battle of Saratoga, spared the fiery end his life-size effigy met in New London last weekend, a gift from the Whaling City's Flock Theater, will be arriving by boat at Howard T. Brown Park.

After travelling up the Thames and making landfall in the park, the leg will be transported in a three foot coffin to the Leffingwell House Museum as part of their day-long focus on the man whose name is synonymous in American history with 'traitor.'

I realize you may have just furrowed your brow and grimaced at the mere mention of his name, but Major General Benedict Arnold is part of Norwich's history and a major presence in that most decisive of all our conflicts, our War of Independence. Feel free to NOT forgive if you so choose-but don't be so foolish as to think you can forget. Or should.

Before you launch a vitriol-laced brickbat at anyone for 'getting that Benedict Arnold business stirred up again,' might I suggest you spend part of your Saturday afternoon, between noon and four, at the Leffingwell House Museum as General Arnold is interviewed by a young reporter from the Norwich Packet and offers his side of what is one of the more unhappy stories of the American Revolutionary War. You may not change how you feel-but you'll know more than you did before.

Saturday evening, just to round out the day, if you haven't already stopped by, check out one of the last remaining publicly staged readings of the new musical, Benedict Arnold, commissioned by the Spirit of Broadway Theater, as it prepares for the 2014 world premiere production!!

There aren't many tickets left so if you think you'll be interested (and why would you not be?), make your reservations now because admission is limited and otherwise by Saturday, your chances could be history. Sort of like Arnold himself.
-bill kenny

Turn the Page

It was twenty-two years ago today I worked my last day in Europe. I still haven't decided if I'm angry or sad about what went on and why. I hadn't lost my job so much as it had lost me.

In less time than it takes to explain the appeal of totalitarianism to Eastern Europeans, that appeal evaporated into thin air and where there had been two Germanys for four and a half decades, there was suddenly only one.

As a card carrying grey eminence of the NATO occupation forces, and with Exchange and Commissary privileges to prove it (not forgetting my Mainz-Kastel Audio -Video Club Frequent Shopper Membership), I was part of the 'everything must go!' overhead the United States Armed Forces parted with in their Getting Out of Europe sale.

In dribs and drabs for the course of a couple of years, many of those with whom I had worked, in and out of uniform, found themselves in the same place and space-where the road and the sky collide with very little time to think once much less twice.

I was considering all of that (and the role the talentless Captain Mary P and the graceless Colonel Tom D played in my exit-you didn't really think I'd forget you, did you?) because this Sunday is Election Day throughout a now reunited-for-nearly-twenty-years Germany that, if many English language reports are to be believed, will return a former Ossi (an East German), Angela Merkel, to a third term as Bundeskanzlerin.

It's the most powerful popularly elected post in Germany, and by extension, across the European Economic Community (what we call the Common Market) whether Frau Merkel and her fans are comfortable with that characterization or not.

She's not popular in southern Europe (an understatement if there were ever one) as the economic reforms she espoused and ultimately imposed on the rest of the member nations as the EEC threatened to buckle under the hammer blows of the world-wide depression very nearly bankrupted nations who had spent money they didn't have on things they didn't need.

In some places like Greece and Spain, her popularity rivaled another German, from another time, and whose name I will not use but you may have seen his picture and thought he was Charlie Chaplin. He wasn't and, more importantly, she isn't no matter how often the contrary is argued.

Gone, though not forgotten, are the tee shirts that were everywhere when the blush of reunification had faded that read on the front "Bring Back the Wall" while auf den ruckseite, it said "And Make It Three Meters Taller."

Nearly a third of Sunday's voters have no idea what all of that Ärger was about because they have never lived in anything other than one Deutschland. If I'd known then what would happen to my life now and that of my family, I don't think I'd have changed a thing, despite or because of that knowledge. We are the sum of everyone we've ever known and the journey, so far, has been as educational as it has been entertaining.

Sometimes this story each of us is writing can be a bit tricky as farewell often becomes goodbye and other times, it's yet another hello.
-bill kenny

Sometimes You Get the Best Light From a Burning Bridge

On our way out of the Mohegan Sun yesterday afternoon after the Connecticut Sun upended the Indiana Fever in overtime to close out a disappointing 2013 WNBA season on a positive note, Michelle, our daughter, darted ahead into a gap into the herd of folks leaving leaving me with the lame and blue-haired contingent.

As I tried to accelerate to see her if not relocate her, I ended up brushing against a guy with an all-too-familiar aroma, that of a freshly lit cigarette. Make no mistake, as someone who smoked three and a half packs a day every day for twenty-three and a half years or so and who stopped cold turkey on the last day of September 1996, I miss cigarette smoking not only every day, but every waking minute of every day.

Didn't stop me from turning to look at him while offering 'sir, there is no smoking permitted here.' His eyes narrowed and his voice thickened as he offered sarcastically 'thank you very much, why don't you go (anatomically challenging while we both were walking) me?'

I smiled as I slowed and touched his elbow so he understood that I could (and the look in his eyes told me he wasn't happy with this knowledge), and to remind him I was very nearly a head taller than he, as I said, 'if I did, you'd never go back to sheep again.'

And I then left him to stand stock-still pondering how nicotinic acid can so severely dull your sense of counter-point and repartee. I imagine he's still there.
-bill kenny