Happy Thanksgivukkah

Some teachable moments are more so than others, I suppose and today has more than its share of both.

As a child, I can remember drawing those turkeys from the silhouette of my hand and bringing them home to my Mom to put on the refrigerator. Considering the size of their tribe, in later years I found it amazing that my parents didn't have a fridge the size of Long Beach Island (whose whereabouts, by the way, I'd never even heard of growing up in Jersey).

No matter how many paper turkeys are adorning various appliances in your kitchen, I hope you have a marvelous Thanksgiving. And if you observe Hanukkah, here's a terrific article I found last week from Long Island's Newsday newspaper that offers a lot of history but even more insight that I think makes it worth the price of admission for those within and without its tradition.

This is as ridiculously appropriate a day as any other to be grateful for everything we have rather than mourn for what we lack. I hope however you choose to celebrate whatever holiday you do choose, it's filled with family and friends and that the afterglow lights the rest of your day and helps brighten our world.
-bill kenny

Too Many Blessings

This is the time of the year, as the daylight grows shorter, temperatures dip and even the slightest breeze adds a crispness to the air, that many of us grow more introspective most especially as we watch the pages on the calendar signal that the start of another year is growing closer.

As has been so often the case for us in recent years and memory, the pause for the holiday season (and this year Thanksgiving and the first day of Hanukkah both fall on the same day, tomorrow), seems to come at a ‘just in time’ moment as we take stock and recharge our emotional batteries.

Meanwhile across our country, those struggling to make a better life for themselves, their families and their communities seem to have as long a road ahead of them as they did a year ago. Progress, such as it is, sometimes seems to be more in the eye of the beholder rather than milestones on the way to a safe harbor of dignity and safety.

When many of us, sadly not all of us, gather tomorrow to celebrate ourselves, one another and the stories of our histories, we should resolve to use this holiday season to begin to remake the world in which we all live into a better place. Not just for the hungry, the hurting, the homeless or the hopeless but for all of us.

We cannot do everything, but each of us can do something and when you add together all of our somethings, what we will have accomplished is greater than the sum of each individual together.

At our house, I'm looking forward to our son and daughter both joining us for a meal that my wife, Sigrid, will have worked for days to prepare and will be a delicious memory in the time it takes to read this sentence.

I hope you and yours can be together, too. We each know people who can't because they're working-men and women of our armed forces serving in places and situations neither of us have ever heard of, in defense of a way of life we too often take for granted. Remember, too, cops on the corner, emergency response teams and all those assigned to 'holiday staffing’ duty or readying for "Black Friday" sales mania.

I didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but I have seen a lot of John Wayne movies, pilgrim, and unlike the original Thanksgiving, it's not the food or the calendar that makes a holiday. It's the people with whom we share it.

Some of us will spend part of the day counting our blessings, and pining over what we don't have. That inventory and regret makes us who we are as a species, I know, but perhaps in the 86,400 seconds that are the holiday, we can spend one of them being grateful for all that we have. Or perhaps two. 

Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Hanukkah.

-bill kenny

The Other Brian's Other Song

Almost 150,000 people die everyday worldwide. That has to be true since it's in bold, right? Obviously, that's an average and, truth to tell, I'm not sure how exact a number that purports to be since I'm less than clear about the methodology used to arrive it, but if you can't trust the CIA, who came up with it, then who can you trust? The NSA? Maybe the PTA?

And the CIA website has a Kid Zone. Who'd have thunk it? Actually that works out almost perfectly as what do kids love more than cartoons? More cartoons (if you'd make the rehearsals, the audience participation segments of this blog might not be such a surprise all the time; just sayin'.)

And the only ones who like more cartoons more than kids are adults who watch Fox on Sunday nights where it's nothing but cartoons, excuse me, animation. I love that kind of rooty-tooty-snootiness. Animation rather than cartoons.

It's like at some point a generation of grocery stores ago we stopped saying noodles and started saying pasta. And upping the price, of course because you can always charge more for pasta than you'll get for noodles. Not that long ago as I remember it, the Fox guys tried to stick a show with actual people on it in the middle of their cartoon stuff and the show bombed.

Yeah, the same folks who brought me a highlighted puck when they televised hockey games, every Sunday all fall and into the winter goes from larger than life 'gridiron warriors' to cartoons and their audience never misses a beat.

Except maybe this past Sunday when one of the cartoon shows killed off one of the lead characters by having him get hit by a car he was chasing. Poor Bill O'Reilly, he deserved better. Not much, we are talking about O'Reilly after all but still. And besides he's not the one who died.

The character who got whacked was a dog named Brian voiced by the series creator, Seth McFarland, on Family Guy. I suspect many of those who suffered stoically, and not so, while McFarland annihilated the Oscars' presentation not that long ago are now wondering what took God so long to answer their prayers.

Besides, it's only a cartoon-an animated figure if you will. It could have only been more dramatic had he been eating a bowl of pasta when a case of bottled water fell on him. Preferably imported water, of course, Fiji or if the budget can't be stretched, Perrier. This is prime-time television so none of the that low power VHF stuff around here.
-bill kenny

Cold and Blue

Saturday's temperatures around here were in the middle 40's with a light breeze but yesterday's were about half the temperature and a LOT more gusty than even Guster.

All across the upper North of the USA folks were bundling up or, in my case, talking themselves out of reasons to be outside unless absolutely necessary.

I ventured outside a bit after the middle of the day more by accident than by design, returning home from an errand when I saw the harbor around which my town has built its downtown from an angle or aspect I don't recall previously in 22 years.  Here's the sequence of shots to see for yourself.

I think by the time I was done, my lips matched the water. And my shoes.
-bill kenny

Deck the Malls

Trust me on this, I didn't take a picture Friday when I first saw it because I was driving and when I saw it yesterday walking back from the Leffingwell House Museum clean-up I resisted the temptation to hip check the holiday-garbed doofus into the oncoming traffic, but I am NOT in the Christmas spirit and forcing the issue will not help.

Coming home Friday afternoon, sitting at the light in Montville (Connecticut) from which I make a left to head onto Route 2A and from there to 395 North and home, I could see ahead on the right at the next intersection where, just beyond that is a large and very successful Chinese food place, a very large sign reading 'Happy Holidays' from a local radio station and behind the sign, sort of propping it up with his legs, Santa Claus.

Okay. It was somebody dressed like Santa Claus. Happy, now? If you're keeping track at home, this was on Friday, 22 November, or one month and three days BEFORE Christmas. I'm not happy now. I'm not an especially big fan of any Christmas brouhaha until the adventkalendar kicks in, meaning on the first of December and ideally we should take a hint from the Twelve Days of Christmas, and it is too hard dammit, and just chill out.

It's not yet Thanksgiving. if you want to stand on a street corner dressed like a Pilgrim holding a plucked turkey by its neck, yes, I concede you'll look foolish but you'll be accurate and authentic. Spare me the commercial cash-in and figure out the answer to Arlo's question.
-bill kenny

Bully for You

I imagine all of us have mixed memories of our growing up years. Places we've lived, schools we attended, people we had as friends that, until just now, we hadn't thought about in decades and others, quite frankly, whom we had striven to forget and had until just now (sorry).

From what I remember of their formative years watching our two children grow into adults, I wouldn't want to be a kid again. And from what I can very nearly can remember of my own childhood, I wouldn't want to do it even the first time, though some things are decided beyond the bounds of this page, I suppose.

It was earlier this fall when the heartaches of being a teen, or this time, a pre-teen were again a headline concern when a twelve year old child, because that's what twelve year old human beings are, children, took her own life after what was called relentless bullying.

Since it's never eaten as hot as it's served, you won't be surprised to know, as I know I wasn't, that no charges were ever filed against any of the designated adults in this tragedy as had been speculated, but a wire item crossed my path the other day that made me very sad, in terms of  inwhom else we've decided to not apply some Old Testament treatment.

Old Testament is deliberate in that I was brought up in a religion that said you should hate the sin not the sinner (unless you're Joan of Arc, or Martin Luther, or Galileo) and my grown-old (not grown-up) sensibilities support the manner in which this matter is being handled.

But then I think about Rebecca Sedgwick's parents and the holiday season and the hole in their hearts that will never heal and I shake my head in dismay over how difficult we've made it for our children to be children. They're a short time here and a long time gone, and when gone, they are gone forever.
-bill kenny

After all, it was you and me....

If you're a youngish someone who thinks, when you hear people speak today about the murder of Kennedy, that we're talking about the passing of the veejay who once toiled in the video vineyards of Music Television, MTV, this probably isn't the place to stop during a break in the battle of today, November 22nd, 2013.

And if you're someone even younger who had always wondered until just now what the "M" in MTV stood for, you must definitely need to move to somewhere else in the ether, mosh skosh my little chickadee, and don't let the mouse click hit you where the good Lord split you.

I'm sharing this quite fine essay on "JFK, Inc.", because as a 61 year-old man, it speaks to everything I have ever felt from the moment I was an earwitness to history, five decades ago.

I can recall a class at Rutgers College as a wee slip of a lad years ago, but years later as well where I attempted to improvise an argument whose premise was, but for the murder of Kennedy, The Beatles might never have succeeded in the USA, only to be most strongly and vociferously directed to attempt a rare if not previously believed physically impossible feat while stifling myself.

Kennedy, like so much else in each of our lives, is and will always be one of those moments, if you were there no words are necessary and if you weren't, no words will suffice.

 Maybe it's memory that makes the days that followed his death always seem so grey or maybe it was just the dawning of the age of uncertainty where, when you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there.

Photos fade, but the heart remembers.
 -bill kenny