Ready, Aim.....

Yesterday was Palm Sunday but more immediately in my neighborhood it was an opportunity to again appreciate the people in public service about whom we rarely think until/unless we need them.

The house up the street and around the corner, at 218 Washington Street, caught on fire shortly after a quarter past eight and in moments there were seven different different fire companies responding to a blaze that licked and lapped up the exterior and interior walls of a classic old house, now a multi-family dwelling, turning into a ravaged ruin by the noon hour.

Everyone who lived in the house got out safely and no reports of injury were made. With temperatures in the low sixties on an overcast day, the protective clothing the fire fighters wear isn't the coolest of apparel on an early Spring Sunday.

We think of those in public safety as abstractions in terms of dollars spent for payroll and benefits and the annual cost of acquisition of the various devices they request in order to address their #1 priority: the preservation of life and protection of property. With all due respect to the credit card commercial, that is priceless.

-bill kenny

A Solitary Life

Even as the proverbial wee slip of a lad, I knew we were being distracted by the sleight of hand that went on in late December when it came to religion. Being born into the One Truth Faith didn't guarantee me a place in Catholic School but I was on the waiting list and me and Neil S from next door both ended up trading a walk down the block and up the hill to Pine Grove Manor School for a charter bus ride into New Brunswick and Saint Peter's (sic) School and Mrs. Hilge's third grade class on the top floor.

With the better of about five decades of hindsight that was a close to heaven as I will ever get. No regrets and if I had any I wouldn't voice them today, Palm Sunday, regarded by many, including those who've lapsed, as the start of Holy Week.

Probably because I'm related to someone who was almost Pope, I've found the stories of the life of Christ (and his death and resurrection), which underpins the establishment of Roman Catholicism (and all of Christianity), to always be compelling no matter the frame of mind or state of grace I'd been in while so doing.

I still lived at home when Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar was released. It became a topic all of us who lived under his roof knew, instinctively, to never bring up, ever, in conversations with our Dad who, for reasons I really first learned on the day of his funeral, seemed to know more about the Catholic Church and the body of faith that held it together than any priest or nun I have ever, or will ever know. He never seemed like a King Herod's Song kind of guy.

I never offered to loan him my copy of Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man, but I still have one, somewhere in our basement having placed it into I-don't-know-how-many cardboard boxes throughout the years as I took my act on the road and sometimes elsewhere. Along with Catch-22, Gravity's Rainbow and Trout Fishing in America it will always be one of my Desert Island books.

When I saw this report earlier in the week online, I flashed on a memory of Dad, having borrowed Mr. Fritsche's (a neighbor from down the street) New Testament, standing in our kitchen in Bloomfield Avenue with his tie and suit jacket off, sleeves rolled up, sight reading the Latin text and translating as he helped Bobby and me on a homework assignment a couple of years later for Sister Thomas Anne.

As I was typing that last line I remember his explanation about the actual meaning of the parable of the difficulties of a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven and a camel passing through the eye of a needle but that will be a story for another time.
-bill kenny

On the way to the Port of No Return

I'm at that difficult age. Old enough to think I know it all but not yet old enough to believe I know it all better. That day will come I know (didja see what I did there?) though tomorrow, as I also know, is promised to no one.

I hope on this Saturday morning, folks gathering in a place I have been to but once (so far) in my life, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, which is in both Portsmouth, Maine and Kittery, New Hampshire, have a brilliantly beautiful mid-April day for an annual sad and somber duty.

This is the weekend that surviving family members and friends, in an ever-dwindling number, gather to remember the USS Thresher (SSN- 593), a nuclear powered newly-constructed submarine whom the ocean took and kept, along with her crew and civilian technicians on April 10, 1963 another quiet casualty of the Cold War that the Soviet and American Empires waged with one another for nearly five decades.

Though officially no shots were fired during the decades, lives were lost and changed and the path and progress of history was re-routed innumerable times as 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' were transformed from intellectual conceits and abstractions to concrete and real values and goods.

As we have all learned in the course of our own time on this orb, if it doesn't cost anything, it's not worth anything and fifty-one years ago 129 men paid with their lives for us to have the luxury to be forgetful of their (and others') sacrifices if we so choose.

That so many take for granted what others died to pass to us is both the challenge and the curse of our democracy. There are hurts that never heal and memories of what might have been but wasn't that cannot rhyme and will not end. This is one of those days of trial and tears for a ring of remembrance that can never look up and never look away.

Lost Harbor by Leslie Nelson Jennings:
"There is a port of no return, where ships may ride at anchor for a little space
And then, some starless night, the cable slips, leaving an eddy at the mooring place . . . Gulls, veer no longer. Sailor, rest your oar.
No tangled wreckage will be washed ashore."
-bill kenny

Sugar, Sugar

I never lived in Riverdale or knew anyone named Reggie or Jughead and certainly didn't know girls as yummy as Veronica or Betty but thanks to Archie comics and for the price of one thin dime (at least at some point in my growing up) I could hang with all of them.

I was born in the Fifties and Archie was a comic book that seemed old timey even to me as a kid. I probably hadn't thought about it in at least four decades until walking down the hallway of my office building (they haven't gotten around to renaming it for me yet but all in due course) when someone played (from their computer I guess) this Moldy Oldie.

Someday I'll dazzle you with my artwork as I draw a line that connects Don Kirchner with Andy Kim to The Monkees and intersects with Jack Nicholson all the way to Milli Vanelli, but my crayon is still in the shop so that will have to wait for another time.

Cannot pretend to regret forgetting the cartoon band responsible for this earworm, but can't help wonder about fate and coincidence. I hadn't even yet told my wife my Everything's Archie story when I came across a very disturbing item on CNN, taking a break (no doubt) from interviewing psychic children who are helping search for missing airplanes.

I'd be even snarkier but this story is very strange-both in its subject and its treatment. Do you also detect a slight bit of pressure? Perhaps a tongue being applied to a cheek? Could this be the comic book version of A Mighty Wind meets This Is Spinal Tap?

I'm not sure if we're stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again but I do know this, Walter, my beautiful friend, this is The End.
-bill kenny

A Less Attractive Alternative to Lemming Leadership

People who meet me for the first time (those willing to do it a second time are in unsurprisingly short supply) invariably express surprise when they learn I served in the Air Force for eight years. Even when I explain while all of it was spent in sky blue clothes, much of it was serving with members of the US Army and I was a "791X1", a radio and TV production specialist.

They tend to see wings and jet engines. Sorry, nope, not this mother's son. I volunteered to take a train to Germany from Greenland and the Wing First Shirt not sure if I were joking, spent an hour explaining the impossibility of rail travel. "Even with all the windows up all the time?" I asked. Turns out, especially with the windows up. By the time he had finished both sides of the discussion I was close to being qualified as a submariner, and that's a choice for me even less attractive than piloting a jet.

I did not make a career out of the Air Force (I had to assume my luck would run out and eventually I'd end up in a 'real Air Force unit on a real Air Force base.' Nein danke) but I had a fine run of eight years. I wasn't greedy, it was someone else's turn to serve his country and having joined in the first wave of post-conscription recruitment probably made me a poster child for Future Shock for airmen and officers who were making a career of their service.

I wasn't what was new but rather who was next as many more who thought like me, on the rare occasions when I did think, were reporting for duty and the defense of the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. As Bruce told Rosalita, 'I ain't here on business, baby; I'm only here for fun,'

I regarded military service as positive application of avoidance behavior. Whether or not I found any value in making my bunk while in basic training with hospital corners or pulling the blankets so tight you could bounce change off them mattered not a jot to me. All of that was the Drill Instructor's religion, and I was pretty much an agnostic. Except, I always figured there to be infinitely more unpleasant things that I could be made to do 24/7 if I found bed-making once a day too tedious, and I had no desire to explore those possibilities.

I'd read Joseph Heller's Catch-22 at college and thought it was fiction only to find myself in the real-life, real-time novel without my library card. The premise for which the book was named became my mantra, "Catch-22 says we have the power to do to you anything you don't have the power to keep us from doing." You had me at power.

The first time we fell out for police call at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, (the largest Air Force base in the world without a runway, seriously) I was unhappy to discover we weren't assisting law enforcement as the phrase police call suggested but, rather, picking up cigarette butts with our fingers. Thinking about Catch-22 helped me remember that this was a good time to keep my disappointment to myself lest there be other, even less savory items we might need to pick up.

In recent years, as both the composition of the military and the nation from whom its membership is drawn have changed, those in uniform have created a descriptive that has spilled over to the private sector, 'toxic leadership' whose style may be hard at times to distinguish but whose impact and long-term effects are easily discernible though sadly, not avoidable (at least so far).

If there's one thing the US military doesn't do, it's muddle along and the leadership of the armed forces having struggled for over a decade with an endless war that has challenged every assumption and eviscerated belief in long-held customs and traditions, are working to take the measure of toxic leadership straight-on. where they can and when they can.

As a no-longer twenty-something who didn't know what he didn't know when he started on a journey that would make him a future veteran, having served with and worked for the USAF, the USA and the USN, I can assure those girding for battle that the color of the uniform matters far less than the character contained and constrained by its contents.

While each of us has a tale or two to tell as the victim, I know now we are often unaware that sometimes we're the practitioners of the politics of poison. It didn't start with us, but with us it must end. -bill kenny

Rhymes with Funny but Isn't

The Norwich City Manager, Alan Bergren, offered his next year's proposed budget to his employers, the City Council, Monday night. What he said versus what we, as residents and citizens, heard has a lot to do with our perspectives and our interests.

He, together with Comptroller Josh Pothier and Community Development Director Gary Evans spoke as much about maintaining the priorities of the city in austere times as they did in speaking directly about the 2014-2015 budget.

You can find all the slides and the numbers from Monday’s presentation on the city’s website as well as at the Otis Library and other locations. We’re talking about spending and investing a bit less than an eighth of a billion dollars. I have no idea what the 'right' dollar figure should be, and in all honesty, neither do you. We may think we do and we might have good points to make in support of our beliefs, but beliefs and facts are separate entities. No matter how passionately I believe in something that belief doesn't make it a fact.

We have a long way to go between now and June 2 when all the magic math aside and the nipping and tucking having been done, we will have come to the place where the road and the sky collide and the men and women of our City Council, whom we elected (and it's funny how often we forget that) will approve a budget for the fiscal year beginning 1 July. A budget under which, they, too, shall have to live.

The key to all the big numbers that we first saw and heard Monday is to   understand all the small(er) numbers from the city's departments that got us there when we add them all up. What we get for what we pay and how much what we want actually costs us. Even free air is a dollar, so our mileage may vary.

There are departmental budget hearings continuing tomorrow night, starting at 6:30. Those making presentations include Human Services, Otis Library, Public Works and to conclude, the Norwich Public Schools.

 The first of two Public Hearings on the budget will be a week from tomorrow night at 6:30 in Council Chambers, which is why I mentioned the departmental hearings as it's always more useful in a discussion that turns into an disagreement (and budget hearings often work out that way) to use facts to improve your argument instead of just raising your voice.

We all get to talk, but we all have to listen to one another because it is, after all our money and we want our City Council to spend it wisely and well (= on those programs we want despite what any other resident/voter says), which can make for some loud deliberations, especially when others at the meetings have opinions and ideas different from our own (=wrong).
There's a difference between listening and hearing which means we have a lot of work yet to do in understanding one another.
-bill kenny

Fractured not Broken

The tragedy of youth, goes the expression, is that it’s wasted on the young. Actually, from what I can remember of my own childhood, riding dinosaurs and helping Noah fill the Ark after school, the usual pre-historic stuff, the actual tragedy is how much of what enriches young people is dependent on money they never possess. And how holes no one ever sees eventually consume the person concealing them.

I’m astounded staring at the tabloids and ‘zines at the grocery check-out exactly what kind of a world I have helped create by doing nothing. I’m not talking about the celebrity wastes of skin, we have always had those from right around the time Marie Antoinette suggested a swap out of foodstuffs that caused her a terrible headache.

I mean the two to three hundred dollar ‘sports shoes’ that we called sneakers growing up and would never dream of calling them that now with warm-up clothes priced to move at about two and half times a monthly car payment. And because we can’t tell the difference between real and knock-off, don’t think our children’s peers can’t or won’t.

When clothes make the man to be weighed and found wanting is a terrible burden and almost more than can be borne. And then we wonder why so many school-age children, ranging from primary grades through college are on every form of narcotic and tranquilizer that a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry can imagine (and a few others that street corners supply). If you can’t hope, then cope and hang on until, exactly what? The World of Things seems to be all that counts.

I think those of us who are parents want our children, of any age, to be happy and everything and anything else beyond that is more or less gravy. So what can and should we do to create an environment where happiness is most likely to flourish? If I had that answer, you’d be watching me on a TV talk show right now.

But rather, I don’t think whatever it has a lot to do with money (I hope not because we didn’t have much in my house for our kids) but perhaps our time, and more the quality of it, rather than the amount. Nothing is wasted on the next generation, ever, except the opportunity to help them succeed in the only life they, or we, will ever know.
-bill kenny