Down to the River

I’ve a well-deserved reputation as misanthropic pragmatist-I find the terms complementary, others less so. As dazzling as I see us and our accomplishments as a species and nearly as often as a national collective (‘Murikans!) I tend to watch almost every transaction large or small and wait for the other shoe to drop. 

I admire people for their achievements and aspirations even when their efforts in pursuit of the latter aren’t crowned by what convention might term ‘success.’  As someone who grew up wanting to be a cowboy, a baseball player, an astronaut and the President all at the same time (and still my trademark application for multitasking was denied!) I’ve watched out for David Wilson, a professional football player for the New Jersey Giants (not a typo; they share a playing surface with the Jersey Jets) even though it’s not really a sport for which I have an aptitude or affection.

Wilson was in the news a LOT for an injury he suffered last season and from which he had hoped (believed) to have made a full recovery so as to resume the pursuit of his dream career. Earlier this week, that dream ended as he was advised the nature of his chosen sport is such that he risked permanent disability and/or worse if he continued, so he retired.

What moved me was the way he handled not only the news but himself in the public arena, with the members of the working sports press, in reacting to it all. I’m NOT a NY Post guy-Daily News was more my morning jacket, and way easier to read on the bus and subway than the NY Times. I mention this because go back to the Post link and look in your browser window. The Post website guys couldn’t be bothered to slug a new page, but rather, dropped the revised text onto the previous url.

Yeah, you’re amazed I’m being snarky after I've marveled at Wilson’s eloquent expansiveness and expansive eloquence. Sue me. 

Decades ago, I fixated on a song from Bruce Springsteen, who has never pretended to be “New York” anything, and his sprawling masterpiece, The River, where he wondered aloud on the title track ‘is a dream a lie if it don’t come true?’

I think, for this moment at least, while I may not have an answer I can live with for the rest of my days, I now know someone who can and, more importantly, will.

-bill kenny

Another Place We'll Never Be

You may have missed-I confess I did but social media was all abuzz-last weekend's activities all part of the  First Friday Downtown Norwich, ranging from the Otis Library to Norwich Arts Center, Artspace as well as the Gallery at the Wauregan and Reliance House Gallery plus live music in multiple locations to include the steps of City Hall and in a recently opened destination shop on Main Street, Encore Justified.

From what I read and heard, people came from within and without the city to admire the art, enjoy the music, patronize the restaurants and were having so much fun enjoying themselves and each other, no one had the time to complain about how there's never anything to do in Norwich or how when there is something to do, there's never any parking. Funny, eh?

Everywhere I go, I run into people who chide me about my "boosterism"-Norwich is NOT Mystic, they remind me. Thanks for the geography lesson and glad we got that straight, but why stop there? There are literally billions of places Norwich isn't; I'll pause while you silently list them all.

I'm kidding-I don't have that kind of time and neither should you. I will confess and concede what you probably already know, I wasn't born here like so many who claim to have such concern about my so-called enthusiasm.

I chose to live here with my family as have many others and that's got a lot to do, perhaps, with why we see Norwich differently than do you. Between discouraged experts and enthusiastic beginners, we can be whatever city we decide to be. But first we must decide to decide.

Weather permitting, if you're at Rock the Docks tonight for the Fat Cats tonight pay attention to how many other people are at Howard T. Brown Park. Some will have stopped off to grab a bite in a local place before the show, others will have something at the show while still others will save their dinner for dessert, so to speak, afterwards.

A lot of folks, our neighbors and friends (a/k/a "local businesses"), worked hard to make all those choices happen. They might take exception to your 'there's nothing to do here' attitude.

If you like Rock the Docks come back this Friday with more music at the Elsie Brown Gazebo when Ramblin' Dan Stevens plays at six. I caught the first installment of "Friday Night Acoustics," last month with Bohemian Picnic and there were folks and fans in lawn chairs across the park and on the benches with boat owners at the Marina all enjoying the sounds.

It's another night of free music in a city with nothing to do that's certainly not Mystic. Of course, at one time, not even Mystic was Mystic so I'm thinking there's hope for us yet. But hope is NOT a plan just like happiness is a choice and not an accident.

-bill kenny

Physics more than Friends

There's no reason to hurry off to a Hallmark store today as I doubt they have any cards for us to send to anyone for tomorrow's sixty-ninth anniversary of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Many cities around the world and across our nation will mark the moment or, like us here in Norwich, will do so on Saturday to commemorate the bombing of Nagasaki.

I've never really understood the name we came to call the effort to develop the weapon, the Manhattan Project, but as much reading as I've done on the era and epoch that created the circumstances where the notion of such a weapon's existence was posited and then created, I'm grateful to have been born in the decade that followed it.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom we've called the 'father of the atomic bomb' for decades in popular history, was probably not comfortable with that sobriquet and spent much of the rest of his life attempting to create a world where such weapons, that we now call Weapons of Mass Destruction, would not/could not ever be used.

We are an amazing species capable of hunting other species and one another to the point of extinction while expending more time, energy and money on weapons of death and destruction than on anything that might in any way enhance our quality or quantity of life.

I've read varying opinions on whether or not war is the natural state of homo sapiens and I've never grasped how we can think waging it in any of the varieties in which it is done helps us prove who is right when all that remains is who is left.

I served in the US Air Force for eight years, and like everyone you or I will ever meet in any branch at any time, I've never met anyone who wasn't a pacifist, because we know who always bears the concrete consequences and costs of that grand abstraction, a declaration of war.

Look at all the places in the world where at this moment we have armed conflict and it's impossible to understand how we can continue to believe unconditionally that we will never again feel ourselves so provoked and/or otherwise bereft of choices but to turn Oppenheimer's Deadly Toy on one another.

And when all those who can, have indeed done so, who will be left to bury the dead and console the dying as what's left of our world descends into a final darkness of the last night as the unending winter of despair envelopes us all?
-bill kenny

This Isn't Who It Would Be

I have the good fortune of rarely remembering my dreams which would be a disappointment to oneirologists everywhere if I were a public figure of any import whose existence mattered to anyone at anytime anywhere.

I say 'good fortune' because I'm wrestling with one I had recently that I can remember all too well and that disquieted me a great deal. My wife and I were home in her country, though I don't know where and actually don't know how I know that as in the dream we never left an apartment in which we lived with a third person whom I never managed to identify.

In the dream we had no children-just one another though I have no memory of whether we were young(er) or old(er) than we are now. And everything in the dream was in shades of brown.

I'm not sure in the dream if I realized it was a dream which, I'm assured, in itself means something though what or why I do not know. That I could have a dream guide on my cell phone 24/7, IPhone or Android, is curiously of little solace to me but does speak volumes about the entrepreneurial spirit and greed of code writers here in the early part of what I fear is becoming the last century.

Nothing looked familiar to me causing me to wonder if I'd become Pirate Prentice as I kept looking to the skies for Gravity's Rainbow, somehow feeling better that if I had seen it but never heard the roaring across the skies, I was safe until Tyrone Slothrop returned from an outing. And even then it could be a stairway to the stars.
-bill kenny

Silver Pockets Full

When is 823 the same as 11? When it comes down to a little ditty we've all seen in recent days on-line, Silver Pockets Full, through any number of social media.

It's remarkable, intriguing and completely specious. Not that I would ever have known this by myself (in much the same way as I'd have never known about the Silver Pockets Full in the first place) but I did enjoy the casual coincidence that thinking such a thing could exist afforded me.

I find comfort in a universe that operates like a Great Clock since I'd like to think that the existence of such a clock predicates the presence of a Great Clock Maker. While I no longer believe in the church in whose faith I was raised through my childhood, I'm unwilling to abandon all hope and belief in an omnipotent, invisible Friend, just in case S/He does exist and holds grudges (see Lot's wife and the opposite of a salt-free diet).

I'm keeping my reawakening under wraps since I'm not really convinced it'll take and if it does, I'd hate to provoke a stampede. A parade, on the other hand, is another matter entirely; truth is I love a parade.
-bill kenny

On the Sunny Side

I've been struggling to regain my equilibrium in recent weeks as my routine and somewhat cocooned version of the world got buffeted by events that I've always known are beyond my control but I somehow seemed to have forgotten.

Out walking the other night and came across this scene and am hoping that it's a harbinger of better things to come.

I'm working on being more upbeat-not so much a smile visible from space as a more receptive attitude to the failings and foibles of my fellow travelers in much the same manner as they extend that courtesy to me. See you on the sunny side.
-bill kenny

Standing Solo in the Sun

I’ve taken today off from work.  My boss, whose cross I am to bear, was very amenable to my request, and to the other twenty-six or so that I launched on the same day, seemingly a man on a mission possessed by his purpose. ‘twould be nice were it to be true but the motivation is far more prosaic.

 Historically, I end up with truckloads of earned vacation time at the end of the calendar year that I lose because I haven’t taken it, and it’s never upset me. Actually, it still doesn’t, but I’ve had incentives in the last few months, some not-so-gentle prodding, really, to re-examine my nearly-lifelong perspective of defining who I am by what I do for a living. For a FARC, I’ve been a terrific WASP.

I’m not really playing hooky since I asked for the day, though I hope I can be forgiven if I hope a little too loudly for nice weather as part of what (for me) will be a three-day weekend. I see it as a head start on another road marker on the highway of life that runs through our Ant Farm with Beepers.

A colleague, he was working in the organization I joined after we arrived from Germany in October 1991 (I am resisting the urge to italicize and underline the month and year because it is really quite some time ago), called it a career yesterday at close of business. As I recall, when he mentioned months ago that he was retiring, in a galaxy far, far away, he had started working on the first of August and he’s always been a fan of symmetry.

We shared the same first name and worked on the same floor of the same building for much of the past twenty-odd (and often, oh were they!) years, dealing on a regular basis with sincere and earnest folks popping up before our respective desks actually looking for ‘the other Bill’ which is how we eventually took to referring to one another.

He was much more organized and vastly more polite and thoughtful than I am or shall ever be. I offer that in the interest and desire for accuracy; I’m not jealous, nor am I competitive. That on Monday when I return to work, there shall no longer be an or the other Bill will slowly sink in and by next week’s end there will be no sting of absence at all. Well, hardly any.

I took my leave of him and he of me yesterday with mutual assurances to take care and be well of the kind that two men in their sixties offer to one another. I extended my best wishes to him and to his family, more or less notionally, as I have always assumed he’s married and has/had child/ren though I have no personal knowledge of any of that because neither of us existed outside of work.

I’m realizing that we will never see one another again, at least in this life, after having seen one another for practically every working day of the last twenty-two years. That's taking a little more getting used to than I thought it would. People often change but memories of people can remain.

-bill kenny