Vegetable Oil Wildcatters’ Strike of ‘04

There’s a really excellent for today’s title but on my way over to the desk to sit at the keyboard and type this, I forgot it. I’m thinking if I sit very still and listen very hard (aside from hearing Robert Plant), the Universe, which knows everything, will share the reason with me, though so far all I’ve been getting is a faint and softly-muted, “Dude, I’ve got nothin’!”  

And so it goes, I fear. I’ve been watching a news stream fill with stories of the testimony in the penalty phase of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his role in the Boston Marathon Murders (that’s what they are/were and I’m tired of all the talkarounds) and ensuing carnage. It’s reported he is now expressing true remorse for his actions. 

Well, as long as he says he’s sorry, I don’t know why we just can’t call it square and move on except, as it turns out, people died and many others were hurt, so moving on doesn’t even get a second much less any discussion. And in the torrent of words that has spilled out about and from this trial since the day it started, that keeps getting forgotten and for the life of me I don’t know how or why. 

Speaking of life that was what was taken from Martin Richard who never saw his ninth birthday. So while I fully understand ‘love the sinner but hate the sin’ at least at the theoretic level, being the father of two (now adult) children, no sale here, Dzokhar. Not even close. 

I don’t see a confused young man under the influence of a zealot older brother. I see two ingrates, rescued from the horrors of war in their own country and through the kindness of strangers able to start anew in the Land of Opportunity, who repaid freely-given kindness with curses and contempt, attempting to bite the hand that fed them for ideological reasons and instead hurting flesh and blood human beings. I can’t help but believe he really is sorry; sorry he didn’t kill more innocents. 

Close his book and turn the page, no matter what happens now. 

-bill kenny

To Be or Not to Be

I didn't mean to startle the young person Saturday afternoon working the window at the newly-opened Friendly's Scoop Shack just a few steps away from the starting bricks of the Heritage Trail at Howard T. Brown Park. I just wanted to say hello and welcome to Norwich.

There's a lot of that hello and welcome going around here it seems to me in recent weeks and months despite that well-worn whine #1 about "Nothing ever happens in Norwich," usually coupled with #2 "back in my day, on Thursday nights you had to walk in the downtown streets because sidewalks were so crowded."

It's not that folks aren't still saying it-as a matter of fact I heard it more than a few times last week as a reaction from folks after they read about Tim Owens and his purchase of the Bulletin Building on Franklin Street and the reports of his hopes for what's next in the heart of downtown Norwich.

There's something a little too New Englandish about that portion of so many souls who cannot be happy for somebody else's success, because they feel somehow it diminishes their own chances of success. Here's the key to being successful (remember, you read it here first): first, you have to do something and then you have to keep doing it. And when you win, we all win. Crazy innit?

We have scores of small businesses, very different from the ones that populated Chelseas in the 50's and 60's and 70's (I assume. My alibis range from a childhood elsewhere to a life on another continent and I have the birth certificate and passport to prove it). They are small businesses with unique and in some cases amazing, goods and services that might be hard to find in places you might normally look, but you'll find them around a nearby corner right here.

On the same Saturday I startled the scooper, I walked past the Caribbean Market on McKinley. Quite frankly, there, I did have to go out in the street to get past because of the throng of shoppers, some of whom (judging from their shopping bags) had also stopped in at Melisa's Market just up the block on Franklin.

We all shook our heads when Chacers' closed because well, see WW#1 and despite those who want to mourn the closing of Pink-it didn't close; it relocated to North Main Street.

To misappropriate the wisdom, wit and words of Mark Twain the reports of the demise of the city of Norwich have been greatly exaggerated. Not that we don't and won't keep telling one another bad news for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom.

These Guys Brewing Co, LLC, intends to open on Franklin Street in less than a month's time and its Facebook page has close to 1,500 hits and they haven't even opened the doors.

On the ground floor of the Wauregan, go back a decade and who thought that rehab project was a good idea?, there's The Rose Pizzeria and Deli and the next block over practically neighbors with Tim Owns is the Panda Market.

On Main Street maybe a dozen steps from LaStella is a quiet treasure trove, literally and figuratively, Encore Justified which is antiques and vintage (I love to visit there because I'm the youngest item in the store) and when you choose to be literally as pretty as you feel, on Water Street, there's Doll Me Up by BKS. They're decades too late to do me any good, but there's always you.

As a past resident of the Wauregan Hotel Abraham Lincoln once said, "We can complain that rose bushes have thorns or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses." We are what we decide to be so let's decide to be shiny and happy for a change.
-bill kenny  

It's So Easy When You Know the Rules

As the ESPN sports guys droned on, I kept waiting for Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog to show up and rescue Tom Terrific. Nope. No chance-nailed for an accumulation of indiscretions, Tom Brady and his bunch a/k/a New England Patriots got spanked by the National Football League for getting caught looking guilty of bending the rules of professional football. and all this time I thought the NFL was like Fight Club.

As Richard Petty supposedly said, "if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying" and these indeed are times to try the souls of the staunchest of fans who brave truly ludicrous weather in New England every late fall into the winter and who spend far too much money on stadium seats and overpriced food and beverages and root passionately for Robert Kraft's Kreatures.

Dear African refugees adrift in the Mediterranean, weary Ukrainians engaged in a national fratricide that Vlad the Impaler helped stoke, refugees in a dozen or more war-torn nations from Syria to Yemen and all points in between.

You'll have to forgive us while we mull the merit/injustice of the discipline meted out to a professional sporting concern probably worth more on the open market than a half dozen or more of your sad-sack little countries' gross national product.

We on whom God's grace has been shed in such profuse amounts have weighty concerns to ponder and targeted audiences to pander to, and we can do both simultaneously and never waste a moment of our front temporal lobe on you and your wrecked, ravaged and ruined lives. It's nothing personal, it's business. Really big business. You wouldn't understand, now and should you survive to see another dawn, or tomorrow.

Bottom line to all the discipline: four more weeks of staying home with Gisele Bündchen. Yeah, It's good to be a gangsta, or at least be treated like one.
-bill kenny

Our Reason Coexists with Our Insanity

I wrote this a year and four days ago. Either I'm stunningly prescient or we are numbingly predictable. I have a pretty good idea which one (and, I suspect, so, too, do you). And yet the movie remains the same, sometimes the cast changes, but only sometimes.

Monday evening (tonight) at 6:30 we in Norwich have a second bite of the proverbial apple at the Second Public Hearing on the (Interim) City Manager's proposed budget.

In a world where silence is interpreted to mean consent, I cannot encourage you strongly enough to use this forum to make your voice heard because (and I'm amazed how often we lose sight of it) this is our city.

The budget creation process is very straight-forward and transparent, if you're willing to look at it. Part of our unhappiness as we struggle to understand the results of a long process I fear is that we want to cut to the chase and have no patience for prologue or explanations. We all want to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. I'm pretty sure that's not how it works.

The professionals who manage our municipal departments made their cases for funding to the City Manager last fall and into the winter with crunch time in the early Spring.

The City Manager, in turn, evaluated the requests and reviewed past performance and results in crafting his proposed budget which he presented to his bosses, the City Council, the men and women we each elected to the City Council. There's not a one of them who doesn't pay taxes for the same goods and services we all expect and receive from the city in which we live.

No one likes their taxes to be increased, by any amount, at any time or for any reason. You know both the City Manager and City Council are keenly aware of this already but by all means go ahead and remind them of that again on tonight if you're so inclined. You're entitled to tell them how and why (and where if we're being technical) you agree and/or disagree with the expenditures and appropriations they are considering.

As Sister Mary Jean used to tell us in math class, "show your work." If you have a proposal or an alternative for a budget item, show how you're paying for it and be specific and realistic. Measure (at least) twice before cutting once-that's what they used to say in New York's Garment District-good watchwords for those creating municipal budgets.

Speaking of which, copies of the budget are available on line and also in the Otis Library (and you thought all they had were book sales?). Despite news reports nationally of an economic upturn, around here these remain hard times in the land of plenty. Someday, we may come to regard these as the best of times, but not today and probably not on a future Monday real soon when the City Council adopts a budget.
-bill kenny

from a Mothers Day Past...

I figure everyone with a pulse, or an approximation, is waxing poetic today in honor of Mother's Day, as well we should except....my mom is a tough old broad who wrangled six of us to adulthood, the last three for a significant distance without her partner of (at that time) nearly thirty years. 

At some point today, unless I beat her to the phone call, she'll call to wish my wife a Happy Mother's Day and then walk across the street to the beach on the ocean where she lives in Florida because the loves the beach. Before my generation started using DTS, Down the Shore, she and hers were living it.

When I was a kid, Mom was more than unflappable, she was a force of nature and in the (now more than) three decades since the death of her husband, all of her children, joined by grandchildren and now great-grand children have watched her lead the life she wishes after taking care of so many of us for so long. Mom came to visit Sigrid and me and our two children when we all still lived in Germany.

She and Franz and Anni Schubert, Sigrid's parents, got along wonderfully well even though they shared not a single syllable of a common language. Sigrid's mom was a Rubble Woman upon whose back the Federal Republic of Germany became the economic engine of Europe in the decade after World War II. Anni's husband passed some years ago. The two women took, and take, no shit crap from anybody and raised children pretty much who are the same way.

My sisters, Evan, Kara and Jill are accomplished, masterful and successful. They take care of their own families with the same devotion and also the same discipline (no feet on tables, no glasses without coasters) as their mother did them. Evan only recently lost the love of her life, Glenn, so this day will be a little longer and more somber for her than for them. Russ and Joe are fortunate to have Kara and Jill in their lives and, I truly believe, are also smart enough to know it.

I and my two brothers, Kelly and Adam, are married to women, Sigrid, Linda and Margaret whose Moms raised them to give us the confidence every day to go out into the world and try to reinvent it in our own image and, when we come home at the end of each day, sometimes defeated but always undaunted, to convince us we can begin again on the morrow because we always have their love and support. I think among us at last count we have two point three metric boxcars of children, some with families of their own.

I realize you fear with my diabetes being so sweet puts me in danger of being terminally mushy. No worries, I'm not, as I choose to invoke the deathless words of Ray Wylie Hubbard (delivered by Jerry Jeff) to close. 

Love ya, Mom(s), all of you.

-bill kenny

The (Not) Short (Enough) List

It’s only early May and the visual depiction of all those seeking (or expected to be seeking) the Republican Party nomination for the office of the Presidency in 2016 already resembles one of those  “have you seen me?” posters. In this case, too often the answer is, ‘sadly, yes.’  

The contingent of contenders expanded by three this week, and I confess to being a little disappointed that we haven’t seen any more jump in. Of course we still have the rest of the weekend, and if the weather holds, I’m thinking an even bigger bumper crop by Monday. Perhaps it will be so large we’ll need a Massey-Ferguson combine to harvest ‘em all. It could happen.

I am blessed to live in a county where anyone and everyone can aspire to grow up and be President. I do find myself wistfully wishing some of those already running would grow up but whether it’s Saul on the Road to Damascus or Slouching towards Bethlehem, sometimes it’s the journey and other times it’s the destination. 

I don’t know how much will be spent, nor by whom, to drive campaigns at eligible voters, but unbidden and (if you’re a Democrat) perhaps unBiden, the circus wagons draw nearer even if the messages are no clearer. And the chances of the circus remaining even remotely well-behaved just keep shrinking even as the Sailors line up to get their nails done. 

From Sea to Shining Sea, and we shall see what we shall see, but don’t believe everything you see even if it’s with your own eyes. Perhaps especially if it’s with your own eyes and ears….

"Praise be to Nero’s Neptune. The Titanic sails at dawn and everybody’s shouting, “Which Side Are You On?” And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower; while calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow. And nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row."
- bill kenny

A Slice of Life

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, Macbeth once observed and the day may come when we are asked by those yet to be why we made so little difference in the world with our time, talents and technology and we’ll stammer out something about our priorities and selfishness. Ouch. I for one hope it’s not today and if it is, then hope you already had lunch but if you didn’t, don’t worry because we’ve got more science to the rescue for you. 

In the days of my youth, when dinosaurs roamed the earth even before there was dial-up (yes, there was a time when not even dial-up existed; hard to believe I know, but true) we would have to call ahead and order a pizza, be it for pick-up or delivery. Yep, we once had to put our finger in the little holes on the rotary dial and give our wrist a twist. It was harrowing and time-consuming.

But the pizza was delicious-which I think was the whole point of the drill. That was then, and this is now, of course, and the rules have changed. Coming to a Pizza Hut near you, like it or not, sooner or later, will be an app not to order pizza-who doesn’t have that- but so that never again will your pizza yammer at your delivery driver, “are we there yet?”

I know, how did we live so long without this? Maybe it just felt long. Okay, so we’ve not cured aids or cancer or Ebola or even the common cold. We do have homeless and unemployed and underemployed around the world and a curious and unjust distribution of wealth and goods just about anywhere you look. Baby steps, my friend, baby steps. 

Now, we’ll know exactly how long it’ll be until our pizza arrives forever (wish I had an excited or perhaps excitable font). To you and me it may not seem like much (perhaps because it really isn’t), but by the time social media gets through with it, it’ll be The Second Sitting for the Last Supper only this time silverware, and pieces of, are optional.

-bill kenny