Time Crawls and Flies as It Wishes

This is actually from six years ago (yeah, I know you think it feels like I've been writing for longer than that) and I don't think I have any more to say on the subject (or at least I hope not).

Every organized religion and a couple of the somewhat disorganized ones have sacred writings, scriptures if you will. No matter the region, or the religion, it's part of our human genome, the need to be a part of something bigger. 

Be it the Koran, the Old Testament, the New Testament, or the latest roman a clef by Danielle Steel, there's a narrative a place to go look for details. When you argue a matter of theology and someone says, 'you can look it up!' the texts are what they're referring to.

There's the blood of the Lamb, the descent of the dove, the tongues of fire, the burning bush and an almost unending number of symbols and signs that The Lord (however you perceive S/He to be) uses to get our attention and pass along the Word. 

What if we were the first generation of people on this planet who had a Deity? I don't pretend to know what all of those before us had, I'm just saying we're the first and Our God uses the tools we have today in much the way as in the days of old we've read about.

Someone speculated on how would God communicate the Ten Commandments if S/He had to use text and here's what it looked like: 

Perhaps:
1. no1 b4 me. srsly.
2. dnt wrshp pix/idols
3. no omg's
4. no wrk on w/end (sat 4 now; sun l8r)
5. pos ok - ur m&d r cool
6. dnt kill ppl
7. :-X only w/ m8
8. dnt steal
9. dnt lie re: bf
10. dnt ogle ur bf's m8. or ox. or dnkey. myob.

M, pls rite on tabs & giv 2 ppl. ttyl, JHWH. ps. wwjd?

What would you ask if you had just one question?
-bill kenny

Sail Away Raymond

As I was watching the doctors and nurses working speedily and confidently on my wife in the hospital emergency room on Sunday evening, realizing I had nothing to contribute but some tight smiles and rueful looks, I allowed my attention to wander into the adjoining room where drama of a different kind was playing out.

Or had reached a pause, I have no idea which. From what I could see standing in the thoroughfare looking half into the room where Sigrid was and half next door it was curiouser and curiouser. A person, perhaps the patient was sitting straight up in the bed, at the foot of the bed on the floor were pointy-toed cowboy boots which may seem off but in the context of the room were logical.

On the head of the person sitting on the bed with the cowboy boots on the floor in front of the bed was a white ten gallon hat (37.8 liters for readers outside CONUS) but, as they say on TV, wait there's more.

Over her/his (I never did sort out the gender involved) right eye, but under the shade of the hat brim (had it been sunny and the brim had cast shade) was a black eye patch. I flashed on what was missing: a palomino pony with a western saddle and a parrot attached to the saddle horn.

You would not believe the movie I started making in my head as I watched the health care folks between the shadow and the light. It was far more amazing than any reality could have ever been. Just pay separate shipping and handling.
- bill kenny

Build Tomorrow from Yesterday's Bones

I love how new beginnings are often found in old endings and how that which itself was old can become new again. In this case, I’m thinking specifically of the 1783 Dr. Daniel Lathrop Schoolhouse at the Norwichtown Green, which is one of the oldest intact brick school buildings in all of Connecticut.

The dismissal bell for its last class rang decades if not centuries before any of us were born but it’s just days away from helping us teach and learn (again) new lessons about who we once were and, perhaps, who we may on the way to becoming.

This Friday afternoon at four the Lathrop Schoolhouse is the site of the Grand Opening and Ribbon Cutting for the Norwich Heritage and Regional Visitors’ Center and we’re all invited to look back at the way we were as well as peer into what could be our future as a tourist destination.

Talking about “historic tourism as an engine for economic development” is all well and good and if talking about it made it so, we’d be on to other topics around here but there’s a lot of moving parts and huge amounts of heavy lifting to get from a spirited conversation at a workshop to an actual brick and mortar visitor and history center that can effectively tell the story of who we once while helping us become whom we want the world to see.

The Center is the latest effort by The Norwich Heritage Group, an umbrella for the collaborative efforts of fifteen different heritage groups throughout the city, whose collective mission is to promote heritage tourism in Norwich and build awareness of the many rich cultural resources here in Norwich, Connecticut.

The Center hopes to educate residents and visitors about Norwich's rich past and to offer information about regional tourist attractions here in the present. It’s intended to be a gateway into Norwich for visitors to learn about our numerous important cultural sites as well as our various local businesses and services.

Friday’s ribbon-cutting offers a chance to check out the “Discover Norwich” exhibit which is a 10-panel exhibit on Norwich history from the 17th to the 20th century, from the founding to today.  It’s intended to offer visitors and locals an overview of Norwich’s history and also deepen both the knowledge and appreciation of the City 

The actual ribbon cutting is at 4:30 with light refreshments before and period music from the Nathan Hale Ancient Fife and Drum Corps afterward. So come fashionably early and stay historically late. 

Considering it took Norwich 356 years to get to this point, I’d hope you’ll find fifteen minutes between four and six PM this Friday to come by and stop in.

-bill kenny 

Sometimes it Takes a Good Scare

My wife, Sigrid, suffered a heart attack at some point Sunday and we went to our hospital, Backus, and their ER early in the evening when her heartburn and nausea concerned even her.

It took less than forty minutes for the very talented folks at Backus to decide she needed to take a helicopter ride to Hartford Hospital where, confirming she had indeed had a heart attack, the doctors put a stent into one of the arteries on the right side of her heart.

My heart has just started to return to normal as each passing minute since all of that on Sunday night suggests she will make a full and speedy recovery, as long as she is very good and does what her doctors tell her to do.

My job as fretter-in-chief will be to make sure she does. And she will. I promised her an exciting life when I asked her to marry me. The intent then (as it is now), was to take her breath away and make her heart glad. Thinking it's time to double down and get to work. Loving someone for forever doesn't happen by itself.
-bill kenny

Besser ein schreckliches Ende....

Tonight, no matter what type of a day it has been, will be the absolute worst day of our entire lives since just about this time last year. Why?

Because tonight in Norwich (and I suspect all kinds of towns across Connecticut who all had to wait on their final municipal budgets for the folks we elect and send to Hartford to come up with a budget, which is the entire point of the journey to the State Capital in the first place) the City Council will adopt a municipal budget for the Fiscal Year 2015-2016 that no one will like.

For those who wanted more money in education, infrastructure, public safety, public works, pony rides for birthdays, or personnel (and a dozen other areas), no soup for you.

If you'd hope to see your property taxes stabilize or even drop, no soup for you either and there's a tax on the ladle you're not using. And if you think we're unhappy here in the Rose of New England tonight, wait until three weeks from tomorrow when the tax bills for personal property (mostly cars, trucks, boats, motorcycles, and I'm thinking scooters, too, but unfunnily enough NOT ponies) arrive in the day's mail.

You'll be able to hear us from wherever it is you live. Again, we will have spent 364 days talking about how to do business differently in every nook and cranny of our city and zero seconds actually attempting to change how we do business.

And then we're surprised and angry (again) at the people we elect to the City Council who have no other way to do business but to antagonize all of us, as happens every year. Better a horrible ending than horrors without end. As long as we never need to change we're all in favor of change.
-bill kenny

Read Him His Miranda Rights, Carmen

I guess we’re making headway on getting a handle on drugged and drunk driving. I say that without seeing any statistics of any kind from federal or regional law enforcement officials but have decided see this story as a ‘the glass is half-full’ tale, though we should be concerned a little about what liquid is in the glass. 

We’re only six months into the calendar year, but I’m thinking Logan Shaulis is already seriously in the lead for the Somerset County, Pennsylvania, “Man of the Year.” Hell, as someone who grow up in Somerset County, New Jersey (no relation), I’d vote for the guy.  

I don’t have the heart to tell him in that picture he has on FB, wearing the BDU blouse and the PFC rocker (Battle Dress Uniform/Private First Class), I can still see him (perhaps because this galaxy has a yellow sun so I have x-ray vision?). Maybe he needs to get his money back for the uniform top. 

Quite frankly, based on the reports of this encounter and the amount of perturbation it will create in his life for the immediate future and probably beyond, he might want to take that money and whatever he can get after pawning the BB pistol and invest it in legal services, or more road flares; depending on his priorities.
-bill kenny

Revisiting Accidental Heroes

I wrote this five years ago. No matter how much has changed, this is a subject I know I will never feel any differently about. Ever.

What had seemed like a beginning in the near daylight off the coast of Normandy in France, seventy-one years ago was actually the end, if you will, of the planning phase of Operation Overlord and years of planning from an embattled outpost, England, that had been left to fight on practically alone after the fall of France in June nearly four years earlier.

This time last week we were all talking about those 'who made the ultimate sacrifice' and 'who paid the ultimate price' and here we are today commemorating an event that marked the beginning of the end of the murderous darkness and mayhem into which first Europe and ultimately the entire world descended that resulted in the deaths of over sixty million people, marked the end of the British Empire, helped redraw the maps of Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East and redivided much of the world into communist and non-communist spheres of influence.

The personages and personalities we always associate with this event are enormous and epic and their fame is well-deserved, but I found an old clip, its source made me smile, that focused more, and more accurately, on the hundreds of thousands of men leading lives of quiet desperation, who did what they were trained to do, when they were trained to do it, and thought in nothing larger than one step increments.

They struggled and died by the tens of thousands wading ashore from the landing craft to the beach, getting off the beachhead to an embankment for cover, rejoining a unit and moving forward, a footfall at a time, until the trickle from the beach became a torrent and that torrent became a flood facing murderous opposition from men who in many respects were their twins, but were on the other side for reasons that had as much to do with accidents of geography and birth as with ideology and politics.

Back in 1984 I had an opportunity with Bob 'The Human Sachtler' Garvin to retrace the assault on Normandy with a US Army unit who took their history very seriously. Bus loads of us, all stationed in Germany, arrived in considerably more style and comfort than the advance party in 1944 to discover every, or seemingly every, bar in the city limits of Normandy is called 6 Juin. 

At the bar (whose name you can guess) across from the church where a US paratrooper's chute had gotten snagged in the steeple and John Steele supposedly died in a hail of bullets from a Wehrmacht defender, spotlights illuminated the church top and a parachute still billowed as a human replica dangled and twisted from the rigging. As it turned out, he didn't die but was captured by the Germans only to escape and rejoin his unit.

Army chopper pilots are tough, hard cases, but even they softened when we toured Pointe du hoc where the US Army's 2nd Ranger Battalion achieved the impossible and it was but one brief moment in a non-stop amazing story of heroism that went on for weeks that summer for twelve allied nations, 

The beaches of Normandy are quite beautiful, if you don't mind looking at the remnants of the Mulberry Harbors that the Allies needed to use to stage reinforcements and supplies prior to the final assault on the beaches themselves.

The seagulls and sandpipers run ahead of you, by just inches, often backwards staring up at you, the flightless sojourner, walking among the washing of the waves trying, and failing, to imagine the carnage and chaos that covered every inch of these beaches all those years ago.

Our final day there, we devoted to the Normandy American Cemetery, a beautifully sad or sadly beautiful island of peace and calm created to honor those who died for those whom they never met but whose lives were made possible by their sacrifice. 

Today, if only for a moment, think about those men and, in looking at the challenges you face in your life, resolve to make a difference as best as you can, in much the way that they did, alone and far from home and hearth on a beach half a world away.

-bill kenny