Della Street Died for Your Sins

We've all seen them, those TV commercials for a product that "nine out ten doctors" endorse or "four out of five dentists recommend." I sit in my living room and wonder about the 'the other one,' the one who doesn't endorse or recommend.

So when I pulled the string on this story I thought about my own  (very limited) dealings with members of the legal community and have opted to withhold judgment on the tragically less than fortunate Stephen Guiterrez and his possibly manufactured by Samsung e-cigarette lighter.

Besides, when your client is accused of setting fire to his own car (for the insurance money? I couldn't find an account that told me the name of the client or the alleged reason for the crime) and your defense is spontaneous combustion, I have to wonder if showing up for closing arguments wearing a Donald Trump suit (if that is indeed what he wore, there's nothing in any of the reports telling me one way or the other) wasn't really calling out the universe. Turns out it answered.
-bill kenny

Give My Umbrella to the Rain Dogs

Driving into work the other day I passed a fellow (I assume; it was early, a bit nippy and lots of outer clothes were called for) taking a dog for a walk. My Uncle Jim divided the canine kingdom into two types, Sooners (those who'd sooner s*it than eat) and dogs. In my years on this orb, I've had no reason to revisit his position, so I don't know what breed this animal was, except small and hairy.

Actually, it wasn't much of a walk, as the person was carrying the dog. As a parent of two children, I recall when ours were more like lurchers; that's the larval stage preceding toddler where the child stands, wobbly-legged but upright, and the mass and momentum of the body dictate in which direction the tyke heads, with just about no control whatsoever. 

If you've been a parent, you know the feeling of your heart in your throat as your little one goes down in a heap and you hear that sharp intake of breath as they suck in as much air as their lungs can hold to fuel the scream that sounds like an air raid siren in Coventry or Dresden. Of course, you pick your child up as if you could barely hear their shrieks until you have them next to your ear. People in the next zip code can hear them but that's part of growing up.

I don't think the dog was crying (not I'm an expert at such things) so I don't get the point of picking the animal up. It has four legs, a low center of gravity and seems to be designed to traverse the planet using his paws. Heck, Tillman uses a skateboard and doesn't depend on bi-ped power to do much else, I suspect, but open the dog food tins. Don't get me wrong, I'm not angry at that dog-I'm not actually angry at anyone; but it's against the nature of things, to my mind, to not let natural systems be natural.

Having said that, and invoking the spirit, if not the intellect of Whitman (Walt, not Lowell) and Rousseau (Jean Jacques, not Danielle), I should concede I've tried the 'let nature be nature' argument when the snow falls or when the grass in the yard is need of a machete whack or two to clear a path to the garage. 

My wife, no less devoted to Rilke than am I to Davies, offers me the 'you had better do' glance in place of her once so welcome 'come hither' look and I realize that being a Sooner isn't just a demarcation of the Animal Kingdom.
-bill kenny

Mein Geburtstag Mädchen

I wrote this many years for the woman I love on the anniversary of her birthday, It's the latter again today and I remain as in love with her now and still as I was on the day we met.

She can barely tolerate Springsteen and winces when I start on my 'Bruce at the Festhalle on His first German Tour' story which I will NOT recount today. She's convinced Bob Dylan cannot now, nor ever, sing and that goes double for Neil Young, because he also can't play the harmonica or guitar according to her. She was a devoted Barry Manilow fan at a moment in his career when he was so commercially sweet, my teeth ached listening to him.

Where there had been just she and a husband was to be also a son and then later a daughter. She raised them both, it's their father with the case of arrested emotional development, practically on her own since her spouse gave his time to total strangers, not for days on end, but for decades. And she never missed a beat in creating from a home and hearth a safe haven for them all.

Not even on the day he came home, on a date of this very month twenty-six years ago, to tell her that she and the children would be leaving the only home they'd ever known to move to a country on another continent, that, of the three, only she had been in (and that was twice for holidays). She never hesitated or looked anywhere else but straight ahead.

Adding to the degree of heart wrenching difficulty in a relocation of close to 4,500 miles was a landing in the area first settled by the Pilgrims at about the time of year they, too, had arrived (but she stuck the landing). And she was to discover being a stranger in a strange land meant swallowing the bewilderment, frustration, humiliation and indignation often created by disinterested petty bureaucrats who required a rain forest of completed forms before issuing her a card of one color, but called by another, in order to remain with her family.

She is the most headstrong person, if not on the planet, than at least in a specific house at an address in Norwich, Connecticut, despite some stiff competition in that department from a daughter who has her self-assurance and belief in her own abilities from her mother.

That child's brother has his easy ability to make friends with people he's just met from his mother and she is the reason why neighbors can abide her spouse, I suspect, since he came with her and she's wonderful so there must be something she sees in him (she does wear glasses, after all).

There's nothing she cannot repair or mend which is a skill that comes in handy because her husband has a gift for physical destruction that approaches an art form and she has as much patience as each project requires, even if all of them require all of it all the time. The number of events and happenstances that had to happen in a specific and given order, for this woman from Offenbach am Main to meet a dweeb from Central New Jersey and make his world stop completely is incalculable.

The life that she has cannot be the one she thought she was getting when she said yes a lifetime ago and it's certainly not the one she deserves. Sometimes the ride has been very dark (as in dunkel night time, a small child offered in Gerglish decades ago). If the power to make today, her birthday, a national, or international holiday, were mine, I would use it, but it doesn't make a difference to her that this will never happen. She does not miss what she cannot have.

I can only wish her happiness today, her birthday, and marvel, yet again, that she shares her life with me. I never had a girl who loved me half as much as this girl loves me. You gotta hold on tight to her. She's a real emotional girl.
-bill kenny

Here's to the Drivers at the Wheel

The future arrives a little earlier this time tomorrow than it did today as we begin Daylight Saving Time. It seems to me in reading that link Benjamin Franklin may be perceived as having a hand in the development of DST. By this time tomorrow DJT will be blaming BHO for it, bigly. 

I'm never sure what to do with this extra hour of daylight I have--I'm equally at a loss as to what to invest the extra hour of sleep in at the moment in the fall when we move the clocks back. If only Bernie Madoff had expanded beyond money and into the time and space continuum, how much easier our lives might have been. Except in Arizona (most of) and Hawaii, seemingly. I'm quite taken with the "most of."

We're the only species, to my knowledge, who divides temporal moments into arbitrarily measured units. I'm especially impressed how all of us on the globe have agreed to use the same increments; none of this 'how many centimeters are in an inch or yards are needed to be a kilometer?' stuff. Sixty is sixty (at least for seconds) until and unless it gets to twenty-four (hours) though when we start rolling the hours into days and then months, the accounting gets a bit ragged.

Remember all the discussion and debate about the Social Security Lock Box a ghost of a Long-Past Presidential Campaign? Maybe we could use that for Daylight Savings Time as well. I think most of us across the globe have some form of it (hand on your heart, were you surprised to discover North Korea didn't observe it? Yeah, me neither. Perhaps the Dear Leader doesn't have a watch). 

I just gotta believe if we all put a little something into the kitty, a few seconds here and there, we'd have ourselves quite a tidy sum of minutes and hours we could redistribute to those who made a hash out of it the first time around. So what do you say, huh? 

You scoff, because you don't see a practical use for this saved time? Let's say, you want to go for a swim, but you've just eaten--one quick call to the DSTLBAC (Daylight Savings Time Lock Box Advisory Committee, 1-866-MIN-UTES) and there you go, catch a wave and enjoy. Unless you're a shark already in the ocean of course as I don't know if they have to wait after eating anyone or anything.

-bill kenny

A Limited Horizon

I'm named after my father. I've told you that before.

Perhaps that's why I'm so confident when I suggest even more so than either of my brothers, I truly am my father's son. I never really use the "Junior" that I'm assuming is still part of my name (and who or how is it decided some folks are "II" or "III" vice whatever the word would be? Thanks, Google) even though there hasn't been a "Senior" since almost thirty-six year ago when Dad died in his sleep of an attacking heart seven-plus months short of his fifty-eighth birthday.

Some years back as the month of April approached I became slightly more circumspect (for me) and mindful of where I was treading and heading as I became older than my old man now. Loudon Wainwright is an "III" for crying out loud; why not "Junior Squared"? And based on how much my brain hurts from that previous supposedly explanatory link, I think I don't like cartoons.

I was thirteen and we were at our summer home at Indian Mountain Lake in the Pennsylvania Poconos when I learned it wasn't my father's idea to name me after himself. Actually, I'm underselling that by a skosh. He told me in that still even-toned voice he had just as he was about to lose his $hit, that he would have never named me after himself because he hated me.

We already didn't get along, something my siblings and I had in common in our relationships with Dad, and I do recall not being surprised at his statement. I think I said something like I hope you feel better for saying that and then bracing for a backhand across the side of the head that was, and this was a surprise, actually a right fist delivered into the center of my face.

I guess the force of the punch knocked me out, or at least down, since I recall a moment of black and then sitting on the ground near one of the rock walls we built everywhere on the property. Kelly, my middle brother, always called them IP's, for Idiot Projects, and Dad had a summer's worth of them for us every day.

I was thinking about all of that and a lot more that was a lot less cheerful while in a pretty dark place emotionally Wednesday as I took the first halting (almost said doddering but that would give it away) steps toward conceding my race to stay forever young has run. I applied for Medicare online and it took moments and didn't hurt at all, which made me feel a little cheated, I think.

I applied because, in another 'he never got to do it' instance, unlike my Dad, I'm "in the window," even if some days I've felt like I was on the ledge. You have ninety days before your 65th birthday and up to ninety days afterward to apply, without penalty (typed like I know what that means) and I was sitting in the sweet spot (?).

I'm still working, or to be honest, I still show up at my place of employment and they continue to pay me (I have no idea when I ceased working, but so far, so good.) so Medicare Part A is all I applied for at this time while wondering what happened to that kid in the Pocono woods checking out the fallen leaves up-close while refusing to touch an aching jaw who had no intentions of growing up or old.

I also wondered about Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey, the survivors of The Who, whose glorious anthem, "My Generation," was close to four generations ago and whose every word we who were that generation knew by heart. And then I remembered close only counts in certain circumstances though I'm a little fuzzy on what exactly they might be.
-bill kenny

Don't Be That Guy

Impaired (drunk, buzzed, whatever you call it) driving is a plague on our highways and nothing that you will next read here is intended to condone, encourage or excuse it. Any and all efforts to keep us safe, often from one another, are most welcome and in my case, pure charity.

When I wore a younger man's clothes, my major undergraduate project as New Jersey lowered its legal drinking age from 21 to 18 (not sure what the illegal drinking became), was helping develop a "bar guide" to New Brunswick for those Rutgers College students who were still in the Inquisitive Mode. I wish I remembered more about the project, but suspect I should be grateful I don't.

With that as a disclaimer, I smiled when I came across a headline on a news item I think will also tickle your funny bone: "Dash, Body Cams Show UCA Juggler Proving Sobriety to Police." Unless the student is enrolled at the Ringling Brothers College of Circus Artistry (it could happen) at the University of Central Arkansas, I applaud the aplomb with which he demonstrated his field sobriety.

When I look back at my days on the banks of the Olde Raritan, I fear my feats of derring-do far more often than not fell under the "take his keys, please" category so bravo to you, Gentleman Juggler, and best of luck working up to those three chainsaws!
-bill kenny

Citizen in a Republic

When I opened my newspaper a few days ago to read Mayor Hinchey would not seek a second term, I thought about Teddy Roosevelt and his "the man in the arena" observation (in an era before women were permitted to vote and hold elected office) and how true, especially here at the most immediate level of government, municipal, in the city of Norwich, those words actually are.

They apply not just to our current Mayor or to the three single-term Mayors, as is she about to be, who preceded her but to all alderpersons, members of the Board of Education and those friends and neighbors who give of their time and talents to serve on the dozens of agencies, boards, commissions and committees (past, present and future) to make where we live as good as we tell one another we are.

Like Roosevelt's critic, I tend to offer unsolicited insights and critiques to those doing their best in the mistaken belief I not only know everything but I know everything better. I should have realized by now offering your opinion in a dogmatic tone of voice doesn't make your observation a fact but I’m a slow learner. 

I can take solace as such that around here, I'm not alone. Anatole France was correct, 'if fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing' but I'm more concerned we never forget Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation that 'everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.' 

In recent months that’s gotten confused. And when that happens, we all pay a price because we have to correct alternative facts and gossip with real truth and then begin again. In every communication model, both the sender and the receiver have responsibilities, often simultaneously. 

When I don't understand something you’re saying, I have to work harder (as do you) until we both succeed. For me to simply blame you solves nothing and fixes even less, leaving us broken, bent and beaten and very angry as to how we got here. But it’s hard to resist temptation, isn’t it? 

The more willing someone is to do a thankless job, the more of us you’ll find willing to stand around and watch them work, never offering a hand and carping when the outcome doesn’t suit us. Then, when it’s election time, “gee, there’s never anyone new to vote for.” If you’re trying to figure out what causes that problem, we do. Meanwhile, thank you, Mayor Hinchey.

Ignorance is when you don't know something; arrogance is when you're proud of your ignorance.We need a whole lot less of both. That we needed it thirty years ago doesn't make it any less important that we start today.  We can make and be the difference in our city-not just because we know we can, but because we know we must. Elections are fast approaching. 
If you’ve decided to stop watching and start helping, this is when you should step up and speak out.
-bill kenny