Figuring Out the Tab

I have a framed quote in my office that purports to be from Mark Twain.

"Every day a child is born who will change the world,” it reads, “but we don’t know who that child is." My old neighborhood had a pretty good idea which kid wouldn't be growing up to change the world and yet look at me now, right here struggling to change the subject. 

As someone who has spent his adult life mostly on the sidelines with his hands in his pockets, I intend no disrespect nor am I throwing shade at anyone who serves on our Board of Education and/or City Council. You have to have a lot of love for where you live to volunteer for those positions and if you've ever attended presentations and public hearings when budgets get created, you also know that having a thick skin doesn't hurt either. Thank you again for your efforts.

As has been the case for all the years I've followed the process, this was “the toughest budget year we’ve ever had.” Those who have (or have had) children in Norwich Public Schools know the value and understand the cost of public education but everyone with and without children pays those costs. That’s how the world turns. 

But the world we are giving our children is very different from the one we had. I was a Cold War Kid who drilled to duck under his desk and turned away from windows. Now we have Windows on computers in every classroom and more computers in our schools than NASA had for the Space Race. But, we also have more metal detectors and a need for them greater than we should ever have. Each day our schools and teachers struggle to find a balance that’s being constantly defined and redefined.  

Every day our schools are, for many, surrogate parents, offering breakfast and lunch for hungry minds with stomachs to match. And many times, our schools are the venue for before and after school services desperately needed by stressed and distressed families across Norwich many of whom bear little resemblance to the Waltons or Cleavers. No one chose to have any of this happen, but it’s part of the lives we all lead now.

The Industrial Revolution has yielded to the Age of Knowledge where skills and abilities must always be enhanced and expanded or we fall behind as citizens and as a society. And once that happens, you never catch up. The goal of education today is to learn the rules of the game better than anyone else to be able to change the rules.

If we hope to remain the nation that’s the envy of the rest of the world we have to accept that education is not an expense so much as it is an investment. We have to choose better than we have in recent years to maximize the advantages for everyone. If you think education is expensive, wait until you calculate the cost of ignorance.

-bill kenny

A World Away

I remember the two days we were there in the late spring of 1984, how blue the sky and the ocean were. That certainly hadn't been the case, the historians traveling with us assured me, forty years earlier. It was soothing to see how the sand seemed to go on forever along the shoreline but, when you turned to face inland from the beaches, how quickly the landscape changed to thick bushes, scrub trees, rocky terrain. 

I found it hard to imagine what it all must have looked like as the landing craft lowered their ramps and men and machines poured from them struggling to cross the water to the beach all in the face of murderous counter-fire.

I was traveling with a US Army Helicopter Company from Hanau, Germany, to walk the beaches of Normandy, France. I had come with a young enlisted US Army videographer, Specialist Four Bob (the Human Sachtler) G. Bobby G was over six feet tall and had, it seemed, enough upper body strength to crush an automobile like a beer can. We called him the Human Sachtler because there wasn't a shot where he needed the camera tripod-between the arms of steel and the ability to control his breathing, he was as steady as a rock.

Walking, as we did for hours in the sand, can wear you out and the fatigue is profound and overwhelming. I could only wonder what, on D-Day, a GI with a seventy-pound rucksack, and all hell in front of and around him, was feeling on what we now call the longest day. We had done interviews earlier that morning with elderly Frenchmen who, as men our present ages and sometimes only boys, had been inadvertent witnesses to history, triangulating linguistically, as they spoke no English and we, no French. 

One of them, to the undisguised scorn of the others, admitted he understood 'some German' and so I would ask him auf Deutsch a question that he would rephrase into French and ask a neighbor who would reply to him and which he'd relay to me in German and which I'd translate into English.

When you read about Normandy and all the planning and staging that led up to it, it feels very different when you can walk the beaches you've read about. There's a taste in your mouth from the salt air and a breeze coming off the water that helps the screams of gulls carry even farther. I wonder if those struggling ashore, from the landing craft or parachuting down onto those maintaining their watch on the Atlantic Wall had a moment in which to take any of that in. On a day when so many would die, was there a final split second to savor life? There was no one to ask except those we visited the next day, friend and foe alike, at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.

When you can struggle to climb to Pointe du Hoc (up the stairs carved into the soft stone and NOT the way the Rangers had to, directly vertical), you can almost, but not quite, grasp what it was like for the soldiers of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, first to seize this emplacement (actually to capture artillery that had already been moved) and then, as the Nazi High Command realized, finally, the invasion wasn't a ruse but the real thing and threw itself at the Rangers trying to drive them over the cliffs and into the sea, how they held their positions for two days.

Today we mark the 73rd anniversary of D-Day, the beginning of the liberation of Europe from the tyrannical, homicidal terror of the Nazi's Third Reich. Young American men had been in Europe thirty years earlier, in the War to End All Wars that, as it turned out, didn't. And what they couldn't know as they waded ashore and struggled to stay alive long enough to shoot back at those shooting at them, in less than a year, all the shooting in Europe would be over.

How much we've learned as a species in all the years since is a matter of debate and discussion (and for some, despair) as the young men, of all sides, who survived D-Day pass from our earth at a rate of thousands everyday, taking with them every memory and meaning we might have shared, assuming we had cared enough to ask.

Santayana noted 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' but those who remember that it was Santayana who said that are, themselves, also few and far between. "Say a prayer for the common foot soldier. Spare a thought for his back breaking work."
-bill kenny

Sometimes a Dot Is a Dash

Those maps of stores in the malls that every mall seems to always have a red pin stuck on the map with a note that reads, 'you are here.' I often wonder why the floor upon which the map display is constructed doesn't have red or orange tiles right there so when I look down, after reading that line on the mall map, I'm reassured. 

Like those who have fallen in love with the camera part of my cell phone, I struggle against a compulsion to photo-document every moment of my life on social media. I don't always succeed so here's a shot of me at the mall, looking at the directory. And here's a picture of me showing you a picture of me looking at the mall directory and OH! Look! Here's one of you and me looking at a picture of us looking at a picture. As a mythical Walter explained to an all too real Ray, people take pictures of each other just to prove that they really existed.

And when our time for coming and going has come and gone, pardon my impertinence but who will know we were here? Will there be a little dot on the front sidewalk at your house? When you look at how long we, as a species, have trodden this planet, what names of all those who've gone before us, do we know? My family and yours and his, over there, all helped build this country and are part of the history of the USA that has gotten us from 1776 until right here but where are the names?

We've preserved Mount Vernon and Monticello. No one has contacted me about efforts to save 33 Bloomfield Avenue in Franklin Township, NJ where three of my brothers and sisters were born and where my mother and father worked as hard as they could to make a life for us. 

There's no marker at the corner of Easton Avenue that says 'this where Evan Dolores Kenny (-2 for spelling earlier in the day) waited for the school bus to take her to Saint Peter School in New Brunswick, every school day for eight years' (Evan NEVER missed a day of school as a kid. How's that for dedication?).

And the same is true for you and yours. And yet here we are, so many people in the same device. Famous faces and famous places mixed in equal parts with ordinary lives doing extraordinary things. You, I, he and she--we are all together and we are here. 
-bill kenny

Unbowed, Unbroken

I knew my mother, Joan Marie (Kelly) Kenny, every day of my life. She died yesterday afternoon after being briefly hospitalized for an infection in an artificial heart valve that slowly overwhelmed her body.

Through the miracle of technology, I was able to speak to her on a phone held to her ear while I said goodbye if by goodbye I'm allowed to include sobbing uncontrollably while apologizing for crying and being comforted by the woman who gave birth to me and my brothers and sisters.  

Mom died very much as she lived, with quiet determination on her own terms and with her eyes wide open, rarely blinking because she knew losing sight of where the bastards of this planet are, even for a moment, could be catastrophic. There was nothing she would and could not do for her children as I know all too well.

There was, in the end, too little, I, as her oldest could do for her. Kara, my sister who was with her in the hospital, told me Mom's heart was slowing down and she was sleeping more than she was awake so I was grateful she was awake when I called so she could hear me tell her how much I loved her one last time in this life.

Mom believes in heaven and I have no doubt that after her sometimes hellish almost nine decades here on earth that is where she is. Mitch Albom wrote,"when death takes your mother, it steals that word forever." The only solace I take in that thought is that forever is only my lifetime and no longer.
-bill kenny

But There's Still a Vitamin, Right?

“Don’t be mistaken on climate; there is no plan B because there is no planet B.”- Emmanuel Macron

-bill kenny

Answers to "Lunch"

Came across a feature online that made me smile. It's a listing of foods that help you burn excess weight (usually through a process that requires your body to use up more calories processing the food than the food, itself, has in it). 

You've seen lists like this for years and about once a decade or so someone tricks up a new name for it and you have the Blah-Blah Diet with a book for only $29.95 (plus processing and handling) and an infomercial where a lot of folks who look vaguely familiar sit on a couch and tell each other stories about their own amazing weight losses while taking turns staring in wide-eyed incredulity at somebody else's 'true story of weight loss'. 

"Gee Buzz, your colon is so clean you can pass a car through it!" exclaims Mitzi, who looks like one of the people who used to be on Three's Company. Of course, not one of the original members (the survivors are out doing supermarket openings), but one of the replacements after the show started into its glide slope of ratings decline and burned up on reentry. 

And Buzz who may or may not have been in Encino Man with Pauly Shore (how'd you like to have that on your resume?) tells us all about it. I had a great idea for a drinking game one night watching these infomercials. You and whoever you're with makes up a list of pat, trite phrases you know will be said and every time one of them is uttered, everyone has to quaff a beverage. And the winner is me because I didn't come to your house and do this drinking game stuff. 

Meanwhile, back at the list. They're basically all the same--just a slight variation of what your Mom told you to eat and not to eat. There's never a lot of chocolate eclairs on these lists of fat burning foods and I've often wondered, near-altar boy as I am, why is it that God, who moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, didn't make the stuff that's good for us taste better. 

I know broccoli is a lot better than a hot sausage sandwich for me, but guess which one tastes better? Maybe He could hire the International Flavors and Fragrances (you thought I was goofing on you?) to work on short-term solutions to that challenge. Of course, smiting would work just as well. I figure after a while we'd all get tired of attending funerals where the guest of honor had marinara sauce on his cheek (and you could still see where the lightning bolt hit him). 

Because, and this is as true of this most recent list as all the others I've ever seen, I don't care how good something is for me. If I don't like the taste or sight, or smell or sometimes the sound (or the name. I almost ate calamari once. I will NEVER eat octopus), I am not having anything to do with it. 

My favorite example is hot oatmeal. I've tried everything and I still can't bring myself to eat it. I know it's good for me (I don't know why, but nevermind) and I can read the side of the box and get the nutritional information, and I'm sure the flavors are marvelous.I almost get there-I boil the water and pour it into the bowl and stir it up without gagging and dip the spoon in and lift it out, next stop, lips and glottis and no deal. I will not open my mouth, no matter how good oatmeal is for me. 

And if you want to offer me a swig of a probiotic drink of something to wash it down, you'd better have a Maid of the Mist raincoat on, buddy boy, because you are so going home to put on new clothes. Could be quite a hike-better eat yer Wheaties.
-bill kenny

Came Whiffling through the Tulgey Wood

The first time through reading the story, I assumed Donnie Bigly had taken a part time job writing for the IKEA furniture catalog. Okay, so covfefe didn't have enough umlauts; hell, technically it didn't have any umlauts but I figure if it worked for Def Leppard, he might be able to pull it off. (Globens will be the death of me yet).

And yeah, the twitter tittering much like Frederick Douglass and Bowling Green helped underscore the diversion and the distraction but let's be clear. The resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a complete phony and a fraud. Oh; and utterly incompetent to be the most powerful person on the planet, in the history of the planet.

Healthcare, Climate Change, Immigration Reform, Tax Code Revision, Abandonment of Traditional Allies, Women's Rights, Embrace of Tyrants and War Criminals. We're four months and a dozen or so days into this dark ride and the list of screw-ups, broken promises, and campaign pledges he wants you to forget just goes on forever.

There's almost no words. almost.

https://goo.gl/6Vsuq9

Except I can't wait for the day you don't come around here no more.
-bill kenny