Leave Room for Dessert

It's been a long week, hasn't it? Just in general and without even getting into specifics on topics like US politics and Russian interference (or not, though, between us, I think the 'or not' ship has sailed with DJT, Jr.'s tweets and squawks). But I digress. Heat and humidity not just where I live but seemingly across the globe all compounding what a hard time we've been giving one another as a species.  

I have no idea why I didn't see this news item at the time it happened three plus years ago. I usually have a pretty good whimsy-meter and this should have caused the arrow on it deflect wildly if not just circle the dial three or more times and then fly off. Glad I can make up for it now.

I choose to regard this as yet another example of how absolutely nothing is lost forever anymore on the interwebz. Every stupid thing that' been done in the last (I'll guess) twenty of so years is someplace posted in a dark corner where electrons fear to tread, waiting to spring out on an unsuspecting web browser and tickle or terrify. I'm glad so much of my dumb stuff happened when dinosaurs, not terabytes, roamed the earth.

On the other hand isn't it also comforting to take solace in what may also be seen as proof that no matter how rich a repast is offered at life's banquet, there's always room for just one more bite. Or that there had better be.
-bill kenny   

Don't Touch that Dial

We have a Farmer's Almanac for no particular reason (we are many things in my house, farming is not one of them) and we buy a new one every year pretty much out of habit and custom. It's not the Whole Earth Catalog (but then again what could be?) but it can come in pretty handy on sometimes offering insight into other events beyond its pages.

For instance, the July Full Moon was Sunday. I'm not sure if that occurrence is critical or coincidental to bear in mind as you read this dispatch. Maybe just me and my love of language but I'm tickled at the phrasing in the middle of the third paragraph, "dropping sharp-edged weapons out of the car window." (Roll-up or power isn't noted; the New York Times, the Universe's Newspaper of Record would have noted that in their story had they chosen to cover this.)

I was holding off on posting about this, hoping the police would release the music devotee's identity, but that hope has so far been in vain, so this one is for you, Anonymous Juggalo (wait! that's a great name for a band, innit?), because I'd like to believe you were sending out an S-O-S.
-bill kenny   

True Then, Truer Now

Almost exactly two years ago I offered observations about Downtown Wednesdays, the delightful combination of farm-fresh fruits and vegetables for much of the day, followed by some tuneful and toe-tapping music as the evening begins that caused more than one person to chide me about my “Rose (City)-Colored Glasses.”

Yeah, because so many really great things happen when pessimism abounds, be it the start of a new business or the ongoing resurrection of a small New England town that’s seen better days. This time last week, Stephanie Menders offered a report you should have read about all of it.

Thanks to a lot of different people, if you wandered through Chelsea in recent weeks and months, assuming you both look and see the activities going on, you’d agree we are, despite bleatings to the contrary, on our way to being a destination and someplace worth coming home to.

Here’s what I said and still make no apology for: Today, assuming the weather proves to be all that the forecasts promise, is the next installment of the (It's) Great (to be) Outdoors Season at Howard T. Brown Park at the Norwich Harbor (I like to think the "T" stands for terrific, or should).

You know how one of your resolutions for 2017 was to eat healthier? Yeah, me too. How's that working out? Thought so. Here's the bad news first: the year is now more than half over and the healthy still ain't happening.

Come Early and Stay Late

But, the good news if you hadn’t heard is there’s the Downtown Norwich Farmers' Market this morning at ten, running until two, with fruits and all manner of vegetables fresh from the farm to your table, so bring a basket and your appetite. You can stop by every Wednesday into very deep into the fall and enjoy the flavors of the season and get your 'good for you' on.

Eating good in your own neighborhood

You can keep tabs on what's going on in the market by checking out their Facebook page or just going to the park today and staying there until Halloween. If you're worried about parking, don't be. The Main Street Municipal Garage is a block from the Harbor and parking is free (and there's always spaces). You'll have enough time to get your purchases back to the car and to your house before you return because tonight’s Rock The Docks concerts with the 60’s Explosion Band starts at six.

Enjoy the enjoyment

It’s the perfect time to visit with neighbors you haven't seen since we were all dressed up like Eskimos clearing snow. The music's always great and free and there’s more again on Fridays at six with Rockin’ the Greens (at the Norwichtown Green) this Friday with Carrie Ashton.

Wednesdays definitely mark the mid-point of the week, especially at the Howard T. Brown Park. You can come join the fun or stay home and complain about how there's never anything to do. Of course, you'll have to talk loud because the rest of us will be at the park. Having fun.

-bill kenny

Eighteen Legs and Catches Flies

(I am reprising a previous paean to MLB's All-Star Game to honor it. Sort of.) 

Today's title is the set-up to one of my favorite baseball jokes of all time-'What has eighteen legs and catches flies? A baseball team.' A knee slapper of the first order. 

The All-Star Game is on Fox TV tonight starting at eight and as both they and MLB have been saying in recent years, 'this time, it counts' because whichever league wins the game assures home field advantage for their team should they reach the World Series.

As a child, I remember watching TWO All-Star games every season and those guys played for blood. One year, on a grainy black and white TV, while watching with my dad in his chair the afternoon game, somebody threw at Willie Mays and it really got crowded on that little tiny TV screen (baseball players fight like girls, or like girls of my age fought-not those UFC women). I cannot imagine that happening tonight.

I wish I could say the same for Fox TV coverage of it as well. I don't dislike them when they televise NFL games mainly because I don't watch them. But I adore the ebb and flow, the game within the game, the nuance and the romance of everything to do with baseball and Fox grabs some hip-hop with auto tune music to slide underneath all the pictures, dawg, and thinks it's just off the hook. Nope, ain't dope and I can't cope. No soap.

Even though I know Fox is NOT responsible for it, I blame them (anyway) for the Home Run Derby and something that was streamed (rather than steamed) apparently last night, the MLB Celebrity Softball Game (how did we live without this all these decades?). 

I have nothing kind to say about the latter. As for the former, I know, "who doesn't like Home Run Derby?" No one, to include me but if we continue to allow it to be part of the All-Star Experience then we should have a game of H-O-R-S-E to decide the NBA finals or perhaps moments prior to the coin flip to start Super Bowl Whatever RomanNumeralItWasThisTime, there should have been a punt, pass and kick contest with the winner getting a touchdown and point after to begin the game or a field goal and the ball to start each half. Winner's choice.

Do NOT roll your eyes at me!

Of course, both of my examples are utterly ludicrous but so, too, is the attraction the Lords of Baseball have manufactured. I really can't expect any better from a management model that created the Designated Hitter, another excruciatingly stupid idea created by people who secretly hate baseball and want to kill it.

Coverage of the All-Star Game starts at eight, Daylight Savings, tonight on Fox and goes until somebody wins unless the two teams run out of pitchers. Should that happen I'm hoping we insist that the designated hitters have a Ninja Pants Off Dance-off. 
-bill kenny 

Grow Old Along with Me

Sigrid and I had the house to ourselves this past weekend and some wonderful summer temperatures and weather as well. At times, it was a lot like BTK, Before The Kids. It was a lot of fun and certainly, as Hudson & Landry might say, a "real memory flogger." 

We discovered, despite the accumulation of decades, we are very much the people we were when we met and married. I never had any doubts, and I'm not sure if Sigrid had any smiles at arriving at that conclusion, But, almost forty years on, she's still a very good sport and remains the most beautiful woman I have ever known.

Beautiful women age like fine wine; men age like spilled milk

The photo is from Saturday night's WNBA contest between the Connecticut Sun and the Washington Mystics, won by the Sun after staging a ferocious comeback, 96-92. Date night was a success I think and a preview, I hope, of our lives after retirement. I wouldn't want it any other way. 
-bill kenny

Douche Donut Daddy-O

I spend a lot of time worrying about being a good father. Cynics have suggested if I spent more time working to be a better dad I could spend less time worrying about it but I have decided when people go low like that, I go lower. 

Anyway, I can rest assured somewhat I'll get a Father's Day card next year, especially if either of our children run across this news item from the Great State of Maine. When I read it in our local newspaper yesterday morning, there was no photo and I imagined what Christopher Peare looked like. 

You cannot imagine my joy, actual full-throated delight, at finding a photo of Chris that confirmed my small-minded snap judgment of him. There's righteous and then there's self-righteous and I say Bring Out the Hellman's and Bring Out the Best. You could see my glow of sanctimonious self-satisfaction from space.

I loved the part in the AP account where it's not clear if Mr. Peare has an attorney because representation is as an integral a part of American jurisprudence as the presumption of innocence. What? 

Same charge five years ago in a different Maine city (and with a different child)? Chris, I think you should put the gamer console down, and pass the dutchie from the left-hand side as I suspect your musical youth is just about over. 
-bill kenny

XXXV

I offered this, for the most part, nine years ago. I meant it then; I mean it now even more.

Today is my son's birthday. When I type 'my son' or 'my daughter' or 'my wife' I smile, not because of a pride of possession mentality but because I am truly the most fortunate person on the planet.

If we've not met, count your blessings-I am NOT likable. Actually, on a very good day, with the wind at my back, I am not close to likable. Take my word for this because I could send you a list of folks who would attest to this, and that list would vaguely resemble the census in size and scope. 

Pat hopes I've lost this photo; better luck next year, I guess.

Being not likable makes it a stretch to be lovable, and yet, my wife, an otherwise sane and logical person, could not possibly be married to me for nearly forty years, but has. Our two children are the result of her ability to make someone into something they feared they never could be. She not only raised two children, she transformed a self-absorbed obliviot into an Approximate Dad. Considering what she had to work with, she done good.

I was afraid to have children--the actual, 'here's a small human to take care of and worry about for the rest of your life' portion of the program seemed more daunting to me than I could ever handle. I didn't have a lot of happy experiences being on the receiving end of Dad and Lad interactions. As a matter of fact, one of the better days of our lives together was when my father got up early to say farewell the day I traveled to the MEPS station to join the Air Force. We were able to pretend for that moment that we had a bond, surety or otherwise.

Sigrid went into labor in the middle of the morning and we drove across town to the Offenbach Stadtkrankenhaus. German physicians in the early Eighties were pretty much an unknown species to me. As Sigrid's labor continued and the contractions shortened and the delivery preparation's tempo quickened, I was asked where I would be during her stay in the geburtsaal. I explained that I had placed the order and had every intention of taking delivery. It was like playing to an oil painting, no smile, no nothing, gar nichts.

This is my favorite one of us because I'm still taller

When Patrick was born, after what's considered a spontangeburt, Sigrid looked she had just run a marathon and was utterly exhausted. I watched while the midwife cleaned up my son and, as she swabbed off the blood, he peed on her. Crying, basically blind, totally helpless in an alien world, that was my son and I laughed out loud maybe in amazement but more likely in joy and thankfulness for what I had just witnessed. 

The midwife placed Patrick Michael on Sigrid's chest, for mother and child bonding and my disappointment knew almost no words. At that moment, I was so jealous of the woman I loved. I asked as politely as I could if after she had 'had enough of holding him' if I could.

I was stunned when she picked him up and fixing me with a stare that bordered on a glare (leading me to suspect that the geburt wasn't quite as spontan as the wizard in the white coat had thought-and just because it was spontan hadn't meant it was schmerzfrei) she handed Patrick to me, saying 'I've carried him for nine months, it's your turn now.'

Patrick Michael was, and is, my deal with God. From the moment I held him, I no longer cared what happened to me and egotist that I am, that's saying something.

Patrick on a day he took me out to the ballgame.

I know, your children are beautiful, and smart and talented and handsome and I'm sorry but they're not my children. I've given this a LOT of thought and my son and my daughter are the absolute best not only in the world but in the history of the world (there's a barn behind a hotel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (I think), that might want to argue that point but no chance, sorry). Where was I?

I walked him around that delivery room for the next two hours or so, singing I've Been Working on the Railroad (the drum and piano would have cluttered the delivery room) and really booming those Fie-Fi-Fiddly-I-Os, making up in volume and enthusiasm what I lacked in pitch (and civility, I guess). 

I don't know why I sang that song--I'm shaking my head in bemused bewilderment as I type this line. It seemed like a really good idea at the time. Actually, it was a perfect idea.

And point in fact, I've gone on for way too long--Patrick was born faster than I'm telling you about it. In many ways, his first thirty-five seem to have sped by at that same clip. He and his sister, have overcome the handicap of being my children, mostly because they've had the good fortune to have the love and devotion of my wife as their Mom. And, yeah, he's made me crazy, angry, frightened, delighted and every emotion in between--because that's what children do.

Nothing ever gets lost on the internet, no matter how hard you wish!

And as long as you remember to make sure they always know that sometimes they will do things you will not like, but that you will always love them, they will be able to do anything, even leave you when they grow up to be adults of their own.

Other times, there will be phone conversations that start out about one subject and become all that and that infamous bag of chips. And your eyes will fill with tears as you watch them end the chapter called childhood and begin to write their own novel as the life you always wanted for them finally begins.

Trust me, it hurts, and maybe the keyboard blurs as I type this because the temperature's really, really warm and my eyes are perspiring-yeah, that what it is I'm sure. Be glad you're on vacation today with the love of your life otherwise the folks you work with would razz you today for having a dotty dad, but you knew that long ago.

Pat & Jenna

Happy Birthday, Patrick!
Love, Dad.