Pathos or Pedicure?

As part of my preparation to return to work earlier this week, I filled up the car with gasoline (I tend to go through a tank of gasoline every week or so) and was less than delighted with a price that was about forty cents higher than I'd paid the week before. 

Yeah, I'd seen the stories on TV about the impact of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Harvey had on the refining operations maintained by the major oil companies in the Gulf of Mexico and how as the storm approached, many had been shut down. Once that happens and the laws of supply and demand get to work their magic, you become a somewhat brittle white guy in his mid-sixties standing at a gas station pump vaguely unhappy at the turn of events that brought him here. 

I suspect I'm not alone in having that twinge of self-pity, based on the number of news stories I'm seeing on this, except what I have to remind myself as the media microscope shifts our attention from Harvey to whatever is hottest, sexiest, and next up on the news cycle (maybe DACA? Hurricane Irma? North Korea? Trump and the Russians?), that the death, damage, and destruction caused across Texas and Louisiana by Harvey will leave a mark and make a lasting impression that won't soon fade, even if the interest of those located elsewhere already has.

It's human nature, I know, to view the world's events through a prism of our own personal perspectives but I'm not as good as I should be on remembering to not only react to the painting but also to the frame of reference it's in. I recall from childhood an old placing-things-in-their-proper-perspective tale that suggests "I felt sorry for myself because I had no shoes until I met someone who had no feet." Again, today, I'm wearing slip-ons. 
-bill kenny 


 

Dinner Bell, Ding!

This is the week The Rose of New England might be advised to consider changing its name to the Full Plate of New England as two of everyone’s favorite (food) festivals return. Food festivals in general are, in my opinion, a brilliantly subversive way to bring every kind of people together over something they can agree upon and let’s be honest, it’s hard to argue when your mouth is full of food. (and looking across our nation right now, an outbreak of napkins and paper plates might do us all a world of good). Cooks always say food tastes better when someone else cooks it (I am only in charge of eating in my house) so make sure the cook in your house gets treated. 

On Washington Street, a block over from Norwich Free Academy and Chelsea Parade, the 42^nd Annual Greek Food Festival starts tomorrow at the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church and lasts through late Sunday afternoon. The church is (about) a four-minute walk from my house, and it's even closer when the gyros are just about done. So, if you see someone moving briskly but no one is chasing him with a stick, it is in all likelihood me 'measuring' the distance (depends on the cooking time). As it stretches over four days, you could dedicate yourself to enjoying a different specialty each day or a sampling of everything every time you go (no one is judging (I hope)). 

Save some room (on your plate and elsewhere) because Saturday is the Taste of Italy at Howard Brown Park, at the mouth of the Norwich harbor (how perfect is that, considering all the food). The press release on the City of Norwich’s website has all the essential information offered in an oh-so-grown-up press but as anyone who’s been at it in previous years will tell you, it’s no accident fun and food start with the same letter. It's only one day and it's spectacular. You have to come here and come hungry-as if you could possibly eat all the things that are being served. HA! 

On Saint Patrick's Day, everyone is Irish, no matter what your mom calls you. On Saturday, I answer to Guglielmo because the same thing happens here with being Italian for Taste of Italy. As I said, it’s at the Norwich Harbor in Howard T. Brown Park where the Yantic and Shetucket Rivers form the Thames but you don’t really need my description or a map to find your way there. You can just roll down the car window and follow the aroma, of course (and because bocce balls have no scent).

Between the Greek Food Festival and the Taste of Italy, you’ll probably see neighbors that you haven’t seen since this time last year when we all grabbed plates and dug in. Both festivals are an opportunity for all of us take a moment as the change of seasons starts to accelerate to savor where we are and what we have. So, enjoy the moment and all of the food. Στην υγειά σας and buon appetito.

-bill kenny

Prob Noblem

Welcome back to the real part of the calendar. Summer's not only done, it's over. If you have children, they're off to school. At work, there's no 'real' holiday until we get to November and Veterans Day-don't hand me Halloween, please. Grown-ups have usurped it as another excuse to get our drunk on, but it was a children's holiday and in my heart, shriveled and cold as it is, so it remains. 

On my walk in honor of Labor Day yesterday, which bore a striking resemblance to all the other walks I take and make throughout the year, I encountered a young person (in my case anyone younger than 50 though in this specific instance more like 16 based on the clothes) who was kind enough to allow me first passage on a wide-enough-for-only-one-person path way. 

I was (and still am) grateful for the kindness and then, within seconds, guaranteed everyone on earth he'll probably never do it again. I had headphones on since I prefer listening to what I perceive as 'my music' over anything happening in the real world. If I could afford prescription mirror shades, I'd wear them as well while walking but I can't so I wear very dark sunglasses so as to better be an island in the stream of humanity.

As I passed the youngster, I said aloud 'thank you' and looked at his face as he mouthed, 'no problem.' I stopped, turned, removed my ear buds and somewhat too-shrilly asked him 'what did you say?' He repeated 'no problem' and discovered to his dismay and chagrin just how wrong he was about that.

If, like me, you're a codger and a curmudgeon, the good news is, I suppose, that we had a good day yesterday as I schooled a youngun' on the acceptable verbal cues of successful social intercourse. I really hate the use of  'no problem' instead of 'you're welcome.' Truth to tell, I'm not especially fond of the contraction but accept it with a sigh of resignation and a five-minute tirade. 

That sigh was identical to the one I made when continuing with my walk in sanctimonious smugness. I realized with a shock, short of calling him a whippersnapper and demanding he stay off my lawn I had become 'that cranky old guy' that every neighborhood has. The difference between steadfast and stuck gets more difficult to distinguish, much less explain, as the years go by. And often, it's impossible.
-bill kenny

An Alternative September Song

The neuralgia of nostalgia? You decide: from me a while ago but still rings true. 

Leave it to the unofficial closing of another summer to make me nostalgic, bordering on maudlin. Technically, I'm enjoying my 65th Labor Day, though in truth, I have no memory of the earliest ones and I've yet to get a clear sense, despite a reasonable amount of reading, on how old we are before we have memories. 

Is that true for you as well? I'll suddenly flash on something from my childhood and not be altogether sure if it's real, or a remembered clip from a movie--my Mom's youngest brother, Paul, when we visited her parents in Elechester out in Flushing, Long Island, (before the World's Fair and Shea Stadium), always calling me 'droopy drawers' and pulling down my trousers and laughing. I can recall being a small child helpless to prevent this and enraged at my own impotence (though not realising that at the time that's what I felt). 

Growing up, I always heard relatives say I looked like Paul, which made me tighten my jaw and hold on to my pants. I think they said that because we both had freckles and lots of them. I know my coloring made burn up in the sun as, after twenty minutes without sunscreen, 

I looked like a lobster and when the burn finally faded, I wasn't tanning but peeling. At times later in our lives my sister Kara reminded me of Paul, especially when she laughed which is a little odd because by the time she was born, Paul and his family were living out on the west coast and rarely came east. 

I flash forward to that same uncle in the back seat of my car, with my father's step-brother, (an actual priest) in the shotgun seat, as we rode to the cemetery in East Millstone, NJ, to bury my father. I think that may have been the last time Paul came east as some years later he was diagnosed with I-no-longer-remember-what from which he died. 

I was in Germany, in the era before cheap long distance phone calls and Internet so letters and cards were the bridge from home and I learned we only read you when you write and no one likes to write bad news when it's still news, so I learned of his death months, if not longer, after it had happened. 

When I was a kid, we hadn't yet gone back to school, that happened after Labor Day and when the New Year began, I'd always look ahead on the calendar to see when the first Monday in September was, always hoping for a date that looked like the 5th or 6th, as if wishing would make it so. Thank goodness we now structure school calendars by union agreements and not on any educational goals, requirements or needs.

I've never attended my high school or college reunion--one of the places I worked for some years used to hold worldwide reunions every two years, in different locations around the globe and I never worked up the interest or the passion, or, in all honesty, the courage, to attend any of them. 

I have a growing-more-dim-by-the-day memory of being one of 400,000 at Watkins Glen in upstate New York for the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers and The Band, but all three of these bands are long gone with members dead. The souvenir tee shirt "Ball 'n' Boogie" went from the dresser to the rag bin to the garbage decades ago. 

My cohort grew up in the swamps of Vietnam and in the aftermath of the murder of JFK, MLK and RFK. We survived Timothy Leary better than he himself did, had parents who didn't understand us (until we became them as it turned out) and stayed up late to watch a man walk on the moon. We were what sociologists call the Pig in the Python generation and yet, I suspect when the last of us has passed (and we will, which, when we were kids, was inconceivable) we'll have left a hole akin to the one in a bucket of water when you pull your fist out. 

It'll be our children's children who'll wrestle with the consequences of our decisions on the environment, on energy, on public financing and world-wide diplomatic outreaches and these days, as hard as we think they are right now, will, with the gift of hindsight, be viewed as the Golden Ones as they "hang round 'neath the vapor light." 
-bill kenny

It's Short

I enjoy holidays as much as the next person and take them off whether I deserve to or not, so if you have time off for Labor Day I hope you enjoy it (if you are retired must you return to work in honor of Labor Day or are you still okay?). 

If you were looking for something profound in this space today, sorry if you feel disappointed but I'm just saying that really because I don't mind.
-bill kenny

It's Labor Day Weekend

I'm not writing this weekend, I'm relaxing and this is from a long time ago (and so am I).

In Southeastern New England we're at that point on the seasonal roller-coaster ride approaching the weightlessness of being. That is, the moment after the moment when you've peaked and are nearly starting down the incline-in a roller coaster I've often suspected if we could actually float in air, that would be the moment we would, but only for a moment.

It's the same with weather. The summer here is gone-the kids went back to school earlier this week, but the warmth of the sun and the mild days are still here, but they take longer to start and end sooner. When I leave in the mornings now for work I have a light jacket on for the first time in months, and I've abandoned the walk around the neighborhood in the evenings because the disappearance of the light disheartens me.

On a recent Saturday morning walking around Spaulding Pond in the Mohegan Park, we have in Norwich, with wonderful hiking trails, wide sidewalks and well-paved roads I could see far more autumn in the tree canopies overhead than when I was here a Saturday earlier. In a couple of more weeks, lots more of the sky will peek through as the leaves turn and then fall off and the bare limbs will eventually win out. That's when I'll stop coming up here.

Between Nature and the calendar, I'm being set up for the part of the year I dislike the most-real fall, not the Indian summer part which doesn't fool, or mollify, me anymore but the slate gray sky and the chill in the air that makes it very clear winter is approaching. Winter (and you may find this funny) I can deal with-because I know spring and summer follow it. Fall is the hopeless and helpless season in my book. The inevitable decline and deepening dark.

I've been in a hurry most of my life-always rushing to somewhere or away from someone. The pace is less frenetic now, the strides more measured and labored. I passed a couple recently pushing a small child in a pram and saw my wife and me with Patrick at the duck pond where Frankfurt am Main ended and Offenbach started. They/we looked so happy and the horizon was wide open. For us, that would have been close to thirty-five or more years ago.

The high school girl who jogged past me, in the opposite direction, earbuds (we would have called them headphones) in place and a solemn face like a mask could have been our daughter Michelle, the picture of concentration as she practiced for her audition for her high school's musical honor society (and blew the judges away). That was well over a decade ago. The memories fade but the scars from the passing of time remain.

I was there for all those moments and tens of thousands more but, like now (I imagine), I was thinking about other places and times. Just as we all do, I'm sure. "Now I sit by my window and I watch the cars. I fear I'll do some damage one fine day. But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers-still crazy after all these years."

-bill kenny

Channeling Joyce Kilmer

The arrival of September, as of midnight this morning, puts "paid" to the Summer of '17 unless you're on a surfing safari or somewhere lost in the ozone. The incredible number of fallen maple leaves dotting our back and side yards all from trees not on our property was my signal to start to dread the warning, "Winter Is Coming" and I don't even watch Game of Thrones.  

What I noticed yesterday across the yard was the preponderance of green leaves, as opposed to leaves of varying colors, causing me to wonder if they had just lost the will to live or were registered in some kind of race to earth that the Forestry Service might be interested in learning about. 

Most distressingly, almost all of the fallen leaves, and I'll assume those on the tree as well though I'm not much of a climber, social or otherwise, had black spots, some more and others less, like the ones on this leaf. 

It's called Maple Tar Spot Disease which is a name I might have come up with because that's exactly what it looks like, though I'd have probably gone with splotch instead of spot because I'm a splotchy kind of a guy.      

I'd pass this information along to the neighbor whose tree this in a woods I know, thank you very much to Robert (and the horse you rode by on), except I've never met her/him and they have zero interest in ever raking up the leaves in the autumn and the fallen branches after the winds of winter that cover my yard. On the other hand, fair is fair, they don't charge me for the welcoming shade in the summer. 
-bill kenny