An Attitude of Gratitude

Maybe where you live the preparations are already underway. We're borrowing chairs from neighbors who were planning on borrowing them from us. A search party to locate card tables has been formed, places in unlikely spaces in the house have been cleared for the kids' tables and the aromas already emanating from the kitchen are causing mouths to water.

Thanksgiving may be the only holiday in America where many of us become, if just for the day, math majors as we try to compute how many hours how large a turkey needs to be in the oven at how many degrees so that it can feed a houseful of family and friends we've invited to join us for dinner. And let's not forget how many side dishes and who's bringing what--all important elements on our national Day of Thankfulness.

No matter how rough times have been leading up to this week, and for some of they sure have been tough, we still make that extra effort to put a smile on a care-worn face and to enjoy the warmth of home and hearth.

Let's face it, for a lot of us those smiles have been in short supply over this past year despite efforts to the contrary and local successes we should all celebrate. Sometimes it's just easy to mourn what we miss than to cheer what we have. And we have enough examples of that suggesting it's hard to argue about it. We've all seen local businesses fade and close and watched neighbors move away in search of something more than we have right here, right now. And for those of us still here, there's a little more doing with a little less than we remember from the year before.

Yeah, it's weird in Washington as well as in Hartford, but when hasn't it been weird? There are big newspaper headlines about deficits, public posturing and unbridled partisanship while here at home, we whisper and worry about the cost and the price of living where we choose to live and wait for a winter that has yet to arrive.

Maybe it's the cold snap in the weather as part of the change of the seasons or maybe it's just fatigue with one another on our part, but there's a bit more bite in our disagreements over policy and politics, and probably not something we want to bring with us to wherever we are having our holiday table.   

So much for dark thoughts on dark days. There's also light among the shadows, as Norwich Free Academy hosts New London High School tomorrow morning at ten with two old football rivals renewing their adversarial acquaintanceship and by game's end, we can be sure some one's Thanksgiving is getting off on the right foot, even if it has turf toe.

The Greater Norwich Area Chamber of Commerce has a Holiday Bazaar, on Saturday morning starting at nine over at the Holiday Inn on Laura Boulevard which is a great way to mark Small Business Saturday and also get a head start on your gift shopping.  

And (of course) this Saturday afternoon at one it's the Winterfest Parade starting at Chelsea Parade wending its way down Broadway and then Broad Street before concluding in the heart of downtown Norwich, Franklin Square. A celebration of everyone here in Norwich created and supported by friends and neighbors who want us to enjoy ourselves. So easy to say and sometimes, so hard to do. 

Ready or not, the holidays are here and as we gather family and friends closer to celebrate, and hopefully in the rush and crush of events we can remember strangers are friends we haven't yet met as we give one another hope when we celebrate Thanksgiving.

-bill kenny

A Morose and Melancholy Memory

As I recall, we had already had lunch and recess on the closed-off portion of what I recall was Division Street. The grammar school had been built less than three years earlier in what had been a vacant lot near the high school on the city block in New Brunswick that St Peter's Parish owned. 

The church, flanked by the convent on the far side and the rectory on the near side, was actually two blocks away, down the street and up the hill from the railroad overpass across from Makaronis' Town House Restaurant and next door to Albany Wines and Liquors, at the train station where my father and hundreds like him congregated workday mornings (and for my father, Saturdays, too) and traveled first by Pennsylvania Railroad, later (after the merger of two failing lines), Penn Central and still later (when Uncle Sam 'rescued' rail travel in the Northeast Corridor) on Amtrak into "the city.' 

I was in fifth grade of St. Peter's School.  I learned years later, despite the name carved in marble on the front of the building, the possessive case was inaccurate and incorrect. But no one had yet invented industrial Wite-Out and when I first returned to the USA, I drove through my old hometown one weekend while my family was still in Germany, looking perhaps, for myself and the person I was then in the hopes of better understanding the man I had become. The school name, in all its incorrectitudeness, was still there. There have to be some constants in the universe, I suppose.

Our classroom was in the basement, on the Division Street side of the building (as opposed to the courtyard side, facing the high school). We had been working on our penmanship. Our school was a firm practitioner of the A.N. Palmer method of cursive writing. Those of us in third through fifth grade loved the name of the writing style and found it incredibly funny for what it almost sounded like. We assumed the Sisters of Charity (a misnomer of some magnitude I should note), our teachers, weren't in on the joke.

I can see the classroom. Sister Rosita's desk in the front, centered and in front of the blackboard that took up the entire wall behind her, facing in the far corner, to her left, the entrance and exit door in the back of the classroom. Our desks faced her, arranged in academic order. 

That is, the student with the best report card was in the far upper left corner at the head of the column with everyone through to those who failed lunch and recess at the far lower right-hand side of the room, as defined by Sister Rosita. Fifty-two students of varying abilities and enthusiasms--all blank slates waiting to be drawn upon. 

Everything in that classroom was defined and controlled by Sister Rosita with the occasional support and intervention of Sister Mary Immaculata, the principal, whose office was upstairs (no talking in the stairwells! no running in the halls!) who existed, aside from report card day, as a voice on the cloth-covered speaker in the upper left corner of the classroom, above the blackboard alongside the American flag to which we pledged Daily Allegiance. 

If you are left-handed, as one of my brothers is, the Palmer Method is a trial as it assumes and presumes all of us write right (in Latin, left is 'sinistro' from which we have derived sinister; do you sense a bias here?) but even for right-handers, the capital Q can be a challenge. It's a fine line between a cursive Q and a very pretentious number 2. 

There's also the two variants on the lower case 't', one for in the middle of a word like 'little' and the other for when it's at the end of a word such as 'variant.' When you're in fifth grade, these are matters of great concern. 

Earlier in the week, before lining up to board the buses that took us home (and there was always a snobbery of those who walked home, the townies from New Brunswick, towards those of us from the developments in Franklin Township, beyond the city's borders) we had all watched, again, the Civil Defense film on what to do in the event of an Atomic Attack.

I remember the sound of the film threading through the projector gate almost drowning out the assault music soundtrack laid down by the 101st Airborne String Quartet over the ominous narration of someone like Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (no one had ever heard of Sr.; which being a Junior, I had more than casual curiosity as to how that had happened. I still use the Jr.with my name even though my father died in 1981). 

Orchestra crescendo, vivid orange flash that filled the screen and turned it red and then black, and something about turning away from the windows and putting our heads under our desks. Most of us were ten and eleven and hadn't spent a lot of time confronting thoughts of our own mortality. We weren't thoughtless-we just hadn't thought about it. It made for a quiet ride bus ride that day.

All of that evaporated as the loudspeaker crackled as Sister Mary Immaculata activated the microphone at her desk. We waited and then waited some more as, instead of her usual imperious summoning of a hapless miscreant for a punishment of a real or sometimes imagined offense, there was the hum of an open microphone and the sound of a radio or television, whose volume was very low. Sister Mary Immaculata was, for the first time in my history at St Peter's, at a loss for words. We all leaned forward as if willing her to speak and perhaps it was as long as thirty seconds later our efforts were rewarded. 

She started slowly and softly in a tone of voice I had never heard from her, or I think, from anyone. As I was to learn later in my own life and to use myself, it's the voice we use to explain events and occurrences that defy explanation. 

She started by telling us the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (with whom every child of the Roman Catholic faith in the United States had an unspoken and unbreakable bond. He was our President-the first Roman Catholic, the first President who didn't look like our grandfather, a President with a pretty wife whom our moms liked a lot with small children (younger than us), had been shot, later adding he was in Dallas, Texas. 

All of us at St Peter's School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and (very probably) across the United States and (maybe) around the world, bowed our heads and clasped our hands as Sister Mary Immaculata led us through The Rosary--the entire Rosary, not just a decade. 

That was how I knew something more horrible than what she was telling us had happened, was really happening. I'm not clear if we had completely finished when she interrupted herself, struggling to remain composed, to tell us the President had died. We said another Rosary for the repose of his soul, but my heart wasn't in it. 

I don't think I'd ever wondered until then why God didn't answer every prayer the way a petitioner wanted (I'm pretty sure I didn't use the word 'petitioner') but as the afternoon abruptly ended and we all went home to participate in the national seance provided by the three TV networks (no cable news, no satellite, no video on demand, no Internet) almost all in black and white (color television was a luxury almost beyond measure), I knew without knowing the world as I had lived in it had ended, not changed. 

I looked at the calendar this morning with regret and incredulity in equal measure. I and everyone who was born, who lived and perhaps died in the USA in the fifty-four years (as of tomorrow) since President Kennedy's murder, will never know what we and our world would have looked like had we prayed harder or longer or louder. 

I'm not sure I ever prayed again, or in the hope of my prayer being answered. And after so many years and tears, I'm not sure I would still know how. I remember that kid, head bowed, at the front of the room and I envy him for the strength his faith gave him in such a dark hour, knowing that the darkness was not only beginning but had already won. 
-bill kenny

Hooray for Holidays!

As we head for The Holidays (mental, if not actual, capital letters always expected), we (or at least, I) start to lose sight of the reason for the season and regard this time of year as just another obstacle to be cleared, another steeple-chase to be run, another 'thing' to be gotten through. 

I'm not alone. I saw lots of grumpy and frumpy folks out in the stores over the weekend wondering 'what are all these people doing out here shopping today while I'm out here shopping today?' I was, and remain, another obliviot alone on my exercise wheel alongside the other human hamsters, chasing the pellets I want for Thanksgiving dinner and a head start on the Christmas gift lists.

It's a cliche, I know, but that doesn't make it less true: we are blessed as a society. We really do throw away more of everything than most other people on earth have ever had, or will ever have. And yet, given the chance, we cry for the moon and the stars and cry even louder when we all we receive is the sun. 

Is it possible our greed grows exponentially as our needs grow arithmetically? How much is enough and how much more is too much? Did The Lord give us two hands so we could take as much as we could grab and two pockets to put it all in? And how are we supposed to offer a prayer of thanks when our mouths are full?
-bill kenny

Not Dark Yet

It's just one more recent moment in a seemingly unending series of moments in the horror show that has become Life in these United States. Another shooting, more fatalities and we don't even look up anymore. 

Order up some more thoughts and prayers because there's not much else we are willing to do to try to change anything that's been happening. It's stupefying, it really is. If a creature emerged from the ocean and devoured people with the same regularity and frequency with which we use all manner of guns to kill one another, we would have long since banded together and figured out a solution.  

And yet, here we are cause and effect about as close to one another as they can possibly get and we remain steadfast in our insistence that we can see no way to end this cycle of violence. We could start by repealing the Dickey Amendment but that's the third rail for the gutless wonders we send to Washington addicted as they are to the big bucks of the NRA whose new motto seems to be "Make Americans Grieve Again." And we shall. 

-bill kenny

Is There Life After Breakfast

As we head towards Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays, the year seems to feel like it's accelerating. Perhaps because the daylight has shifted, the days are all shorter and more jammed with activities. Personal calendars that were already pretty full are now loaded with holiday parties, travel, shopping outings and all kinds of other activities. 

So here I am on a Saturday morning lobbying you to not only put another event into the mix but one that happens today. Trust me on this one, you'll thank me later. Today, starting at ten and running through the middle of the afternoon, is the annual holiday festival with many local area artisans offering some pretty amazing items suitable for gifting to others (and, truth be told, also keeping for yourself).

The Otis Library on Main Street in Norwich is, for me, the last man standing who is now being rewarded for steadfastness. A decade ago, there was very nearly nothing in downtown, aside from potential. And now, after a lot of work from a lot of different folks, there are actual businesses lining the streets around the library with even more on the way. 

As I've said a million, billion times because it's completely true, Otis like so many other libraries across our country is not close to the same place we went to as kids, wherever that library was. Here in Norwich and elsewhere I'm sure, city downtown districts look to the library the way the fingers on the hand look to the thumb.

We have an ongoing discussion going on here about needing a 'community center' and, for me, we already sort of have one in the Otis Library, bustling with more activities and uses than either of us have fingers and toes (leave your shoes on; I believe we're on the honor system around here). 

So find the time today to head downtown and enjoy yourself and the company of so many others you probably haven't seen since this time last year. And if the latter is indeed the case, remember (and I am proof of this) women tend to age like wine, men, like milk.
-bill kenny

Love Is the Answer.....

...assuming the question is 'what can you fall into that doesn't stick to your face?' 

As part of the generation that insisted 'All You Need is Love' might I be permitted a do-over on that concept as I make my way through my Autumnal Years?  I have an excuse, and no it’s not the one I offered my Mom who always wanted a doctor. And now I have one and/or more, though not quite in the way she'd originally hoped, proving again sometimes the only thing more dangerous than unanswered prayers are answered ones.

My actual point (hard to see because I’m wearing a hat) is I’m not sure anymore that the world (or the one in which we find ourselves at this moment) can be seen in absolutes like 'love' and 'hate' or black and white. Moreover, I'm not sure that was ever the case, despite a generation's fervent conviction to the contrary. Perhaps that's why Tolstoy entitled his tome, "War and Peace". 

I think 65 plus years of running around on the ant hill, forty of it as a spouse and thirty-five of that as a Dad has taught me that what I don't know may be of far more importance than what I thought I had learned.

While my generation sang a Beatles' anthem, we were actually living the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" ('just as every cop is a criminal and all the criminals are saints....').

I’ve worn glasses for the last two (plus) decades in an effort (often forlorn) to see other people’s point of view, but I have the sinking suspicion that was both foolish and pointless. Sometimes the difference between essential and existential is both nonexistent and utter nonsense.

-bill kenny

Tendency or Casualty

Buckminster Fuller once said 'truth is a tendency," while Philip Snowden, who may have been channeling Aeschylus, popularized 'truth is the first casualty in war.' For just about the last decade, the topography and landscape of corporate communications have undergone extensive if not radical reshaping, rendering truth nearly a moot point. 

There was a time, before the last ice age, sorry the current administration doesn't believe in global warming (or, by extension, global cooling) when everyone worked to have a website. Just get a website were the watchwords used by all and sundry. But that's all so 1994ish now as we've migrated to social media platforms and beyond. I'm still trying to understand why for so many folks CNN dot.com doesn't have the cache or credibility that their Facebook page does. 

And don't get me started on the importance of having a twitter feed, or two (or more). I have an account but use it like twice a day because I cannot figure out how to follow conversations happening in the twitsophere, despite the popularity that the small-minded and small-handed Chief Executive has brought to the platform. 

In this new age of I say it and you can decide to believe it or not, and truth doesn't seem to enter into it in any way, we are running faster and faster as we, in my opinion, circle the drain. 

Not sure when the truth became a fashion accessory, I guess, because it's no longer an absolute, starting at the very top of our national food chain. When you have a manipulative, mendacious media creation as President, you have to wonder about our decision-making ability as a country. 

I found myself choosing to believe the alleged lunatic running the Philippines in the wake of the US president's recent Asian trip when the former's office assured us that the latter never raised human rights issues while the pair were in bilateral conversations. I rationalized, in light of everything Trump has lied about since stepping into the Republican Presidential primaries, why would he tell the truth now.

It took me a moment to realize I'm thinking about the President of the United States, whose office's reputation for honesty and veracity should be beyond reproach and above question except for the broken-down real estate grifter currently occupying it. Think I'm being harsh? Think again. Here's a bean count on his balderdash, broken promises, and bullshit last tabulated during the late summer. It hasn't gotten better and it won't.

When honesty becomes a relative term and a fungible commodity you can't tell truth from lies which, in our culture, means we are losing our moral compass and slowly sinking into a morass of tribal suspicions where we place Infowars and the New York Times on the same scale and think we're being even-handed. One of my local newspapers asked its readers on Tuesday "who do you believe most about whether the Russian government meddled in the 2016 presidential election?" and over 50% of those answering said they believed the Prevaricator in Chief.     

Buddha once said, "Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth." I'm thinking the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had better be praying for permanently overcast skies. For my part, I don't mind rain or snow in the forecast as long as it leads to the truth.
-bill kenny