Putting the Van in Karma

Some of us are born lucky while some of us not so much. If like me, you are in the latter category, there's ample proof that no matter how bad things are currently going, given half a chance they can, and will, get even worse. 

If you think you're the butt of some practical joke the universe is playing on you, be of good cheer. You could always be former tire thief Jeremy Michael Dickey, previously of a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It came to pass that feeling of being run down was so consuming that not even Joni could cure it. Thus endeth the lesson.
-bill kenny   

Though Dark Our Days May Often Be

Despite all the days of malevolence and hate-filled utterances throughout what has been at least for me a very long year and most especially now during what we called as kids a Season of Hope, today, Gaudete Sunday remains a favorite of mine (since my earliest school days). 

Before I had memorized the entire Latin Mass, in hopes (forlorn) of becoming an altar boy, I had theorized from what I understood of the roots of the word Gaudete and its proximity to the birth of Jesus that it must somehow be Latin for 'just hold on a little bit longer.' I still think I should get partial credit for grasping the feeling if not the exact meaning

A lot of the warmth of our human hearts regardless of your beliefs is reflected by the holiday seasons that fall together this time of year somehow reminding us, I hope, that we are when we can see and live beyond our differences all very much the same people.

Underscoring that is the life of Lt. Col. Leo K. Thorsness, who, though he passed on before we reached the Third Sunday of Advent, is I think someone we should and could each aspire to become.

We have too many horns in the cacophony of life and can most certainly use another light, especially in this, the most hopeful of seasons. 
-bill kenny

Upon Further Review

Our son, Patrick, stopped by Thursday afternoon (my first day of vacation since whenever it was I last took a vacation, probably to go to Margaret and Adam's beach sanctuary in August) to walk me through money after I retire at the end of June next year. 

I'm still struggling to accept there's something other than that decades-long tradition we have around these parts that what I do for a living defines who I am as a person and turning my attention to what  I'll should and could say when I'm asked as of 1 July.  

He helps people plan financial futures and he's incredibly good at it (I cannot balance my checkbook so I have no idea where his aptitude and ability come from) and in less than an hour, he took a world of worry off my shoulders about what we'll have in terms of dollars and sense. 

My life is brilliant. I have as my best friend a woman I've loved from the moment I first saw her and to whom I've been married for over forty years. Together we have two children who are ridiculously capable adults with rich and fulfilling lives of their own despite (because?) the fact I have no idea how any of all of that might have happened since I really wasn't involved (carrying on in my way a tradition I'd rather not have thought too much about.) 

My superpower, recalling my own childhood, is and always was staying out of the way, not so much as a benefit to me as an advantage for everyone else. Our children and so much of my life are amazing because of my wife and her efforts. I tend to moan about all the things which I don't have instead of cherishing the intangibles which I do. And I always forget that redemption is never earned, but rather a gift that's given.     
-bill kenny  

I Say John, You Say Wayne

This is from a long, long time ago about this time of year. If there was a lesson in it then, it didn’t survive until this now, but between us, I’m pretty sure I was just enjoying from moot point. Anyway, that said... 

We were a loud and large family when I was a child. My parents had heeded the Biblical injunction at least in part-my dad always had a garden though how fruitful it was, it's hard to say now-but we were many so they were good at math, at least at multiplication.

Birthdays usually involved grandparents, Mom's, who were much closer geographically, living in Elechester in what’s now called Pomonok (we called it Flushing), Queens, than were Dad's, someplace out in Illinois (I learned many years later, Taylorsville (maybe without the 's'). Sightings of Grandma Kenny were rarer than Elvis, the live Elvis, who's not nearly as successful as the dead one, so we always called Grandma Kelly, Grandma.

It was of her I thought yesterday morning when reading the saga of Nicholas Trabakoulos versus Sue Handy, actually Judge Susan B. Handy, in a courtroom in New London, Connecticut, Thursday. 

Our grandma had, when her children were our ages, she told us, started a birthday tradition of gently smacking the birthday child on the bottom once for every natal anniversary topped at the conclusion by a pinch, 'to grow an inch' by your next birthday. 

In the ensuing decades, the notion gentle was lost. Reading that now helps explain why, usually for our tenth birthday, most of us received a set of Esso road maps as a gift so we wouldn't get lost when we ran away from home.

Anyway, Nicholas wasn't ever at those gatherings which is just as well as Nicholas comes across as a bad man when you read the news report. I couldn't help but wonder if he'd built up his stamina if Lance Armstrong couldn't have used him on his Tour de France Astana team. But that was not to be. Nicholas had other ideas and when a boy and his bike (and his sawed-off shotgun hidden under a pink blanket) have their mind set on something, that's all there is to it.

Nicholas, says the news story, was in Groton visiting from New York when he robbed someone of $140, making his getaway by bicycle. The idea of a bike race where you commit armed robbery along the way probably hasn't yet been broached to anyone in the Connecticut Offices of Culture and Tourism. 

In my mind’s eye I can see swarms of competitors, pedaling furiously with ski masks on, in a line stretching to the horizon with satellite TV uplink vans and bloggers, twitters, and 'live right now on facebook!' as far as the eye can see, along a getaway route lined with tourists who come just for these races. I just hope when they go with it that we don't owe Nicholas royalties on the intellectual property rights.

Back to Grandma. Nicholas the Biker had not been Mr. Congeniality during his incarceration says the story, from the time of his arrest, through his trial to his sentencing, where he was awarded fourteen years for both robbery and weapons possession (I wonder what became of the bike?). As they say in the infomercials, 'but wait there's more!'. 

Apparently not fully appreciating the right to remain silent might be for his own good, Nick "unleashed a stream of obscenities... when Handy asked Trabakoulos if he had anything to say. His responses are unprintable." Johnny, why don't you tell us what Mr. Trabakoulos has won?

The judge ordered Nicholas removed from the courtroom, gave him two hours to mull over his actions and then brought him back to ask if he wished to apologize. Nicholas had a number of wishes, but apologizing didn't make the list. Judge Handy, like Grandma, then gave him six additional months on top of the fourteen years, for contempt of court.

 It would have been too much, I suppose, as part of his sentence had Nicholas also been transported to the pokey riding on the handlebars of a bicycle pedaled by a corrections officer, though I'm unsure the officer could have reached the bell. 
-bill kenny

Naming the Souls Who Departed

Five years ago horror came to "where is that?" Connecticut as someone who should have never had access to guns did and used them to horrible and horrendous effect on a day where we were all pre-occupied with the approaching holidays, just like today. 

And aside from a moment to send thoughts and prayers, we've done nothing (and the scale and scope of all ensuing carnage increased). I'm shifting my investment strategy and sinking all my money into small, stuffed teddy bears and votive candles because the demand for both of those just keeps going up. 

Five years on, we know nothing more because we have chosen to learn nothing. I was angry when I wrote this and I'm still pissed now, and that won't do. It's really hard to work together to fix something with balled fists. Anyway..... 

No other animal works harder to rationalize our sometimes unthinking behavior than do we-no other animal is even capable of seeing the absurdity and contradiction of how we so often live our lives. Because the carnage at Newtown, Connecticut, happened in the state in which I reside I'm haunted by a feeling very similar to the aftermath of 9-11-01.

I suspect you've been doing what I've been doing: watching television and reading rafts of online commentary and analysis (a three-dollar word for what on my block we called a WAG) nearly non-stop assuming, persisting in the belief might be a better phrase, that at some point a penny is going to drop, a light is going to go on and someone, somewhere will say or write something that causes us each to have an 'aha!' moment and understand what has gone on.

Both of us are only reluctantly starting to accept the notion that there may well never be a nice, neat, explanation with a timeline and expert testimony that explains the inexplicable. Leaving so many moms and dads and friends and relatives of the deceased (an abstraction of the first order) not to even start to think about the surviving school-children with holes in their hearts that will never heal.

Those murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School weren't 'victims,' they were people, mostly incredibly tiny and very young people. The Innocents included:

Charlotte Bacon, 6; Daniel Barden, 7; Rachel Davino, 29; Olivia Engel, 6; Josephine Gay, 7; Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6; Dylan Hockley, 6; Dawn Hochsprung, 47; Madeleine F. Hsu, 6; Catherine V. Hubbard, 6; Chase Kowalski, 7; Jesse Lewis, 6; James Mattioli, 6; Grace McDonnell, 7; Anne Marie Murphy, 52; Emilie Parker, 6; Jack Pinto, 6; Noah Pozner, 6; Caroline Previdi, 6; Jessica Rekos, 6; Avielle Richman, 6; Lauren Rousseau, 30; Mary Sherlach, 56; Victoria Soto, 27; Benjamin Wheeler, 6 and Allison N. Wyatt, 6.

"This is a prayer for the souls of the departed" and sadly we should all know it by heart.
-bill kenny

What You Remember Will Save You

There's a lot of counting going on right now on my street, around the city and elsewhere. 

There are the eight candles of Hanukkah which began yesterday evening; twelve days until Christmas as well as the twelve days of Christmas and one day shy of two weeks until the start of Kwanzaa, a celebration of family, community, and culture. And of course, the annual countdown for the arrival of the new year has already begun.

Your time is in high demand and in very short supply I know, but I have a suggestion of a better use for that half hour or so you were going to stand in line somewhere hoping to buy that certain someone this season’s hot toy or to try and assemble that shiny new bicycle. 

This Saturday at noon is the annual Wreaths Across America (WAA) Day observance conducted by American Legion Post 104 at Taftville's Sacred Heart Cemetery to honor veterans during the holidays. 

Recognizing the service and sacrifice of our veterans and their families is very poignant anytime but truly timely and appropriate during the traditional holiday season. Doing for others can help us refocus on what this time of year is about for so many, being with those for whom we care and who care for us. 

Wreaths Across America has a three-fold mission: Remember, Honor and Teach. 

Every year for the last quarter of a century this national outreach has coordinated wreath-laying ceremonies on veterans’ graves on the third Saturday in December at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, as well as veterans’ cemeteries and other locations in each of our 50 states, at sea, and in over two dozen cemeteries in other nations where US military members have been interred.

Attendance at the Taftville ceremony has always been good, and with you along this year, it will be even better. Seven specially designated wreaths for the Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, and Prisoners of War (POW) and Missing In Action (MIA) will be placed on memorials during the ceremony along with wreaths for each of the graves of the sixty-seven veterans now resting there. 

If only for the few moments the ceremony takes, neither we nor those whose sacrifice we are remembering are alone, and that's as it should be, and not just for the holidays. No matter the temperature and weather conditions, your presence will warm the hearts of the organizers and definitely put a smile on your own face.

As an attendee at previous ceremonies I admire the words offered by the speakers but confess to not having enough of my own to capture the essence and adequately describe an event that's a heartfelt and homegrown acknowledgement of the lives of our departed veterans (of all services and from every conflict and era of our history). 

It's a time for us as a community to gather, reflect and remember the fallen, honor those still in service and teach one another freedom is free only with sacrifice. 

I’ll look for you Saturday at noon.

-bill kenny

Don't Touch that Dial!

I have a habit of thanking the imbeciles who drive through parking lots and down residential streets with bone-rattling bass rumbling strongly enough to set off seismic shocks for sharing their music. I'm probably very lucky they can't hear me otherwise I'm sure I'd have a few dents and dings than I currently do but I have always been fascinated with by cars (and trucks and motorcycles for that matter) and music.

I've come to appreciate, though don't tell her, my wife's perspective on the pairing, which seems to be that it's foolish and stupid. She doesn't drive so she brings to her side of the front seat a very different point of view than I have and, yes, I am the guy who turns down the stereo (rarely the radio anymore) when he's trying to find a particular street address which is an excellent example of her foolish and stupid paradigm and I wasn't even really trying though she assures I often am very trying.

I am not a fan of Rastafarian country and western music, but I like almost all other kinds of music, except crunk which I cannot define but know it I when I hear it as well as any and all of whatever it is Kanye West, Justin Bieber and others who unload on the public. It matters not to me that in the universe we all share, I am no more than a "who?" to any of them because they remain 'stop leaning on my Torino!' to me.

I devoutly believe employment of Auto-tune should be punishable by ten years in prison and a ten thousand dollar fine and if you spent more money on the production of the video in support of a song than you did on the song itself I think we should take away your birthday. I'll pause for a moment while you compose yourself and recover from that shock.

But music hath charms though it appears, based on this story that if you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, you may be the opposite of immune to those aforementioned charms. Mune? Is that the opposite or would it be Unmune? Or dark side of the moon?

Each of the songs mentioned in the article makes me smile because I've heard nearly all of them, and so, too, have you (okay, Barney not so much), and hundreds of others on every hike across a mall's macadam. Just the soundtrack for when you're on top of the world and you can't get any higher. 
-bill kenny