Even

I shared this the other day on a different web platform and am still taken by its audacity, ferocity, and simplicity.

It only seems hard to do when we choose to make it hard to do.
-bill kenny

It's Time to Shine

We’ve been doing this to one another for more years than I care to remember. The City Council’s deliberations Monday night which resulted in a municipal budget that no one is happy about cannot be considered a surprise, unhappy or otherwise.

The word in the newspaper headline was ‘contentious,’ which, in light of the demand for resources to pay for goods and services conflicting with the amount and volume of tax money available seems nearly an understatement.

And not the way to define "success" but these are strange days that call for strange ways if we hope to adapt and overcome in equal measure. We have been here before and that we'll be here again is believed to be a given but isn't really promised though we behave as if it were.

At times like these, I tend to offer words that I hope are thoughts but are maybe more like prayers to try to talk myself back off the ledge. If they sound familiar, and they should, feel free to say them along with me and perhaps by saying so we can make it so. But I wouldn't put a lot of faith or money on that happening which is more than appropriate in light of where we are. So here goes:

The distance between who we are and who we hope to become can vary from very great to very small depending on our plans, abilities, aptitudes and perhaps, most importantly, our desire and will to improve. The difference between being a victor and being a victim is often making a choice to take a chance. 

I think we'd all agree that you have to risk something of yourself to move ahead. But the more you have, the more you can lose and the cost of a poor choice can do damage from which recovery can be difficult.

Perhaps that's why the fear of making a mistake is, in itself, a mistake and why, as we age, as persons and as a society, we become more risk-averse. We see what there is to lose should we fail more readily and easily than what we can gain if we succeed. 

The arguments against taking that first, possibly flawed, step into the unknown and untested grow louder as the time to choose to do something grows shorter. We confuse stasis and stability and hope the former can be accepted as the latter when in reality it can only mean failure.    

I've lived here for close to three decades and for much longer than that I think we’ve had too many discouraged experts and never quite enough enthusiastic beginners. We have a surfeit of those who have a problem for every solution and who never forgive anyone who has tried but has failed without realizing our real problem is failing to try. I'm not naïve enough to say Norwich could be turning a corner because for before that can happen we must all agree to step closer towards the light on the horizon.

-bill kenny

God's Other Son

I will concede when I first saw ads pop up all across the interwebz late last week into the weekend that I assumed  I was looking at a Pinterest prank or something of that sort. I have now realized to my somewhat less than total surprise that I was wrong.

Many people say the Eucharist is called a cracker.

This is not a book ghost-written by the orange man with the tiny hands and the non-existent sense of ethics and integrity, but rather, a book about him. And, according to at least one reviewer, the book is a doozie.

As if the jobs of Literacy Volunteers weren't hard enough already. Now they have to worry about God smiting their students in anger for reading it.  
-bill kenny  

Change Starts Tonight?

Tonight the Norwich City Council has a busy agenda but for many, the most (if not solely) important item on it is the adoption of a budget. It will NOT be a short meeting, and to compensate it will also not be very pleasant for anyone in the room and ultimately the city.

For weeks and longer, many have spoken of shared sacrifice, of lowering expectations, of having more will than wallet, but not to worry, what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable. 

We could have seen tonight coming from as long ago as those many open to the public departmental budget hearings the City Council held earlier in the spring (that next to no one attended) and whose theme always seemed to be 'you're kidding, right? Balance the budget elsewhere and leave me and mine alone." 

How else to understand, when faced with finite funding to pay for all of our municipal goods and services, instead of attempting to accomplish all the necessary municipal tasks AND not tax property-owners until they flee the city, everyone who spoke at a hearing carved up someone else in arguments that made up in volume what they lacked in logic. 

We reached a point as a city that the local papers reported our Board of Education would sue our City Council to get the funding they wanted though where the money would come from was never made clear (probably because no one knew or knows). Not just here, but everywhere at some point we confused an unending flow of money spent on school with "investing in education". 

Let me point out our children, resettled from Germany where they were born and raised, learned almost everything they know about their father's country from their schooling. And for them and for me, this was money well-spent and time and talent well invested, but times have changed and so has language and how it's used. 

In today's environment, a "cut" doesn't mean a reduction in funds; it often means giving me less money than I asked for (even if it's more money than I currently have). No wonder so many people think English is the hardest language to learn, right? At budget formulation, logic and common sense are too often sacrificed for a smattering of applause and a newspaper headline. And so it goes, or seems to until...when, exactly? 

Until we run out of money? Close. Out of patience? Long since there. Out of appetites for new and even newer people and programs, paid for by someone other than ourselves? Looking for the villain in all of this? We should stop looking out the window and start looking in the mirror. 

We do a lot of talking about change but we don't change. And then we wonder why we are where we are.
-bill kenny

The Hurt Gets Worse

A year ago today was both a happy and also the saddest day of my life. 

Happy because our son, Patrick Michael and the love of his life, Jena, announced their engagement. As my wife and I were leaving our home in the early afternoon to attend their engagement party, one of my sisters and then one of my brothers texted me that our Mom was hospialized near her home in Florida and was not expected to survive the day. The remainder of the day was and is still a blur for me.

I wrote what follows in the hours after she passed that afternoon a year ago leaving a hole in my heart that will never heal. 

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

Something Else Has Become the New Black

MomsDemandAction.org

Click to join in. 

-bill kenny

Putting the High in Eight Miles High

9 Oct 1940-8 Dec 1980

I had never heard of Jesse Duplantis until the other day. In fairness I should point out it's doubtful he has ever heard of me either.

But now, of course, there's this and Jesse's name is on everyone's lips. Along with, I'm just guessing, a colorful epithet that starts with "ass" and ends with "hole." Of course that could just be the root beer (or ambien) talking, but I'm thinking 'not so much.' 

Talk about God's Little Acre. I don't think that's anywhere near long enough for take-offs and landings. Perhaps Jesse should wait for Pentecost and pray for a VTOL aircraft.
-bill kenny