Follow the Flag

from USFlag.org:

The History Of Flag Day

The Fourth of July was traditionally celebrated as America's birthday, but the idea of an annual day specifically celebrating the Flag is believed to have first originated in 1885. BJ Cigrand, a schoolteacher, arranged for the pupils in the Fredonia, Wisconsin Public School, District 6, to observe June 14 (the 108th anniversary of the official adoption of The Stars and Stripes) as 'Flag Birthday'. 

In numerous magazines and newspaper articles and public addresses over the following years, Cigrand continued to enthusiastically advocate the observance of June 14 as 'Flag Birthday', or 'Flag Day'.

On June 14, 1889, George Balch, a kindergarten teacher in New York City, planned appropriate ceremonies for the children of his school, and his idea of observing Flag Day was later adopted by the State Board of Education of New York. On June 14, 1891, the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia held a Flag Day celebration, and on June 14 of the following year, the New York Society of the Sons of the Revolution, celebrated Flag Day.

Following the suggestion of Colonel J Granville Leach (at the time historian of the Pennsylvania Society of the Sons of the Revolution), the Pennsylvania Society of Colonial Dames of America on April 25, 1893 adopted a resolution requesting the mayor of Philadelphia and all others in authority and all private citizens to display the Flag on June 14th. Leach went on to recommend that thereafter the day be known as 'Flag Day', and on that day, school children be assembled for appropriate exercises, with each child being given a small Flag.

Two weeks later on May 8th, the Board of Managers of the Pennsylvania Society of Sons of the Revolution unanimously endorsed the action of the Pennsylvania Society of Colonial Dames. As a result of the resolution, Dr. Edward Brooks, then Superintendent of Public Schools of Philadelphia, directed that Flag Day exercises be held on June 14, 1893, in Independence Square. School children were assembled, each carrying a small Flag, and patriotic songs were sung and addresses delivered.

In 1894, the governor of New York directed that on June 14 the Flag be displayed on all public buildings. With BJ Cigrand and Leroy Van Horn as the moving spirits, the Illinois organization, known as the American Flag Day Association, was organized for the purpose of promoting the holding of Flag Day exercises. On June 14th, 1894, under the auspices of this association, the first general public school children's celebration of Flag Day in Chicago was held in Douglas, Garfield, Humboldt, Lincoln, and Washington Parks, with more than 300,000 children participating.

Adults, too, participated in patriotic programs. Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, delivered a 1914 Flag Day address in which he repeated words he said the flag had spoken to him that morning: "I am what you make me; nothing more. I swing before your eyes as a bright gleam of color, a symbol of yourself."

Inspired by these three decades of state and local celebrations, Flag Day - the anniversary of the Flag Resolution of 1777 - was officially established by the Proclamation of President Woodrow Wilson on May 30th, 1916. While Flag Day was celebrated in various communities for years after Wilson's proclamation, it was not until August 3rd, 1949, that President Truman signed an Act of Congress designating June 14th of each year as National Flag Day.

-bill kenny

Our Boys of Summer

If you have a little trouble reading this today, that's only fair since I had difficulty typing it probably because I'm wearing gloves. Actually, I'm wearing baseball gloves on both hands, just in case a foul ball heads in my direction. I believe in being prepared.

Scouting aside, I'm getting ready for the start of the 2018 New York-Penn League baseball season, which is already underway but as far as I'm concerned our Connecticut Tigers' home opener at Dodd Stadium this Friday against the Lowell Spinners makes it official.   

Let me share some wisdom from Cal Ripken, Jr., the Baltimore Orioles baseball immortal, "you can be a kid for as long as you want when you play baseball." As someone frequently accused of being childish, I like to have Cal's quote in my pocket. Comes in especially useful this time of year.

The warmer temperatures are arriving, at least in theory, bringing bluer skies and longer days. We've observed Memorial Day, most of the kids are finishing school and even the calendar says next Thursday is the "official" start of Summer. So this is the perfect moment for local, professional baseball. 

As you probably know, the Connecticut Tigers, are the Class A Short-Season affiliates of the Detroit Tigers, but did you know the New York-Penn League (NYPL) is the oldest Single-A baseball league in the United States? It hardly shows, in my opinion. 

Our Tigers play teams from Aberdeen, Maryland, (whose principal owner is none other than Cal Ripken, Jr.), the farm hands of the Oakland A's, the Burlington, Vermont Lake Monsters. and open at home Friday against the baby Bosox. 

And, for geography lovers, the Tigers will also tangle with the Brooklyn Cyclones, affiliated with the New York Mets as well as with the Staten Island Yankees. (I'm betting you can guess their affiliation). 

When our kids were kids, they were the perfect reason for me to head to Dodd Stadium with them back in the days of the Navigators and Defenders. Baseball at Dodd then and now is a great value and the CT Tigers are terrific family entertainment. 

Class A is a learning experience that forges potential into professional talent and you have to admire the efforts both teams make on the field. There's not a bad seat in Dodd Stadium, you can still follow the action while getting a burger, fries or whatever at a concession on the concourse and you don't need to take out a second mortgage to pay for a family outing at a Tigers game. 

For fans, it's an afternoon in the sun or a nice evening under the stars but for the players, this is real-life and it's their real lives. They give it all they've got because the goal is that "trip to the Bigs." And, at last count, seventeen former CT Tigers are in the Major Leagues, so hard work is rewarded.    

Meanwhile, up at Dodd Stadium, there'll be plenty of between-innings silliness to keep us entertained. And between you and me, I'm not sure we'd see adults do the Chicken Dance with their children and (often) their grandchildren on the roof of a dugout at Fenway, Shea or Yankee Stadium so maybe the best fun is the fun you make yourself. 

Did I mention this Friday night home game has fireworks afterward? Actually, there will be fireworks all season long because how else would you celebrate the greatest time of the year, baseball season? See you there (and bring your glove).

Thanks, I’m Good

Not sure what it says about us a country or a culture that, with the leader of one nation negotiating peace on the Korean peninsula with an infantile narcissist (and btw, the North Korean media can use the exact same headline), our news feeds are all abuzz with reports of Sonic’s Pickle Juice Slush.  

In the grand scheme of things, you’d think it was a simple choice between coverage of an effort at mitigation of tensions that stretch back to close to seventy years or wall to wall reporting on a semi-frozen fast food item that (from what I’ve read) could prove to be so sour one sip could cause your underwear to give you a wedgie. But no….nothing is ever as it seems

In short, this is the Information age’s equivalent of a cat meme. Worldwide, real-time and totally live. Thank goodness we don't have scratch and sniff internet. Yet.  And then we wonder if there’s intelligent life “out there” why they don’t visit.

-bill kenny

Between Exhalation and Exultation

I don't need much of a reason to focus on myself and my own inner world. 

Being the self-absorbed bastard that I am (the apple doesn't fall far (enough) from the tree), I have watched current events over the last week to ten days unfold refracted, reflected and ultimately refined through so much of the planned and unplanned activities within my own life. 

Raised as a loyal son of Holy Mother Church, I've drifted and dawdled for decades as the stream of my life has taken me where I've convinced myself I've wanted to go, not that I've not sometimes thought about Big Things from when I was a kid and how all of that has now become all of this. 

Every organized religion and a couple of the somewhat disorganized ones have sacred writings, scriptures if you will. No matter the region, or the religion, it's part of our human genome, the need to be a part of something bigger. 

Be it the Koran, the Old Testament, the New Testament, or a roman a clef by Danielle Steel, there's a narrative-a place to go look for details. When you argue a matter of theology and someone says, 'you can look it up!' the texts are what they're referring to.

There's the blood of the Lamb, the descent of the dove, the tongues of fire, the burning bush and an almost unending number of symbols and signs that The Lord (however you perceive S/He to be) uses to get our attention and pass along the Word. 

What if we were the first generation of inhabitants on this planet who had a Deity? I don't pretend to know what all of those before us had, I'm just saying we're the first and Our God uses the tools we have today in much the way as in the days of old we've read about. 

Somewhere I read of how someone speculated on how that God would communicate the Ten Commandments, if, like so many of us, S/He had to use text messages. 

Perhaps:
1. no1 b4 me. srsly.
2. dnt wrshp pix/idols
3. no omg's
4. no wrk on w/end (sat 4 now; sun l8r)
5. pos ok - ur m&d r cool
6. dnt kill ppl
7. :-X only w/ m8
8. dnt steal
9. dnt lie re: bf
10. dnt ogle ur bf's m8. or ox. or dnkey. myob.

M, pls rite on tabs & giv 2 ppl. ttyl, JHWH. ps. wwjd?

What would you ask if you had just one question?
-bill kenny

Basically, Because I Can

This is from almost a decade ago. We don't plant gardens at my house anymore though sometimes we still talk about doing it (okay, I talk about doing it). I looked in the backyard yesterday and the fencing for the garden is still there but it's disorder in many places, not unlike in some respects, the city in which I live.   

Rocky and Bullwinkle Offer a Teachable Moment

This year the garden my daughter and I have planted in our yard is different from our gardens of the past decade and longer. The selection of vegetables has been restricted in terms of variety and volume (we had so many tomatoes last year it was ironic that it wasn't a local election year if you follow my drift), so that planted this time are far fewer types of tomato plants and lettuce. Perhaps the biggest change in the garden she and I have planted this year is that I have planted none of it. 

I came home from work one day last week and she and her mother had traveled to "CT's Home Improvement Warehouse", the one with the orange signs (as in 'orange you sorry you didn't choose a different color?') and rented the small roto-tiller, the Mantis, chewed up a patch of the backyard, worked in the compost to prepare the plot and planted the crops.

Since, among my talents, is the inability to understand when to water young plants, I don't even do that part of the garden. I open the back door, walk down the stairs, stand on the concrete landing and admire the fruits of not-my-labor. I never grow tired of this. Between us, had I realized how much fun gardening this way was, I'd have taken it up years ago. Assuming my daughter would have allowed me. 

Michelle is very much her mother's daughter in terms of attention to detail (the map she drew of the garden with the layout and distribution of plants is color-coded and seems to also be to scale). In years past, I would draw schematics on white pieces of paper in ink with my recollections of what I thought we had planted and where. Usually in equal parts less than accurate. Two, or maybe three, years ago we waited for most of the season for the rhubarb that I thought I had planted to break through. Turns out it may have been elsewhere in the patch but had been mooted when I'd clipped it with the mower. 

The garden is in and doing well, or as well as anyone who has only been around for forty-eight hours can be doing, except as I learned yesterday morning, our neighborhood posse of squirrels, the same animals who show up, magically, when they sense Michelle might be home from college on weekends and holidays, and beg, literally, for peanuts, played the 'let's dig up the corn plants' card yesterday with deleterious effect. 

Michelle was outraged at their betrayal. To their credit, they were thorough, though I knew better than to offer that observation aloud. The squirrels ate every shoot of every plant, digging them out of the garden so as to enjoy every mouthful. I find it interesting that since pulling this stunt, we haven't seen the little ba$tards since.

They're usually all over the back landing with the first rays of the sun, banging into the blue recycling bins (searching perhaps for something to eat) making enough noise to attract attention, hopefully, to be followed by fistfuls of peanuts being flung in their direction. 

This morning and all of today, not so much or so many. My daughter is angry and I think the squirrels know it, and no matter what Animal Planet has taught me, I think they might even know why. In a way, as I've watched her rearrange our garden, and look to replace the corn plants and then safeguard the replacements, I've come to see our little backyard setback as symbolic of Norwich. 

We have a plan of development in the Rose City, a relatively stable infrastructure, a good handle on our municipal expenses and realistic if not fully articulated goals for small-scale economic development. We know to realize our plans and benefit ourselves and our children, we must be prepared to accept a certain amount of sacrifice in the now for rewards to be reaped in the future. But delayed gratification is so hard and for so many, it's too hard. 

Yes, we know if we eat our seed corn there will nothing to plant or to harvest. But we're hungry now and someone, somewhere could show up with corn enough for all at harvest time and then our sacrifice and self-control will have been unnecessary. At least that's what we tell ourselves and our squirrels. That, and that they can fly. 
-bill kenny

Each for a Reason

We have all lost family and friends on our way from where we each began to where we are now and before we reach our separate ends there will be more hellos and goodbyes. 

Some faltered, perhaps some failed and others fell along the way but we are, each of us, the sum total of everyone we have ever known.

I’m not an organized religion guy, any more, and I am most certainly not what anyone else would call religious unless they could add sacri as a prefix but I choose to believe we are  here on this Earth at this moment for a reason, even if we never learn or understand what that reason is. 

Maybe that’s what life is actually supposed to be about, the search for the reason. 
-bill kenny

Without Warning

I learned yesterday morning after getting some less than happy news at my cardiologist and returning home to read the newspaper, drink a cup of coffee, and feel sorry for myself (and not necessarily in that order) that a neighbor had passed away Tuesday evening. 

He wasn't a down the street neighbor but we had first met a little more than twenty years ago when we were volunteers on the Norwich Schools Building andTechnology Committee along with other like-minded moms and dads administering a twenty-two million dollar bond approved by Norwich voters to put additions on two schools and wire all of the classrooms to leverage technology to enhance education as we were approaching the turn of the century. 

I'm not sure any of us volunteers knew just how much shit we'd eat from power-hungry, envious assholes on the two elected bodies in the city who waged war on one another for most of the Nineties and beyond and who cared not a whit when almost all of us on the committee ended up as collateral damage in their tug of war. We did get the additions built and did drag the school system into the Information Age, so there was that, I guess. 

I read his obituary twice, the first time refusing to believe he was gone as we'd watched the Memorial Day Parade up Broadway together from the driveway of the Lutheran Church a block up from Saint Pat's. Me, pacing because that's what I do, and he, seated on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle that drew compliments from passers-by as they walked towards Chelsea Parade in time with the marchers on Broadway. And now he's gone.           

Dylan offered that it takes a lot to laugh-it takes a train to cry. My mother, world-renowned wrangler of six of the most thick-headed and strong-willed children to ever walk the planet, demonstrated her smartness to us all when, without consulting the Internet (there was life before the ether. Who knew?), told us it took more muscles to frown than it did to smile. We believed her because she was our Mom and it didn't hurt that she was also right, but how did she know? 

So we can wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up faster (and yeah I know where I swapped out one consonant for another and why). I always wear trousers with pockets so I have someplace to put all the fun. We can promise to not miss what we do not have and enjoy our now in the here and now and look towards tomorrow with hope and not dread. "I'm carving 'em up through the dust in your town. Crawling over rubble just to sound me out. Tend to wonder why?"
-bill kenny