Channeling Carole Bayer Sager

I strive to go for a walk around my neighborhood (a loosely defined term whose parameters change on a daily basis and my mood) whether I hit the treadmill in the gym or not. One of the constants in all of my walks is a turn around the Chelsea Parade, a minute's walk from my house on the way to Broadway and the Norwich Free Academy.

Warm temperatures returned to our area over the weekend and have lingered but they're too late to reverse the process started by last week's middle Sixties temperatures in the deciduous trees flanking The Parade and across the region. 

Like it or not (and I don't; I really don't) the seasons have turned and for all of its beauty and crisp, clean air, Autumn means that Winter is another day closer.
-bill kenny 

Better, Not Older?

I wrote this exactly a decade ago. Doesn't seem that long when looking back but living through it, well, that's another perspective entirely I suppose. Some things have changed: we no longer own the Forester (traded it for an Impreza), our daughter has our own household now and is always a welcome visitor with us, and the car stolen from her was recovered (with no help from our local police) but was destroyed by the folks who stole it. That should catch you up. 

When I wrote this I called it:

With Apologies to John Prine

With my daughter and I currently sharing a car as a result of theft, I get a chance to learn new things, or to re-learn old things (I'm not sure which), as another driver's perspective offers an informed contrast to my own notions.

Two years ago or so, the wind shear noise from the rolled up front windows (actually all the windows are electric, so I'm not sure what the phrase should be, 'zipped up' or 'zoomed up' how about 'powered up'? Now I feel like a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger) was so pronounced that as part of the routine maintenance for the Subaru Forester at whatever mileage it was at, I had the garage see what could be done to quiet the hubbub three feet from my ears.

Their solution, and it seemed to work, was to swap out mirror housings, at my expense of course which was only fair. The vehicle warranty covers reasonable wear and tear not all the minutiae damage that Mr. Persnickety Ears can come up with. Some months ago, it seemed to me, at somewhat elevated speeds (and since you might be connected to the public safety/law enforcement community, let's leave those speeds this side of specified, okay?) that the noise was coming back. Actually, it was back and had even accomplished a mail forwarding request through the USPS, I just didn't want to believe it.

Being my father's son, I had a solution that did not involve anything mechanical--turn up the volume on the CD player and the Sirius Radio receiver. (Should you ever be in need of an acoustic baffle, I'd suggest almost anything by Dropkick Murphys, whose anger, velocity, virtuosity, and sheer exuberance make me feel like I'm doing a hundred miles an hour even when I'm parked in the garage.) As time has gone on and other rattles and noises have been added to the not quite celestial choir, I've been turning the volume up to eleven and beyond.

Michelle, who was behind the wheel for part of the day on Sunday as she ran errands with her Mom, has far keener hearing than her metal-headed father and her years of music instruction and concert performance has made her far more sensitive to road noises. Luckily she has her mother's sense of how things are put together which means far fewer invocations of 'sinister force' as a cause for breakdowns and far more often a 'let's roll up our sleeves and see what the matter is' approach.

She shared with me that much of the noise was caused by a split seal on a 1/32" long piece of rubber gasket that separates the driver's side window from the car frame (Foresters have NO door frames that window glass slides up into. I don't know why) and she speculated a piece of black gasket tape, to close the gap would do the trick in terms of dampening.

We've often been told as she grew up by a variety of music teachers that she has a wonderful sense of pitch (I almost said perfect pitch but I'm not sure how that would work) and it seems that it may have opened up another career path for her should she decide that concert musician isn't the life she wishes, service manager at a car dealership. It's now so quiet in the Forester I can hear myself think. Sadly, the silence is deafening.
-bill kenny

A Sneak Preview

Sure wish I could look away.

But there's really nowhere else to look.
-bill kenny

Let's Play Charades

Since I often hear from people that much of what I write annoys and angers them, I thought a vacation from words of any kind, if but only for a day, might be a nice idea. And you're welcome in advance., 

You can get this one, it's pretty easy and I think it'll make you smile as well. 

Just me, or did I hear the sound of one hand clapping in appreciation?
-bill kenny

But That Trick Never Works

More and more of my family have relocated to The Sunshine State, Florida, be it for school, for employment, or for post-employment (retirement) and who can blame them? 

All the sunshine you could ever imagine, a wardrobe, if tourism advertising is to be believed that consists of short sleeve shirts and swimsuits. And no snowblowers or snow shovels anywhere in sight.

Good on them, I say (though it's mostly mumbled) because anytime I think of migrating south with the birds and staying there, I come across a story like this: 

Woman pulls gator from yoga pants during traffic stop, authorities say. 

Rocky and Bullwinkle are considering suing for copyright infringement.

-bill kenny

Tomorrow Will Be Here in a Moment

Tomorrow marks the last weekend of the summer as Autumn, says my calendar, begins on Monday. The official end may come as a shock, I suspect, to tens of millions of the nation's schoolchildren who've been back at the academic grindstone for weeks now and who are already looking forward to the Thanksgiving break.

Back when I was a wee slip of a lad, summers seemed to go on forever. We used to spring out of bed to better get a head start on doing absolutely nothing until late in the afternoon when, with a little luck, a marathon baseball game would break out on the dirt field up the street from the Girard's house. No one kept score and nobody cared who won or lost. Players would come and go for hours, heading home for lunch and after returning later again for dinner or to go shopping with Mom and then return again hours later sometimes having to be on the other team.

Usually what we did, depending on how good the player returning was might be that he would have to wait to rejoin the game until another player showed up to balance him out. Mid-inning trades were also not unknown. The games went on until the daylight was dying or, more correctly, had died and then Mr. Girard would back his car out of the carport and turn the headlights (high beams) on to wash over the field so we could wrap it finally (until tomorrow when it began again).

We did this for years until someone (I never knew who) bought the lot and built a house on it. We all hated the people who moved in to live there. And, much later, when the house burned down, I felt a twinge of guilt even though I had nothing to do with what happened-the power of wishing and its consequences, I guess.

As I got older the summers got shorter and when our Pat and Mike were smaller it was fun to watch the cycle begin again with them. We're not too many weeks away from the 'leaf peeping' that everyone associates with New England weekends in the fall. But for me, it's already too late. I hate autumn-I can smell the scent of all things dying even before they actually do and I'm left with memories of the summer to get me through the winter into the following spring. Enjoy what you have, while you have it.
-bill kenny

"I" Plural Is "We"

I offered this three years ago as we hurtled towards a national election. This local election season the pace is more measured if not halting but the sentiments, I think, bear repeating.

I was teasing with an acquaintance on how very similar, and sometimes too similar small towns everywhere are to one another. Regardless of politics or location, it's often the same movie with a different cast.

Growing up in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in the middle Sixties I was fascinated to read how Washington's army had slipped out of New York City, at the mouth of the Hudson River, under the cover of darkness but fought tooth and nail to hold on to New Brunswick, on the banks of the old Raritan River.

New Brunswick, then, was a lot like Norwich and hundreds of other places you can think of are now. Varying degrees of plywood windows, people mourning long-gone shops and merchants, and a variety of other suburban ills, real and/or imagined. (back then, no opioid plague but lots of other secret sins and vices.)

They are mostly populated by those who chose to stay but didn't (and still don't) always know how to stem the ebb of vitality and by the ghosts of those who departed. They have stories of past glories we, who are not from here, have heard all the years we've lived here and no longer care about. Your Reid & Hughes building is my George Street Playhouse. No rights, no wrongs. Just us at this moment.

Economic development, achieving and sustaining it, will, I hope, be the primary theme as we near November because one of the concerns I have when we look at the small towns so many call home, or here, is how we attempt to return to a point in the past that can never come again, and we make that idealized version of what once was into a definition of what we wish to be.

When I returned to New Brunswick in 1991, where there had been a ghost town, there was now a downtown, full of shops and people. I had returned to my roots but I didn't recognize the tree. That didn't and doesn't make it 'bad', and for my children, who never lived there, and for those whose children grew up there, it's all the town they've ever known.

When the past keeps us from seeing a future, we need to shift the present.  

Same is true right here and now.

No one steps into the same river twice because both they and the river have changed. And while it's probably healthy to mourn what we miss, getting stuck in someone else's reverie will not help us get to where we want and need to be however you define tomorrow.

A life without risk is safe, but not much of a life because a life without risk is a life without the joy of reward and who wants that? Innovation, Invigoration, and Invention all begin with "I"-that's probably not a coincidence, but a call to arms.

-bill kenny