It Seems Like Just a Moment Ago

Today, on this date in 1977 at 1020 in the morning in the Offenbach am Main Rathaus in (West) Germany. Sigrid Schubert and I were married. Forty-two years ago. Sigrid says it often feels a lot longer than that but that's because, I hope, the Germans use the metric system. I mean, what else could it be? 

How lucky can one guy get, eh? I've never known what she saw or sees in me (aside from a great personality, rapier-like wit complementing a puckish sense of humor, a body like Adonis (Joey Adonis from West Orange near Prospect Plains)), all hobbled by a nearly crippling sense of modesty that is my lifelong cross to bear; oh, and delusions, almost forgot those) but she is my entire world.  

She is everything I have wanted to be or to do and she makes me want to be a better man than I am by knowing that she loves me, often despite who I am. I can remember the most minute of details of that day and have driven her and both of our adult children almost to distraction by recounting them incessantly AND on an annual basis, so I'll skip them here, but they know what will happen, just not when.

I hope with all my heart wherever in this world you find yourself that you also have and keep someone who will hold your heart forever as she has mine. I don't remember often enough to tell her I love her though I will today and vow to be better every day we have together for all the days that remain. Happy Anniversary, angel eyes. 
-bill kenny

Another Reason to Be Fearful?

Every time we pause to think of ourselves as the Crown of Creation, which (by the way) I truly believe we are since we have the only ballots cast in that election, Mother Nature pops up with a hurricane, a blizzard, a typhoon, or a rain of frogs (or was that The Lord? I get confused) to take us down a peg or more. 

Physarum polycephalum or The Blob has, as I read this article, been around for a million or more years, so I guess that means I'd get up and give it my seat on the subway and it seems to have skills and abilities I will never possess. 

I thought of a particular Frank Zappa song when I read the article but let's face it that's pretty hard to hum so, after reading about its preferred habitat, I changed my mind to something I think that's more suitable.
-bill kenny

Another Somber Road Trip

We're up early in my house today and out on the road headed to the Jersey Shore. As a carefree kid at Rutgers I can recall hitting the shore throughout the late spring and summer weekends (and depending on the class, maybe some spring weekdays too). The days and the promise they seemed to contain stretched on and on to beyond the horizon.

But we all grow up or old, in my case. I think the last time I made this drive, Sigrid and I were heading to a memorial service for my Mom. One of the brighter moments of that day was reuniting with nearly all of my cousins (Mom came from a big family) and especially those of Mom's younger sister (and sole surviving sibling) Clare and grabbing some group happy snaps so they could share them with their mom.

Time moves on and memories fade. Today we'll gather to celebrate and remember Clare's life. There will be. I know, some tears, some smiles and some memories shared by and with her children and perhaps her grandchildren as we keep her in our thoughts as those closest and dearest to her hold her in their hearts. 
-bill kenny

Within You, Without You

If I had a dime for every time recently that I've said: "This certainly was a weird week, wasn't it?" I could just about erase the national deficit. So much shouting and pointing but so little conversation and direction. It's not that we have too many distractions. We are the distraction.

And to see you're really only very small and life goes on within you and without you.
-bill kenny

Beyond Summer's End

The days are getting shorter and colder in my neighborhood as the chill of autumn takes longer every day to lift and we all learn again to pace ourselves accordingly. 

Among the half dozen or so squirrels I used to feed during the dog days of July heat there's now one visitor who leaps from the ground to my back stoop avoiding the stairs entirely, some thirty-eight inches (yes, I measured it) high and leans against the double-pane thermal glass in the storm back door to peer through it to see what the peanut-dispensing biped is up to because he isn't throwing legumes out into the backyard.

More often than not, he gathers two peanuts together (there's a market for squirrel shopping bags, I imagine, but I don't know how to collect their money) and scampers off, but not too far, to bury the nuts somewhere on the property or near it where I'm assured he remembers where they are, though I have no idea how he pulls that off 

As the colder months approach, that squirrel along with his colleagues(?) seems more single-minded about this routine with every passing day. I'm trying to imagine what the animal uses in October to find the buried peanuts in January. Eco-location?

The squirrel hurries back where the thrown peanuts are scattered because he's in a race with the blue jays who swoop down, grab a peanut and then give themselves a headache, I believe, standing on a tree branch holding it in their beaks while slamming it into the tree until the shell cracks. I can understand why they prefer bugs and slugs.

There was a day recently that a squirrel and a bird had a difference of opinion that I joined, already in progress. The audio cue had been that annoying yell that blue jays never tire of-ever. He just kept at it and kept at it. No less incessant, but barely audible was what I at first thought was a bike tire losing air-a soft, low steady hissing. I looked out the window and saw a squirrel facing off with the bird over a thrown peanut.

One hopped while the other stepped. One cocked its head to one side and scolded loudly and the other stood on its hind legs as if to bow. I threw out some more peanuts hoping to defuse the situation but it was too late-they were captured by the conflict. It was on and gone. All I could do was close the door after promising to feed whichever one showed up the next day.
-bill kenny

We Are Worth the Effort

As we near the first Tuesday in November and hopefully (finally) think more about the large issues that afflict and affect us locally (and how they often are a reflection of our national concerns) maybe it will help to see our local elections as a way to work on solutions from the bottom up.

What is looking like the one and only opportunity to hear from all of those seeking places on both the City Council (six seats are up for grabs) and the Board of Education (which has nine members), ask questions, hear explanations, policies, positions, and maybe (if we're lucky) some hopes and visions will be next Tuesday at NFA's Slater Auditorium. 

Doors open at five with the BoE candidates' debate from six to seven followed immediately by the City Council debate. Government is a contact sport so make the time to be at Slater Tuesday because each of us needs to get off the bench because we have skin in the game and need to behave like it. 

I know you're busy with kids in school, jobs, projects around the house and a hundred other tasks clamoring for your attention. Who isn’t? The effective range of an excuse is less than a meter, so your choices are to show up Tuesday or to shut up about how things get done around here.   

Not unique to Norwich, admittedly, but as true here as it is elsewhere, we have streets in need of paving, neighborhoods transitioning, infrastructure renewal and replacement that’s been postponed and delayed for decades (not just years), public safety systems addressing more institutional, physical, and mental health challenges no amount of funding can ever address, and schools where the tasks facing teachers and the instructional staff stretch far beyond the classroom walls requiring a wholesale reinvention of public education that no one wants to think about because we've invested so much in what we have.

All of that is on all of us. You've read it here before; we are all we will ever have to rebuild and reinvent where we live. And that's fine by me, as we are all we should ever need. For too long we believed if we did nothing, we did nothing wrong but forgot every Next Thing begins with a leap of faith and good works to back up our words. We chose to live where we choose to be, and it's what brought us all to this place and this moment we are in. So many people in the same device.

All that we carry is all that we are-and it includes our hopes for a better city for our children and ourselves. We cannot continue to allow those whom we have selected to elect to be so cavalier and unmindful of our dreams. There's an old Spiritual that sings about "I am but one-but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something." We are not too late and we are not too few. Make the time to be in Slater Tuesday because we are worth the effort. 

-bill kenny

Paddle Faster. I Hear Banjo Music.

I saw that on the bumper of a Jeep in front of me at a stop signal while I was out on some errands. I'm not sure what it meant, but I can probably guess and if I were Ned Beatty I'd keep the windows rolled up and the doors locked at the traffic lights.

The car next to the Jeep was the puzzler. It was a red Hyundai of some kind (our daughter used to drive  one so I'm tried hard to learn all the flavors of their rainbow only to realize there are scads, believe me) which had a bumper sticker that read 'Buy American.' I looked to my left to see if the driver of that car got the joke, too, but he was alone with his thoughts in his prison on the road and then it occurred to me it might not be a joke.

I drive a vehicle usually thought of as Japanese but it was made, I believe, in an assembly plant in Indiana. I spent the Summer of '75 in Indianapolis and the people there seemed to be as American as, well, as American as you and me or the driver of the Hyundai (for all I know).

When you're approaching Indianapolis via the interstate the trick is to remember (I think; insert obligatory bad memory joke here) that it encircles the entire city so, depending on where you got on it, you can be traveling east in order to go west and vice versa. Don't pay that any mind, that's a mistake I made for a couple of months which got me very lost very quickly and I'd wind up in the corner of the state that periodically switched from Eastern to Central time for reasons I never grasped and without warning ever given.

You do not have to show your passport however, which is one of the ways I figure out where I'm not and when I'm not there. I did have to show my license proving I was over twenty-one to get served a beer in a cocktail lounge at Weir-Cook Airport (no, they didn't name it after Bob, I asked), which Pete F, from New Hampshire (all eighteen years and three months of him), thought was hysterically funny as the waitress had already brought him his beer.

He wasn't laughing quite so hard when I ordered a glass of milk after I put my license back in my wallet and had the waitress give Pete the glass of milk while I drank his beer, a Stroh's fire brewed draft if I remember correctly (and I do). That was the summer I also learned to drink beer fifty/fifty with tomato juice. I was young and the summer was very warm. I was crazy in the heat--that's as close to an explanation as I can offer.

Anyway, I'm not sure if the Hyundai is made on this side of the Pond or not and if it takes you where you need to go I'm not sure we're not talking difference without a distinction. I never got the chance to ask the driver what the point of the bumper sticker was supposed to be or even where the bumper sticker was made. 

Remember that from a couple of years ago, one of those organizations handing out little American flags to 'encourage' patriotism (and discourage what they regarded as dissent) learning their flags were all from some off-shore sweatshop? Talk about a quiet night in the old sleeping bag...
-bill kenny