Darkness Peaks and then Slowly Diminishes

This is the shortest day(light) of the year. From here until late June the amount of daylight every day will get incrementally more until by the time we're ready to start planning summer vacations we'll be sick of all the sun (present company excluded). Or not. 

Winter is why I don't enjoy Autumn, (<= understatement alert!) because I know what's coming next and the fact that it's been getting darker for months, and even more so and faster after we fell back at the end of Daylight Saving Time, just makes it harder to see both in the morning when I get up and when I look out the window in the afternoon. We can treat the cold and the snow as read for purposes of this discussion.

Osage Forest of Peace 

So as we sing the seasons through, today is the day for a dark and deep note as we begin to moderate the key and alter the tempo as the changes that make up our universe enfold and unfold around us.
-bill kenny

A Day Delayed, But Not Denied

I wrestled with this, as I do every year, and thought I was past it but of all the things one can never leap over, one's shadow is at the top of that list. This should have been in this space yesterday but wasn't. When I wrote it a very long time ago I called it:

And All This Time the River Flowed

I don't ever remember celebrating my father's birthday as I grew up. Logic dictates we, our mother (his wife) and my brothers and sisters (his children) must have done so as we did for everyone in our family, and yet every year I struggle and fail to find a single memory of a single moment of that day.

I mention that because had he lived, today would be his ninety-sixth birthday (he died thirty-eight years ago) and I'd like to think he would be something I never felt he was while we shared the earth, proud of something, anything, I'd ever done. In this case, as was so true in our shared lives, I would be cheating (oh so slightly) as I'd hope he'd be proud of his grandchildren, Patrick and Michelle, who are my wife, Sigrid, and my children.

My most lasting memory of my father isn't really a memory of him at all, but a reminder of how life goes on within you and without you. Many years ago while shopping, Sigrid found what she assured me was 'the perfect card for you to send to your dad for Father's Day.' This was all pre-Internet and global village days, remember, and actually, it was back when it was only she and me and work (and sadly, not always in that order).

I don't remember the card, though this would be a better lesson for me if I had, but I signed it after Sigrid had addressed it, put a stamp on it and had me throw it in my work bag (a shoulder-strapped book bag, of sorts, that carried, judging from its weight, most of the world's most curious and heaviest items).

And that's where the card stayed. Months later, and well past Father's Day, she was rooting through my bag, in search of something I had promised to bring home but had misplaced. Her theory, more often right than I'd like to admit, was that whatever it was, it could be found in my bag. The body of Jimmy Hoffa, the other gunmen on the grassy knoll, Weapons of Mass Destruction--check in the bag.

What she found that day, and registered a quiet note of disappointment with me because of the discovery, was the card we both thought I had mailed months earlier for Father's Day. Faced with the reality that I hadn't, all I could do was to mumble a promise to do so 'next year'.

You've guessed, of course, that my father died before 'next year' ever happened. As a self-centered oldest child, stiff-necked and incapable of bending, I had clashed with my father nearly every day of life-I think from the time I could talk, all I said to him was 'no.' 

I don't recall what we fought about or why, but they were bitter arguments, often ending in physical contact that made me more fully appreciate the weight of his hands, but I refused to yield anything at any time and we passed months, if not years, exchanging as few words as possible for as long as possible. 

I had wished him ill growing up countless times, and when notified by the Red Cross (I was still on active duty in the Air Force) that he had died, my first reaction was overwhelming guilt.

We three oldest children had moved out and away, but our three youngest sisters and brother were left to be raised by our mother in circumstances vastly different from ours when we were their age, and that I made no effort to ever learn or to mitigate or improve. 

I've never spoken to them about those times and know I'll never do so. More casualties in a war that should have ended decades ago, but continues even as I type this and feel the gorge rise in my veins as if "enough" weren't already, and finally, truly enough.

I am, like it or not, my father's son in ways neither of us could have ever seen or imagined. Perhaps he'd be proud of that, and yet I truly hope not. Life is a sum of all your moments--waking and dreaming; everything you've done or left undone; every word, said and unsaid and of all your prayers, answered but, most especially and finally, unanswered.
-bill kenny

Wait! No Figgy Pudding?

A lot of families, mine included when our children were still children, have dinners and get-togethers to mark the Christmas season. Our two children, now grown and gone, have their own someone's with whom to have holiday meals in much the same way as their parents got started over four decades earlier. 

I've fantasied about having spaghetti and hot sausage as the Christmas meal. Sprinkle a lot of parmesan cheese on top for that freshly fallen snow effect and there you go, Bob's Your Uncle. 

Speaking of all things British and don't worry I'm not about to go on a Boris Johnson and Brexit rant (though it's nice to live in a nation that is no longer the dumbest English-speaking country on earth), how about an evolution that could only come from a country where for decades the sun never set on the flag of their empire? 

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Christmas Tinner, for Christmas dinner. 
All we need now is a drive-through gift exchange and it'll truly be heaven on earth. 
-bill kenny

You Look Older Without Your Clothes On

One of my favorite Christmas customs, aside from amusing my wife and children with my ill-advised attempts to gift wrap presents, is enjoying "It's A Wonderful Life". Anytime it's on television I find the time to watch it even though we also have it on DVD and if I knew how to work the player I could, in theory, view it anytime I wish. (In much the same way as if I had ham I could have a ham sandwich. (If I also had some bread)). 
  

I was surprised to read when the movie was first released it was NOT hailed as a classic or celebrated for its art but was seen more as both a commercial and artistic failure. In the decades that have passed, as more of us have had an opportunity to look at its larger message and ponder the implications of the road not taken, the appeal of the movie has, I think, grown.

I arrived here because we won the Cold War and NATO cut the overhead. I had lived in Germany since 1976 and had a wife and two children. We had a gemutlich existence in the heart of a moderate-sized German city. 

Our two children were old enough to realize Dad's German wasn't as good as theirs (actually it was about as good as my daughter, Michelle's if you forgot that I was in my late thirties and she wasn't quite four). And then the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact collapsed and we in Western Europe thought the Age of Aquarius had dawned. Turns out it hadn't and it still hasn't, but that doesn't mean someday it won't get here-just not today.

There were hundreds and thousands of decisions that had to be made (or not made) in order for us to settle here in The Rose of New England. I cannot imagine all the ways my life has been enriched by those with whom I share my neighborhood and by the neighbors from across the city with whom I've worked with on a variety of volunteer committees. 

I'd hope I've added something to their lives as well but know better. I am humbled and grateful for what they have shared with me and realize I am who I am because of every person I have ever met on the way to who I am now.

For some, knowing me has been more of trial and error (emphasis on the latter) than either of us wish to admit. For others, a little contact goes a long way and absence makes the heart grow fonder (and so they are waiting for me to leave so they can like me). 

I lack the grace and style of Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey, though I've often attempted to lasso the moon for the love of my life. I'm not sure I could stand up to Potter the way George did and that whole 'angel gets his wings' thing gets me confused. The first Clarence I knew of growing up was a cross-eyed lion, so, child of the video age that I am, the programs sometimes get edited together and the meanings get diffused.

The days of 2019 are dwindling dwindle down with Christmas just a week from today. I think we should all look forward with both hope and confidence to what the next year brings because of what we have endured, persevered and triumphed over during this year.

I'd wish the same for you and yours: a moment of respite in the hectic days ahead to reflect at where you are and how you got here and to better appreciate that trials and tribulations to the contrary, indeed, "It's A Wonderful Life."

-bill kenny

Should Be Coming Up for Release

This is from a little more than a decade ago and I confess I had forgotten all about it until I fell over it and smiled not at how clever I am (I stopped doing that hours after birth I guess) but for how amazing and different we all are from one another (and how happy I am to not be Nicholas). At the time I called it:

And One to Grow On

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 out in Flushing, Queens, than were Dad's, someplace out in Illinois (I learned 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 T. versus Sue H., actually Judge Susan B. Handy, in a courtroom in New London, Connecticut, Thursday. 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 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 made up about 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 Department of Economic Community Development who handle tourism for our state(I envision swarms of competitors, stretching to the horizon with satellite TV uplink vans and bloggers, twitters and facebookers as far as the eye can see. Tourist Ka-Ching!). I just hope when they go with it that we don't owe Nicholas royalties for 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 Thursday, 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: wait, there's more. Apparently not appreciating the right to remain silent might be for his own good, Nicolas "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, had Nicholas also been sentenced to be transported to the pokey on the handlebars of a bicycle pedaled by a corrections officer, though I'm unsure the officer could have reached the bell.
-bill kenny

I Have Been a Desperado

Sometimes all I have to do to find inspiration to fill up this space is look to the interwebz and like manna in the desert, it's all right there. Or in this case, right here.

That may not be the greatest story ever told, or even this year, but it reminds me to remind all you junior cowpokes that you've got spurs (San Antonio and otherwise) that jingle, jangle, jingle as you go rolling merrily along. 

Don't take any wooden cowpies, podner.
-bill kenny

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Am I blaspheming if I look at the past fifty weeks of this year and exhale as I say 'it's been a helluva time'? Rhetorical question in my case, I suppose.

I know this is supposed to be the Season of Hope but still, at times it's a hard slog. For me, thankfully, today, Gaudete Sunday, remains a bright spot and has 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 in need of as much light from every candle as we can get.

-bill kenny