There's Nothing Left to Be Desired

I'm starting to wonder what the dinosaurs were thinking as they watched the meteor showers crashing into the earth and if it was anything like the way I felt yesterday in one of the aisles of our Big Y grocery store passing a seemingly normal and healthy young person (younger than either of our two children) who looked like he might have been on a high school wrestling team until our Governor out of an abundance of caution (and consulting with Alice Cooper, perhaps) canceled school for the rest of the year in Connecticut. 

He had one of those gaiters that makes you look like Bazooka Joe's stunt double (I bought one that I've worn once because I have this giant head that makes putting it on feel like it's a tube top for my neck. One of my brothers also has a large head but his head is jam-packed with brains whereas my brain is so small it just rolls around inside my watermelon-sized head making a noise like a bee-bee in a boxcar). Anyway, Gaiter Guy has the thing up over his mouth but under his nose, testing that whole axiom about how it's the thought that counts. Especially when non-sentients are doing the thinking.

However, he pales in comparison to the advanced thinking that this sweet thing from Kentucky offered, confirming to my satisfaction that stupidity is as airborne as respiratory illnesses.

Which is why I prefer The Hollies' cover to Albert Hammond's original. And don't hold your breath waiting for me to change my mind
-bill kenny      

Clickity-Click

I've always enjoyed "Groundhog Day" with Bill Murray and thought it was a funny movie that stood up well even after repeated viewings. I confess I never really thought of it as a training film for our current circumstances but I suspect I'm not alone in sometimes losing track of the days and how one day seems to blend into the next as we continue to self-quarantine (and hope for the best).

When I sat down to write these words and glanced at the desk calendar I was surprised to realize this Sunday is Mother's Day. It sort of just snuck up on me, to be honest, so for those who are mothers (and not just the ones called that sometimes in anger or exasperation), best wishes on your special day in a year that in retrospect (if that ever happens) we'll call many things but I suspect 'special' will probably not be among them.

And as much of our world has changed, so, too, have how we respond to the challenges of those changes. We have federal, state, and local programs with financial support for businesses and individuals that we hope will help them weather the current storm but at the same time, as you probably saw Monday night either on the city's website or on the Comcast government access television channel, the business of city government must and does, go on. 

Okay, for a moment I thought I was watching an audition for an episode of Fox's The Masked Singer (Alderman Nash convinced me otherwise), but bad joke aside, serious discussions were had and decisions were made by our neighbors, and perhaps, friends, who volunteered last Spring to serve on a city council elected last fall in circumstances vastly different now than when they stepped forward. 

We call politics the art of the possible and looking to both Hartford and Washington, there's not a lot of comity and cooperation going on these days despite the peril threatening all of us with the COVID-19 pandemic. 

There's still way too much 'for me and my party to look good, you and your party need to look bad' pouting and posturing going on at both of those locations so I smiled (actually grimaced from the painful truth of his statement) when as the discussion on a "Request for Proposal to complete an analysis of the entirety of the City's Fire Services" became somewhat heated, Alderman Nash suggested sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees. 

He reminded his fellow City Council members and all of us across the city that the members of the City Council, while of two different parties, strive to see themselves as residents first, and always, and make decisions on what they believe to be in the best interests of all of us.

So much of what we all do every day we tell ourselves is business as usual, except, and here's my point, it's NOT business as usual. We're not treading water waiting for the flood to recede and if we are, we have ZERO guarantees that the dry land to which we hope to return will be anything like what we once had. 

Those in elected local leadership right now must plan for everything and nothing in terms of revenues, expenses, programs, and promises. If ever there was a moment when we needed to listen to one another more than speak, this is it and will remain it for the foreseeable future because quite there are too many home fires burning and not enough trees. 
-bill kenny

Zevon Called It

The British are fond of saying, "I'd like to have your nerve in my tooth," to capture the contempt they feel for someone without any self-awareness or irony bemoaning their lot in life from a position of privilege. I once worked with a guy who complained that the charging cable for his iPhone was too short; that's the kind of putz we're talking about. 

Let's move to this past Sunday evening and eavesdrop for just a moment as the Apricot Asshole is on his favorite network being lobbed softball questions that he has trouble getting out of the infield much less clearing the fences. Here's the visual his image-makers decided was perfect for the spoiled brat client they have.

"They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln.
I believe I am treated worse." 

Yeah.
Lincoln was murdered while serving as President, but you're right, baby-cakes; it's a hard, hard road that you travel. I'd offer to feel sorry for the tiny-handed, small-minded, ethically-impaired, grifting bastard but he does such a great job of feeling sorry for himself and hates competition. 

November 3rd can't get here soon enough.
-bill kenny

   

The Cost and the Price

We live a lot of our lives these days at the top of our voices. Each of us seems to have a TV talking head we turn to for the truth, like some kind of oracle who always uses the definite article when the truth is often so ephemeral and illusory that any and all reassurances of its constancy is paradoxically a lie.

On what seems like a frighteningly frequent basis we've watched large turnouts by our countrymen of all persuasions and political ideologies who insist they love their country but seem to hate and fear the rest of us who live here with them. Disagreement among us is not new nor is the violence too often connected with it. 

There were wide-scale draft riots in Northern cities as the War Between the States, perversely often called the Civil War, created larger and larger levies of conscripts and those who could afford a three hundred dollar deferral fee managed to avoid the draft while the sons of the poor and the immigrants were sent to the Killing Floor.

By this time five decades ago, in one form or another, the United States was more than knee-deep in a war in Southeast Asia and the Republic of South Vietnam. On this date, fifty years ago the dissent and opposition to that war across the nation, as a whole generation simultaneously stopped believing in the government became a self-fulfilling prophecy as four students at Kent State University died in acts of panicked violence by soldiers of the Ohio National Guard who had been summoned by the state's governor to protect property and prevent the very violence they visited upon the students. 

Five decades on, there is no right or wrong, just dead and dying. Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 20, Allison B. Krause, 19, William Knox Schroeder, 19, and Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, all never lived to see May 5, 1970. There was a well-known image from that tragedy, a photo taken by a Kent State photojournalism student, John Filo, of a young woman, actually, a fourteen-year-old runaway, Mary Ann Vecchio, screaming over the lifeless body of Jeffrey Miller who had been shot in the mouth. 

The photograph won a Pulitzer Prize and became one of the most enduring images of the anti-Vietnam War movement that continued without surcease for the rest of the decade and into the next. What's often overlooked, because it was practically ignored when it happened ten days after Kent State were the deaths of two black students killed by police at Jackson State University. The two young people who never grew older that day were Philip Lafayette Gibbs, 21, a junior pre-law student, and James Earl Green, who was 17.

As scary as we can be to one another when we talk loudly to the point of screaming, it's when we stop talking, I become even more afraid. And too often, and too abruptly, we've stopped talking in this country.

"Find the cost of freedom, buried in the Ground.

Mother Earth will swallow you, lay your body down.

-bill kenny

Somewhere Buck Is Smiling

I love when art imitates life but even more so when vice versa happens. 

And it is, on the beaches of Florida, a/k/a "God's waiting room."

Turns out the hanging chads were just the curtain going up on the Divine Comedy.
-bill kenny

For My Daughter's Birthday

This is one of my five most favorite days of the year; today is our daughter, Michelle's, birthday. I was all kinds of bubbly about this quite some time ago when I called my rhapsodizing, 

Hoppy Birfday

My wife and I had the tremendous good fortune of being the parents of two amazing children, who are, themselves, actually adults though one of their parents (me) doesn't always see them or think of them that way when, for instance, the hour is late and I know one or the other is out gallivanting or on an excursion. Very frightening things can be delivered over the telephone and I have an active and vivid imagination and what I can scheme and dream up takes my own breath away.

Today is the birthday of our daughter, Michelle. Born in the Kettler Krankenhaus in Offenbach am Main, in (then West) Germany, she spent her first four and half years living with her brother and parents on Ahornstrasse around the corner from the park with the kiosk where she used to charm the owner into giving her a sweet when she ran past as she played.

It was in Offenbach that Michelle first met my mother, seeing her two German grandchildren for the first time and she stayed very close to Sigrid, watching 'Oma America' carefully while speaking in whispers about 'Die Frau' (the woman). 

Michelle gradually warmed up to her American grandma and for many months after my mom flew back to the states from the Frankfurt Flughafen when we'd drive by it on the A3 autobahn, Michelle would peer out the car window hoping to catch a glimpse of Oma America, convinced that since we'd this is where we'd picked up and dropped off my mom, she must be living there.

When, near the end of a very long day sometime later, she, her brother and their mother finally got off the plane in Philadelphia where I met them as they arrived to start their lives in these United States, she stared out the terminal windows at the runways blazing with halogen lights and offered that "Amerika hast sehr viel dunkel night time", her own attempt at Gerglish and to impose some meaning into what had become a very chaotic young life. Beginning again as a small child, but now in a completely different environment where the only thing that hadn't changed was she, Michelle seemed to realize she needed to adapt and overcome and did (and still does every day).

She started with a violin in fourth grade at the (now closed) William Buckingham School and I've long since lost track of all the instruments she has mastered. I know there's a piano, a viola, a guitar, a French Horn, and who knows what else. 

Along the way, I went from being the smartest dad in the whole world to a balding, slow to react, dotard who, very often in a battle of wits with a determined young woman, too late discovers he is unarmed. The more of an adult she becomes, the less she is comfortable being my 'itty-bit', a name I rarely call her now because she frowns when I say it, in much the same way as her brow furrows slightly when I call her 'Mike' as my diminutive for Michelle because my late Uncle Jim called his daughter Michelle, Mike, as well.

Michelle completed her studies as a music major at Eastern Connecticut, captivated her Kyle as she moved along, and is helping us all stay safe and healthy in some perilous times as a member of the Backus Hospital Healthcare Team. 

And while I know the world will be braced for her, I can't help but believe she'll make her mark. And I hope she'll always remember that no matter far apart we are, we will always share the same sky and the same moon and stars. Happy Birthday, Michelle.

"I'm gonna watch you shine.
Gonna watch you grow
Gonna paint a sign.
So you'll always know.
As long as one and one is two.
There could never be a father
Who loved his daughter more than I love you."

-bill kenny

Crying for the Moon

The older I get, the better I was. This is from so long ago I was practically brilliant (at least in my own mind). At the time, a decade ago, I called it: 

The Moon's a Harsh Mistress

Driving in to work yesterday morning, as the mercury hovered not all that much above the freezing point making it dicey for Southern New England farmers to keep their crops growing, I had a long, hard look at what seemed to be just about a full moon.

I have no life, and spend a large part of it at work, driving to or from work or worrying about something connected to work. I don't get up in the middle of the night like my brother Adam because I have a few more miles on the odometer and neither the spirit nor the flesh is willing any longer, but it's still pretty early. 

In the spring and summer months, as the days lengthen, there's a lighter tint to the darkness rolling along Route 12 through Ledyard at a little after five, and yesterday the moon was sitting practically on the roadway on the horizon.

I remember as a kid, in Mrs. Hilge's classroom, 3-B, in St Peter's (sic) School in New Brunswick, NJ, as Sister Mary Immaculata put a radio speaker near the microphone in her office connected to the PA system so we could hear the launch of Alan Shepard. We were on our way to the moon and we would beat those Ruskie bastards (I should admit I don't think I knew the word bastard then; I caught up pretty fast) and plant our flag up there.

I heard years later, in one of those stories moms tell to other adults about their now-grown children which shock the child because they never knew, one of the nuns (would have had to have been Sister Stephen who never liked me anyway) asked me what I was most concerned about for the astronaut and I replied, 'how Mission Control will monitor his heartbeat during lift-off' when, seemingly, the correct answer was 'his immortal soul.' Even then...

Looking at the US effort to put a man on the moon, it's hard to not think, if, for just a moment, we had replaced God with Science (caps are deliberate in case there is a God or Science has truly replaced Him. I'm going to need brownie points from someplace). Who among us didn't want to grow up to be an astronaut? I hated Tang, and I still wanted to be one. The irony of ironies, I HATE flying in all forms. Take-offs and landings terrify me and once we're airborne it's a really boring bus ride at thirty thousand feet.

But dawn patrolling yesterday morning, I was thinking about November when the days are growing darker earlier and staying dark longer when the last of the shuttle flights is slated to liftoff as the age of private space flight begins. I'm very sure I'm VERY angry this is happening and am wondering if perhaps it's part of the reason I'm in a dark place spinning my wheels without gaining traction at the moment.

Rome, a small city in the middle of Italy grew into the Roman Republic and then devolved into the Roman Empire before disappearing beneath the bread and circuses and onslaught of the Vandals and Visigoths. Somewhere at some point in time, we've stopped being the greatest notion to ever become a nation and are now on our way to being another Carjackistan (sorry, Tank McNamara).

My point is Great Nations Do Great Deeds. We, okay not me personally, but my parents and their parents (and ALL of our parents and grandparents before them), fought two world wars, endured a decade of deprivation we now call The Great Depression, retooled and rebuilt not only our own country but our defeated foes across the globe. We/they stared into the maw of mutually assured destruction and the gaping jaws of the Russian bear and he blinked and fell. A lesser nation would have stepped on its enemy's throat while it was down.

A great nation would, and did, help the bear up and help it find its way even while, at times, losing our own and now our children's children will never be able to fully appreciate, much less share, their grandparent's dreams of space flight? How did it happen that we cannot afford to live out loud? 

I wasn't the only kid or boy, come to think of it, in my class with 'the' plan: I'd grow up to be a baseball player and the President (baseball was only a summer job) and an astronaut. It seemed like a pretty full day in the third grade. All these years on, all that remains is my dislike of Tang.

"I fell out of her eyes.
I fell out of her heart.
I fell down on my face.
Yes, I did, and I -- I tripped and I missed my star.
God, I fell and I fell alone, I fell alone.
And the moon's a harsh mistress,
And the sky is made of stone."
-bill kenny