Another Dark Day on the Calendar

As the oldest child in my family, I spend a lot of time fretting over what is and what could have been, often failing badly to see my role and responsibility in moving from the former to the latter.

Today is an anniversary of sorts for something so many of us couldn't grasp when it happened, and, I confess, I still didn't "get" any better than when we observed its first anniversary. Here are words I offered some time ago-they remain as inadequate as they were then.

I cannot imagine how long this day is for a parent who suffered the loss of a child, a husband of a wife, a son or daughter of a parent, but I do know that today in Newtown, Connecticut, everyone trying to heal will hurt again.

Everywhere we turn today there will be news accounts recounting everything that everyone will ever know about an unthinkable tragedy that happened eight years ago today but there is one thing we, with all of our research and analysis, will never know.

For a small town whose residents will always have broken hearts that can never heal today is just the next day in the unending tragedy that will only end when all memory of what happened has gone. And that will never happen.

Even those of us who question the existence of God can have no doubt that evil is real and in the world, because it came to a place that offered safety and security, an elementary school filled with adults who gave the last and fullest measure of devotion to save those least able to save themselves, the children.

All I can offer is to hold the parents, siblings, and friends of those who were murdered in my thoughts as the survivors hold them in their hearts. I'd pray for better days for them and us but hope for better days may have been among the casualties at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Newtown should remind us to examine our lives and decide what is truly important. We see every incident of inchoate violence as an isolated singular event, rather than as larger and unending episodes of anger and rage so profound we still dare not speak of causes and solutions because our emotions are still too raw or ‘it’s too soon.’

Except, it's not soon; it's too late, much too late for six young teachers and twenty even younger children and grieving relatives who put very small coffins into the cold, cold earth, during the holiday season eight years ago and who will carry until their dying day a hole in their hearts that time will not ever heal.

Today is a day to pause and hold our loved ones closer and see in their eyes a reflection of who we must become the difference in the world, today and every day.

-bill kenny

Lights and Horns

Despite all the days of malevolence and hate-filled utterances throughout what has been at least for me a very long year and most especially now during what we called as kids a Season of Hope, today, Gaudete Sunday remains a favorite of mine (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.

This has been a year of ineffable pain for so many of us because of the coronavirus. There's hardly anyone any of us know who hasn't been affected by its impact as the souls of the faithful departed parade past us on all manner of screens, they risk losing their singularity and meaning. 

Each name was a life and a light and I'm reminded again that we have too many horns in the cacophony of life and can most certainly use another light, especially in this, the most hopeful of seasons.
-bill kenny

When Truth Is at a Premium

Benjamin Franklin, the only President of the United States who was never President of the United States is credited with first saying "honesty is the best policy." He's also credited with offering 'looks like a great night for kite-flying; take my key so you can let yourself back into the house,' but no one wants to talk about that one.   

But in regards to that first piece of advice, I suspect Steven P. Murphy would say 'hell yeah!' For me, the bonus to reading a-news-from-the-newsroom-floor story like this is that I know exactly where this place is, having driven past it one day near the latter part of last week, and not for the only time.

Visually. it always reminds me of something out of a Tonio K song, "'cept it was cleaner," so I'm hoping the damage wasn't too severe or at least too noticeable from the street.
-bill kenny

 

Redefining Definitions

Some days are diamonds and some days are dogs but ALL days are what we decide they are. Preceptions of reality AND reality are the same thing.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; just don't blink. 
-bill kenny 

The Limits of Her Pure Surprise

In the Sixties and Seventies, we wore blue jeans but we didn't call them that, we called them Levis, for Levi Strauss who made dungarees. Sort of like we didn't call it soda we called it Coke when you took a photo it was a Kodak or when you made a copy of a document it was a Xerox.

Levis' TV commercials were incredibly and consistently brilliant combinations of sight, sound, and narration that redefined the word cool.   

If you are waiting for a point to this meander down memory lane, sorry to disappoint you; there isn't one. I was thinking about Ken Nordine who voiced all those Levis commercials and whose identity I first learned of from my Rutgers friend, Nat, who is an artist in his own right, and now you have learned about both of them. By the way, how are things in your town?
-bill kenny 

Putting the Risk in Asterisk

I semi-gave you a bum steer last Wednesday and my apologies for that. 

I forget this time of year across large sections of the country anything and everything outdoors always needs to have that typographic symbol that looks sort of like a snowflake, the asterisk (*), because there's always a chance of some form of precipitation and this time of year, the smart bet is on snow.

That, as you know by now, was exactly what the Greater Norwich Area Chamber of Commerce, GNACC, was calculating when they checked out the forecast land saw what was heading our way last Saturday and rescheduled the Shop Local Holiday Market downtown for this Saturday from noon until four (* weather permitting (see, I'm catching on)).  

In years past (= before COVID-19) there'd be a holiday showcase in one of the ballrooms at the Holiday Inn on Route 82. That change is yet another instance of adapt and overcome in this year of the pandemic and for many artisans and vendors who used to flock to the showcase, the loss of that venue in some instances threatened their continuance not just as small businesses, but as businesses, period.

Everything for everyone on Saturday is outside, with vendors, crafters, and artists setting up in the parking lots on Broadway, Franklin, and Bath Streets. If you've ever attended any of the Global Norwich block festivals downtown, you'll be very familiar with the layout, highlighted by special appearances from Rudolph (I'm thinking Valentino, but maybe not) and holiday music from Franco and K-HITS 100.9.

Visitors and vendors will be required to be masked (I think Clayton Moore would be tickled with this homage), and to follow social distancing guidelines (think: six feet apart or six feet under). Aside from that, the only other thing to remember is to have fun and that should be pretty easy especially for those of us who've been keeping ourselves to ourselves in recent months.  

This new normal has meant a lot of change, and not all of it good for many and that includes the area's local merchants who were still working to make Down City and its surrounding neighborhoods and villages a great place to live and work in when times got a lot tougher. 

Still, the tentative listing of those turning up and turning out for the favor of your custom is quite impressive, and though it's a tired marketing cliche to suggest 'there's something for everyone' in this case, there really is. 

And, if it's been a while since you last made the time to stop and then shop downtown, I think, particularly in light of how we focus on 'what we don't have anymore,' you'll be more than pleased with the variety of opportunities you'll have to sample foods, books, apparel, home furnishings, and a plethora of 'what a great gift that would make!' items all around you that are right up your street, Literally and figuratively. 

All the restaurants, and then some, that you've been reading about in The Bulletin and in Norwich Magazine and have been telling yourself you really should try, you'll now have the perfect opportunity to taste for yourself what all the talk has been about. 

If you're shopping for someone hard to please, think about the gift that keeps on giving, gift cards. And by visiting GNACC Shop Local 2020, you can check out not just those who'll be in downtown on Saturday (* almost forgot), but so many others across the region who help make us a great place to come home to and who deserve your attention and support. 

So, barring *, this Saturday #shoplocal because we're #BetterTogether.
-bill kenny

Another Decade and Still No Rosary

I offered what follows exactly a decade ago and glanced at it in advance of this date because try as I might I cannot think of anything to add now to anything I wrote then.  

The Quartet Practiced in the Park

If I need more than a dozen words to explain the importance of John Lennon and the music he helped create, and the other music he made possible, I'm too old and you're too young to be having this conversation. And since, chronologically, I got here first, you'll have to leave.

I was born the year Dwight David Eisenhower was elected US President. Rock and roll was either very rhythm and blues-oriented (and called 'race music') or was so white it glowed in the dark with melodies from the Brill Building professionals as sung by any fresh face who showed up at the auditions. 

Little Richard's originals such as Good Golly, Miss Molly were covered and eclipsed by a variety of white artists and never enjoyed the success on pop radio station airwaves they should have, but the UK rockers had no way of knowing that.

People like Sam Phillips and Sun Records helped change all that with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and (of course) Elvis Presley. The seismic shock Elvis set off echoed halfway across the world where tub thumpers, literally, who were part of something the British called skiffle, attempted to emulate the American records they were hearing in the coffee bars and teen clubs.

The perspiring and aspiring musicians who spent hours trying to copy every chord change of every R&B song they heard had no idea that in the USA, the music to which they were so devoted had been co-opted and to a large extent castrated by safe-as-houses imitators. Their world then was so different from our world now that words fail, which is why (perhaps) so many of us who came of age in The Sixties turned to music in the first place as a replacement for language.

If all you know of John Lennon is what you've read, you cannot imagine the electricity late-night American Top 40 radio had when The Beatles were on. They built a bridge from the UK for every disaffected rocker to cross, and it mattered not if they could sing, Noel Harrison certainly couldn't, as long as they looked the part. 

The Liverpool lads stuck and stayed while so many others faded away because they had talent and the ear of a generation who sought a voice while they, themselves, searched for the sound they had heard years earlier. They may have never realized they had become the object for which they searched-we on other hand never cared and embraced them as the Soundtrack of the World to Be.

The Beatles 'broke big in America' in the aftermath of the murder of John F. Kennedy and I've never believed that was a coincidence. They were the standard by which all other pop music was measured. It felt, for someone in his teens for much of their public career, that The Beatles had been around forever but when they went dark in 1970, they had been a chart presence for far less than a decade.

Where there were four, only two are alive today. All of them spent, and continue to spend, their solo careers battling unreal expectations, measured by critics and fans alike against an impossible standard no one could match. With Lennon's murder forty years ago, the death of the public John overshadowed the personal tragedy his two sons, Julian and Sean, as well as the pain and grief his wife, Yoko Ono, and his late first spouse, Cynthia, felt and feel every day of their lives, but most especially today.

It's tempting when revisiting history to forget it can just as easily be written as his story because in this case, the bandmate, the father, the husband, were all walk-ons in the Beatlemania movie Mark David Chapman so abruptly and completely ended exactly four decades ago. 

For many who never knew the man, except through his music, today is a very long day. There's little we can do except enjoy what he gave us while watching the wheels go round and round and wonder what might have been.
-bill kenny