Ticking Away

Good morning to you slightly earlier. 

In some parts of the world this time yesterday was the day before and now in these parts, it's already light. This is the time of the year when I'm never sure if it's better to believe the calendar or my own eyes. Today is the beginning of daylight saving time and many of us are already counting down the days to spring (I guess so we can then count down the days until Summer) which is actually this coming Saturday but when I look out the window there are more than enough reminders everywhere that winter's last word hasn't yet been spoken.   

Don't know about your house, but in mine, there's always one clock we forgot to move forward on Saturday night and then didn't see it at all Sunday so it's actually Monday or Tuesday when we finally get caught up on all the watches and clocks. 

I hate the clock on the microwave and it shows because I never get it set correctly. You can hear the sounds of my struggling with it as it beeps and bleats in frustration while I manage to do everything but get it to move forward and eventually my wife resets it in what seems to be one fluid motion leaving me to wonder as I always do why we have the forward and back thing with the clocks in the first place. 

As someone raised a Catholic I guess I should find familiar solace in a ritual that we do whether we understand why we do it or not. And while I'd like to hope the spring ahead means winter is now finally in retreat in the Northeast what we will have is more daylight in the afternoons. As a kid, I thought it made the days longer and gave us more time and the elderly adult in me now hopes that the kid was right on both counts.   
-bill kenny

Through the Past, Darkly

The sky above looks the same for the most part, as does the earth below it. It's everything in the middle that's changed and yet, hasn't, in the last year. 

We measure time by what we've done and what we've left undone. 

from CNN

We measure pain by whom we've loved and whom we've lost.
-bill kenny

A Real Emotional Girl

This is from a long time ago but so am I so we're even, except that I think you're odd, sometimes. Back then I called it:

She Makes My World Stop

She can barely tolerate Springsteen and winces when I start on my 'Bruce at the Festhalle on His first German Tour' story which I will NOT recount today. She's convinced Bob Dylan cannot now, nor ever, sing and that goes double for Neil Young because he also can't play the harmonica or guitar according to her. She was a devoted Barry Manilow fan at a moment in his career when he was so commercially sweet, my teeth ached listening to him.

Where there had been just she and a husband was to be also a son and then later a daughter. She raised them both; it's their father with the case of arrested emotional development, practically on her own since her spouse gave his time to total strangers, not for days on end, but for decades-and, she never missed a beat in creating from a home and hearth a safe haven for them all.

Not even on the day he came home, on a date of this very month thirty years ago, to tell her she and the children would be leaving the only home they'd ever known and move to a country on another continent, that, of the three, only she had been in (and that was twice for holidays) did she hesitate or look anywhere else but straight ahead.

Adding to the degree of heart-wrenching difficulty in a relocation of close to 4,500 miles was a landing in the area first settled by the Pilgrims at about the time of year they, too, had arrived (but she stuck the landing). And she was to discover being a stranger in a strange land meant swallowing the bewilderment, frustration, humiliation, and indignation often created by disinterested bureaucrats who required a rain forest of completed forms before issuing her a card of one color, but called by another, in order to remain with her family.

She is the most headstrong person, if not on the planet then at least in a specific house at an address in Norwich, Connecticut, despite some stiff competition in that department from a daughter who has her self-assurance and belief in her own abilities from her mother. The child's brother has his easy ability to make friends with people he's just met from his mother and she is the reason why neighbors can abide her spouse, I suspect, since he came with her and she's wonderful so there must be something she sees in him (she does wear glasses, after all).

There's nothing she cannot repair or mend which is a skill that comes in handy because her husband has a gift for physical destruction that approaches an art form and she has as much patience as each project requires, even if all of them require all of it all the time. The number of events and happenstances that had to happen in a specific and given order, for this woman from Offenbach am Main to meet a dweeb from Central New Jersey and make his world stop completely is incalculable.

The life that she has cannot be the one she thought she was getting when she said yes a lifetime ago and it's certainly not the one she deserves. Sometimes the ride has been very dark (as in dunkel night time, a small child offered in Gerglish nearly three decades ago). If the power to make today, her birthday, a national, or international holiday, were mine, I would use it, but it doesn't make a difference to her that this will never happen. She does not miss what she cannot have.

I can only wish her happiness today, her birthday, and marvel, yet again, that she shares her life with me. I never had a girl who loved me half as much as this girl loves me. You gotta hold on tight to her. She's a real emotional girl.
-bill kenny

Pick a Card, Any Card

I don't know about you, but since the November election (aside from the January Attempted Insurrection), I've been learning to exhale a little more every day.

I have fewer ALL CAPS pitched battles on the deliciously oxymoronically named social media platforms that are as much a part of my day as food and coffee, but the rate and pace have slowed and that's fine by me. 

And I found this handy coping mechanism that I'm passing along to make of what you wish. 

No need to thank me. I can see the gratitude in your eyes right through the screen.
-bill kenny 

More Time to Help

At some point as this Saturday night becomes Sunday morning, our clocks will spring forward. I’ll admit I’ve never really gotten the point of Daylight Saving versus Eastern Standard and that whole 'spring ahead' and 'fall back' mnemonic is little more than nonsense in my book since when we're all done playing with the clock's innards, the time is what the time is.  

I'm especially not sure why we do it late on Saturday/early on Sunday anyway. What would be so terrible about a Friday afternoon at four suddenly becoming a Friday afternoon at five? Good night, everybody, have a great weekend! Nope, not a chance. 

Aside from that rabbit Alice encountered in Through the Looking Glass, we're the only species on the planet that arbitrarily divides the day into smaller and smaller increments to the point that neither the mind nor the eye can comprehend the difference between 0.001 seconds and 0.0001 seconds. 

Animal, vegetable, mineral, most everything else adapts to the 'gets dark later/gets bright earlier' hot and cold parts of life here on earth, but not us. We impose, or attempt to, ourselves on our environment and surroundings. Take a look around and tell me how you think that’s working out.

We created a concept we call "time" and then worked its division into seconds and minutes that added together we call hours and then gathered up twenty-four of them, pronouncing that to be a day. But wait, there’s more. 

We then lined up seven days into a week (not six or eight, seven), combining them in various clusters of varying lengths called months concluding here, my dear, with that which we call a year. And we remain undeterred that nothing else on this planet does any of that. Seems to me, fellow bi-peds, with our big brains and opposable thumbs we could work on bigger things, but that’s just me. 

For the early part of next week, most of us will be out of sorts and/or out of sync and will blame it on all those clocks springing forward. But that’s not where I think we should focus our attention. I’m more concerned that so few of us have a plan for what to do with all of the extra daylight we’ve been getting since the winter solstice with Daylight Saving (no ‘s’ by the way) just making it official. That’s the real pity.

But having the time is one thing; doing something productive and worthwhile with it is something else entirely. How many projects around your house have you left undone because you just didn't have the time to get to them? Maybe tackle cleaning out the basement/attic/garage or shed project? And before you start, call Public Works and arrange for a pick-up.

And if you're already caught up on the around the house projects, I'm not going to lecture or hector because your mileage may vary but there are people and projects in need of your extra time and singular talents, be it on your street, neighborhood, city or state. I'm not talking large-scale projects like leaping tall buildings in a single bound, but down to earth, helping-hands stuff.

Invest that Daylight Saving hour and the dividend it returns will benefit all of us.
-bill kenny

Dog Day Morning

Out walking one morning recently I passed a fellow taking a dog for a walk. My Uncle Jim divided the canine kingdom into two types, Sooners (those who'd sooner s*it than eat) and dogs. In my (so far) 68 years on this orb, I've had no reason to revisit his position, so I don't know what breed this animal was, except small and hairy.

Actually, it wasn't much of a walk, as the person was carrying the dog. As a parent of two children, I recall when ours were more like lurchers, that's the larval stage preceding toddler where the child stands, wobbly-legged but upright, and the mass and momentum of the body dictate in which direction the tyke heads, with just about no control whatsoever. 

If you've been a parent, you know the feeling of your heart in your throat as your little one goes down in a heap and you hear that intake of breath as they suck in as much air as their lungs can hold to fuel a scream that sounds like an air raid siren in Coventry or Dresden. Of course, you pick your child up and truth to tell you can barely hear their shrieks until you have them next to your ear.

I don't think the dog was crying so I don't get the point of picking the animal up. It has four legs, a low center of gravity, and seems to be designed to traverse the planet using its paws. Heck, Tillman uses a skateboard for crying out loud and doesn't depend on bi-ped power to do much else, I suspect, but open the dog food tins. Don't get me wrong, I'm not angry at the dog-I'm not angry at anyone-but it's against the nature of things, to my mind, to not let natural systems be natural.

Having said that, and invoking the spirit, if not the intellect of Walt Whitman and Rousseau (Jean Jacques, not Danielle), I would admit I've tried the 'let nature be nature' argument when the snow falls or when the grass in the yard is need of a machete whack or two to clear a path to the garage. 

My wife, no less devoted to Rilke than am I to Davies, offers me the 'you had better do' glance in place of her once so welcome 'come hither' look and I realize that being a Sooner isn't just a declination within the Animal Kingdom.
-bill kenny

#ChooseToChallenge

Today is International Women's Day. I'm reasonably sure holding a celebratory repast at the International House of Pancakes is not considered appropriate if that's what you were leaning towards. I'm neither an expert on and certainly not myself, a woman-but more of a visitor, a beyond-interested bystander, on an extended and extensive tour of their world.

I live together with my wife of forty-three-plus years (to be honest, she allows me to live with her and I am fortunate beyond words that she does). I am very aware of the importance of closing previously shut closet doors when finished rummaging around inside. I know well the notion of turning off a light I turned on when entering a room when I leave it. And there is nothing about a well-known lid on a well-known seat in a particularly utilitarian room about which I have not been thoroughly schooled.

Those who celebrate our continuing advances in achieving equality will eventually revel in triumphs that today are unimaginable but by tomorrow will be commonplace. I came across a thought the other day (I have so few of my own I almost didn't recognize what it was) from Joseph Conrad (Mistah Kurtz, he dead. That Joseph Conrad) which captures, I feel, the moment and many of the moments so many women live through every day: "Being a woman is a terribly difficult task since it consists principally in dealing with men." 

Perhaps speaking only for me, thank you.
-bill kenny