A Decade Down and Still No Rosary

Since the declaration of the pandemic and preventatives to mitigate it over a year ago the days, weeks, and months seem to run together, at least for me. This story and others like it from across the country on the ongoing tussle about the information generated and tabulated from the 2020 US Census reminded me of a blast from my past on a previous nose-counting expedition from another time. I called it: 

Taking Leave of My Census

It came in the afternoon mail earlier this week, and truth to tell I thought it was the auto club, looking for a renewal on a membership (I already have a lifetime membership but I can never remember if it's mine or the car's). 

Once I figured out it wasn't that, I assumed it was probably a statement from Usury International Bank explaining, in accordance with the new Credit Cards R UR Friend Act (reminiscent of the warnings Big Tobacco put on their products), that at the minimum monthly payment level, I'll need to believe in reincarnation to get their Plutonium Card off my back.

It wasn't either of those things, of course. After all the weeks and months of screaming and yelling on the THNs (Talking Heads Networks), it was only the US Census. Anyway, since it was paper, I decided that opening the envelope under running water was counter-intuitive, not that we didn't have enough running water on the Eastern Seaboard in the last few days.

But, to minimize the chances of Demon Spawn escaping the envelope, (of course) I opened it outside, behind the sandbags in the bunker where I watch both Glenn Beck as well as Keith Olbermann. Together, they're like a cranial colonic, though refreshed is never what they leave me.

I've been around these parts for close to sixty-nine years, and maybe there was a lot MORE brown acid at Yasgur's Farm than previously advertised, but I don't remember filling out a census form, ever. My evil twin, Skippy, 'blue or black pen' in hand, wondered if we should be living in a barn and if you can sell myrrh on e-bay. You have to offer it as a bonus for purchasing frankincense, I think. And cows contribute to global warming, especially when you drive to the store and buy pieces of them for cook-outs.

I've been eyeballing the whole form for a while and if there's a lyrical conspiracy behind it (Sorry, what? a liberal conspiracy! That makes even less sense), it's pretty slick, since even when I hold it up to the light I cannot see any aspect of it. Although, come to think of it (and maybe this is the clever-by-a-half part), the ballpoint pen manufacturers might be up to something since no #2 pencils are needed (or even wanted) at all. 

And what the heck are The Duggars supposed to do when they run out blanks before children's names to put in 'em? Move?!?
-bill kenny

"I Have Slipped the Surly Bounds of Underwear..."

Remember the old Burger King TV jingle? 

"Hold the pickle,

Hold the lettuce

Special orders don't upset us

All we ask is that you let us serve it your way." 

Here's the sad part, I can remember that jingle and thousands of lines of doggerel, sketches, catch-phrases, tv dialogue, et al, from well over sixty-plus years of existence here on the ant farm but I can't keep track of my youngest brother's birthdate and confuse the day and month of our son's birth.

But I digress.

The New York Daily News, a tabloid before we ever used that word, had what I thought was an attention-grabbing headline on a 'news from the newsroom floor kind of story' Florida Man Arrested for Masturbating with Pickle on Private Property. 

Imagine my chagrin to learn the NYDN don't even know the half of it because when you trace the story back to its origins you have an exercise in assertive alliteration as a headline that throws some large shade at the Daily News' effort, Pickle-Packing Perv Popped on Private Premise.  

Here's what I'm trying to understand (among a myriad of things): the smile on Eric's face in his mug shot. Is he auditioning to be one of the Campbell Soup Kids? According to the warrant, to my profound disappointment, the arresting officer offered no 'aggravating/mitigating factors.' And as the news account reports, there was NO word on the disposition of the pickle. 

I think someone needs to contact the Vlasic Stork for comment, and, perhaps, recipe ideas.
-bill kenny

Not a Moveable Feast

I offer these words in this space on this date every year. Consider yourself warned. 

The difference, I've read, between a rut and a grave is the depth of the habit. As I've aged the humor of that observation has grown rather thin (more so than I) and, despite that, I look forward to it growing thinner with every passing day. 

I first offered the following over a decade ago and if I'm still above ground a decade from now, I'll offer them then as well. What you do is entirely up to you; just as you may be whomever you wish to be. Back then I called it: 

Scared that He'll Be Caught

This ends a tough week for anyone who's ever picked up, owned, or been named for, anyone in Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints. The main event, of course, was Saint Patrick's Day. 

I'm not sure every place on earth paints the median strips on Main Street green as part of the parade or adds food coloring to the beer (or gets into fist-fights in New York's forgotten borough over matters of ethnicity and sexual preference) but let's face it, Saint Patrick is the 800-pound gorilla in the room for the month of March.

Which is too bad in my opinion, because today is the Feast of Saint Joseph, husband of Mary (Mother of God) and (to my way of thinking) Jesus' step-dad. I've always imagined an at-the-dinner-table exchange between the Son of Man (when still small) and Joseph that has Joe ending an argument with the lad with something like "then go right ahead and ask your 'real dad' for a new bike and let's see what happens." 

And then The Curia or the Legion of Decency (or both) shows up at my house and slaps the rosary bead handcuffs on me while The Pope reads me my rights ('you have none, just free will.'). 

As a grade-school child, I missed the subtlety that went into the talk-around as the Sisters of Charity explained 'the Annunciation' and when I got older and it smacked me right between the eyes, I admired, even more, the cool, collected response Joseph seemed to have had to all of that. 

Talk about Rainy Day Women #12 and 35. It's a pity we don't roll the Apocrypha into the Bible (sort of like a VH-1 Behind the Book) and let Max Von Sydow have another crack at the Greatest Story Ever Told (as soon as legal gets the rights clearances squared away).

Today, the Feast of Saint Joseph is when the swallows come back to Capistrano. I wonder if the village fathers paint the center stripe of their main street a shade of bird droppings white and grey or if they even have a parade. 

As urbane and world-wise as I like to think of myself, I love the story as much now as I did hearing it as a child. I find it reassuring and, while my belief in a Divine Being fluctuates wildly (and how screwed am I if Her/His belief in me reflects my faith in Her/Him?), I hope (in a faint-hearted, wimpy sort of way) that Paley is right about the Great Watchmaker.

I say that, mindful (with apologies to Jackson Browne) that 'I don't know what happens when people die.' And in keeping with that point, I have known two very dear people who shared the Feast of Saint Joseph as their birthday. 

They are both from long ago, at the time when I knew everything (and everything better) while I worked for American Forces (Europe) Network and Bob was my first (and very best) boss in Radio Command Information (together with Brian, Marge, Norm, and Sara) while Gisela was the record librarian of the most amazing (and amazingly organized) collection of vinyl in the world.

Bob was married to 'local color' as I was to be as well (GI's who married citizens from the country in which they were stationed; usually guys marrying women but NOT always). He and his wife, Erika, had no children but loved as if she were one, a stray dog they took in and kept all its life, Sandy. 

Erika and Sandy passed away pretty close to one another, leaving a hole in Bob's heart that never healed, filled with a pain of which he never spoke. Bob himself passed a number of years ago and I see him at this very moment in my mind's eye in a beaten beige long coat with a beret he wore in every kind of weather.

Gisela was my translator when the letter of permission from the Standesamt of Offenbach am Main (where Sigrid and I hoped to marry) arrived and I raced frantically from office to office trying to find someone to be my eyes (I was illiterate auf deutsch and vowed to never be that guy again). 

Gisela put her glasses on near the edge of her nose and would read a line and then look over the tops to give me the English translation. I still recall the shine in her eyes and her warm smile as she reached the conclusion granting us permission and she clasped both of my shoulders and hugged me in congratulations.

I remember both of them today, maybe more so than Saint Joseph, perhaps because I don't know how many others remember them and I'm sad when I think about what happens to you when the last person on earth to know you and of you has died. 

So today I told a little of the story of their lives, as I knew them, to remind me to celebrate them and hope the day comes when we can laugh together about all of that and so much more.

Happy Birthday, Bob und Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Gisela.
-bill kenny

Tuning Up

Spring, says my desk calendar, begins this Saturday morning. My heart is surely not alone in shouting "welcome!" as it's been a long, cold, lonely winter.

But here comes the sun. 

An early morning at Chelsea Parade

Here comes the sun, doo da doo doo doo.

Here comes the sun, and I say, It's all right.
-bill kenny

Remembering the Green Fields of America

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

History is often the same movie with a different cast. Watching and reading news reports over the weekend about ‘Rising Migrant Apprehensions’ at Texas’ border with Mexico is a variation on a theme that has been the American tune from before the beginning of our nation. I am a verse of that song.

The Irish's arrival in America was, for its time, the largest and most prolonged migration of one ethnic group since the nations of the world began keeping track of such things. Those fleeing Ireland for America were not only family members, but extended families, whole neighborhoods, and, in many instances, entire villages and townships. All were half a step ahead of starvation and destitution.

To remain in Ireland was to die but fleeing to America was often death of another kind, only more slowly. Having already been made into outcasts in our own country, immigrants hardly noticed how our treatment in the New World often resembled our handling in the old.

And still, we came, by the thousands every month, by the tens of thousands and into the millions. At one point, very nearly twenty percent of all Americans were of Irish ancestry which is a statistic offered today, Saint Patrick's Day, to help not just those of us who are and were part of the Irish Diaspora to remember where we came from but to remind all of us how far we have yet to go.

Let me offer words from SineyCrotty's "The Green Fields of America," a song I hope each of us in our own voice can someday sing in our own time, 

"Fare thee well to the groves of the shillelagh and shamrock;
Farewell to the girls of this country around.
May their hearts be as merry as ever I would wish them
When far, across this ocean I’m bound.

"But what matter to me where my bones they are buried,
If in peace and contentment I spend the rest of my life.
Oh the green fields of Canada, are daily blooming,
And it's there I'll put an end to my misery and strife.

"But my father is old and my mother quite feeble,
To leave their dear country, it would grieve their heart sore.
Whilst the tears down their cheeks, in big drops are rolling,
To think they should die on a far distant shore.

"So pack up your seashores, consider it no longer,
Ten dollars a week is not very bad pay.
With no taxes or tithes to devour up your wages,
All in the green fields of America.

"Now the sheep run unsheared, and the land's gone to rushes,
The journeyman’s gone, and the mender of reels.
So it’s cross the Atlantic, you journeymen and tailors
And your fiddlers who flaked out the old mountain reels.

"I remember the time when old Ireland was flourishing,
And most of the tradesmen, they worked for fine pay.
But since the manufactories have crossed the Atlantic,
It’s then we must go on to Americay.

 “And now to conclude and to finish my ditty
If e'er a friendless Irishman in chance to meet
With the best in the house I will treat them and greet them,
Home from the green fields of America."
-bill kenny

"Distracted by Bad Boys and Good Dope"

A year plus into this Corona 500 or whatever NASCAR event this actually is, I'm getting a little worn and frayed around the edges. Not helping is a resumption, not a return, of winter with both unkind temperatures and winds that scream more than mutter.  

Here's a photo I grabbed the other day while out walking on what proved to be a true start to our False Spring, not that I am having any hard feelings about it (as they would change nothing if I were). 

I like the hint of red on the very tips of the tree's branches and tell myself it means buds are preparing for what's to come and that I should do likewise. If I say it forcefully enough aloud maybe it will come true. 

Maybe.

Anyway, here's a quote from someone I enjoy in small doses and I hope you will too.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?'
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so other people won't feel insecure around you."

Just a reminder for today, be an exclamation and NOT an explanation.

-bill kenny

Don't Let Landon Be Your Wing Man

An unsolicited true story (hint: on the interwebz, everything is unsolicited).

When I arrived (back) in the United States from Germany in the fall of 1991, the plane landed at JFK in New York City, and through the miracle, I am assuming of deregulation, the shortest distance to my final destination of Groton, Connecticut, was to and through Philadelphia. 

So I frog marched sort of from the international arrivals lounge in JFK to a domestic departures area where I boarded a slightly smaller plane than the one I flew over the Atlantic Ocean and landed in a very dark Philadelphia International Airport where I changed planes to one so small I had both an aisle and window seat at the same time. 

The pilot walked up the (center and only) aisle in the plane to the nose, opened what looked like a dutch door, and hopped up into the cockpit. I couldn't help noticing from my window seat after take-off that we were heading north by following the New Jersey Turnpike and I fretted about the Vince Lombardi rest stop at Exit 16 and hoped we had enough fuel in case we had to circle while whatever truck we were shadowing battled its way north through the congestion. 

I remember at some point the hostess bringing around a wicker basket with hard candies in it as our snack, and I asked since regular size aircraft had movies if we should expect a puppet show.

I don't recall the answer, but I guess, almost thirty years on I should be glad I didn't have to share a row with Landon Grier. With him on-board I can only imagine there's no need to feel bad about not having a movie, though the verdict's still out on how good an idea having a rodeo is.   
-bill kenny