Elevating Social Distance to a Fine Art

I've received both phases of the Pfizer Phauci Ouchy but have every intention of keeping a large swath of humanity as far from me as my bony little arms will allow me to do. I've been around this ant farm with beepers for a lot longer than a lot of folks think is merited and I fear anything more intense than a passing acquaintanceship is probably cruising for a bruising. 

As things start a slow return to what we seem to have decided is to be our new normalcy it will be up to people like me to make sure people like you don't get caught up in the euphoria of being able to eat in a restaurant or attend a sporting event by having me witness it. 

Actually, if it were up to me it wouldn't be up to me because I don't care if you do or you don't as long as whatever it is you choose is done as far from me as possible for as long as possible (or even longer). Absence makes the heart grow fonder and the sooner you're gone the sooner I'll miss you (in theory). 

As someone who's been practicing social distancing in some form since about the third grade, it all sort of looks the same to me from where I am, which is someplace you're not. By design or accident. Makes no difference to me.   

And when I vacation in a place like this, I not only do not expect them to leave the light on; I insist that they don't.

Gute Reise.
-bill kenny

Roll Up Your Sleeve

I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on television (possibly because I have a face best suited for radio). I don't pretend to be an Internet Epidemiologist or a Virologist like (m)any of the myriad of same we've all encountered on social media platforms on a non-stop basis over the last couple of months as our country and the world has battled sometimes fiercely and at other times just fitfully in attempting to contain and conquer the most terrifying (to me) health threat in my almost-seven decades here on the Big Blue Marble, COVID-19. 

I've spent most of my adult life never allowing my lack of knowledge on any given subject to keep me from having an opinion about it (just like you, in case you were feeling superior; you're not. We're all bozos on this bus and sometimes some of us have a window seat and sometimes we don't) so why would COVID-19 be any different for me? It's not.

About a month and a half ago, in a  post called Vacci-Nation, I offered a peek at my earliest years on Earth while recounting barely-remembered early childhood memories from when I was (maybe) three years old at a time it was just me and my Mom and Dad in a high-rise in Flushing, Queens (New York City). I had some interesting emails in response. 

Post World War II grown-ups were having children, us, who were to be the vanguard of the Baby Boom, as the United States became not just a but the world power and the political, social, and economic powerhouse of the world. And yet even as my parents and their friends were fruitful and multiplied, infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis) was reaching epidemic levels, killing thousands of kids in this country every year and untold numbers around the world. 

Dr. Jonas Salk had developed what proved to be the first effective vaccine against polio but when it was being tested no one, Salk included, 'knew' that it would work. I was still a toddler when my mom and dad had an opportunity for me to receive Salk's polio immunization in its earliest days. I remember Mom telling me as an adult she never hesitated about a decision.

Polio was the most frightening disease you have probably never heard of, and Salk's vaccine is the reason why. The vaccine was released just before my third birthday in 1955 and cases of polio disappeared dramatically until, by 1995, it had been basically eliminated in the Western Hemisphere. I received a vaccination; a child one apartment over didn't because her parents were afraid of the unknown consequences. She contracted polio. Normally this might be where I'd suggest 'thus endeth the lesson.' 

Except, on the last Friday of last month, my wife and I received the second of the two Pfizer COVID-19 vaccinations and gave not a moment's thought to all, or any, of the discussions and distractions, swirling around from those who not only know everything about vaccines but everything better, so it's okay to think of me as one of those folks when I tell you to trust the science, keep wearing your mask, practice social distancing and wash your hands.
-bill kenny

 

Redefining a Casual Conversation

You would not know this to read me I know, but I have remarkably talented brothers and sisters with more skills and abilities than I have fingers and toes (and I interned one summer in a morgue if you follow my drift).

All three of my sisters and both of my brothers are younger than me so I sometimes offer the feeble defense that the bar was set kind of low, but quibbling aside each of my five siblings has talents and strengths that make them pricelessly invaluable to their own families as well as treasures within mine.

Here's the kind of stuff I'm talking about as posted the other day by my sister, Kara.

A timely insight from Damian Barr. Only someone like Kara could unearth it.
-bill kenny   

Everything Old is New Again

I am no longer stuttering or stumbling over the YeeHawdists of Vanilla Isis' attempted insurrection of 6 January because I've rubbed enough elbows with the Children of the Corn right here where I live a state considered just about as blue as any in the nation. 

The Gadsden Flag, the bumper stickers that boast of ignorance and hate, none of that did NOT exist prior to 6 January when the Arsonist-in-Chief tried to set it all ablaze. The surprise of those who chose to NOT see it before that date is what keeps tripping me up, and I don't get out much anymore. 

This is from ELEVEN YEARS AGO and I cannot pretend to have an IQ too much beyond an average room temperature and here I am back in the day, channeling Nostradamus I guess except I called it: 

That's Why I Love Mankind

Dante called it The Divine Comedy though he wouldn't have been laughing at what I said when I first heard about the latest looners ensnared by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (and how in the heck did we decide those three went together like faith, hope, and charity, or the Kardashians?).

Just what we needed since we've had had so little for at least the last twenty centuries, more proof that we are God's special creatures, the Lord's punchline, assuming He takes us seriously as we dare to wonder if He exists (we might never see Him because of who we are, not because of who He is).

And you thought all we needed to be on guard against were Al and Eunice Kider, Auntie Fa, and Tommy and the Taliban. What do you think this is? A Children's Crusade at Chuck E. Cheeses? Ladies and Gentlemen, put your hands together for a nearly seamless blend of anti-government, militant Christians who call themselves Hutaree. For just a moment when I heard the name I flashed on F Troop but that was the Hekawi.

The NY Times account quotes their website (and who doesn't have one these days) “Jesus wanted us to be ready to defend ourselves using the sword and stay alive using equipment.” 

I have to wonder if this is the same Jesus who helps professional basketball players make free throws or assists baseball pitchers in achieving strike-outs. Where does He find the time for ALL this other activity? Not only are the NBA playoffs practically just around the corner but baseball season just started!

As a child of the Sixties, I often wondered why the Zig-Zag rolling papers people didn't make a bigger deal out of the physical resemblance of their guy to the Son of God, but I'd like to think it had something to do with respect for the purity of others' beliefs. 

So now I have to wonder where these hockey pucks with hair found their divine inspiration and how much more of this My God Is Bigger than Your God most of us who travel on this Big Blue Marble will have to put up before someone someplace finds the biblical passage that talks about Blessed are the Reloaders and we start collecting paving stones as we search for those without sin. 

It's a cinch we won't find any. What's that bumper sticker? "Lord Deliver me from Your Followers " Amen.

-bill kenny

Falling Up

If you were in any store of nearly any kind within the previous three weeks your perception of what today is all about involves marshmallow Peeps and Cadbury chocolate. Good luck with both of those. Here are some previously voiced sentiments in the spirit of today's returnee.  

These started out as some thoughts (or what passes for such) from some years back and then things got twisted I guess. Some things like wine improve with age; others, like milk, not so much. I'll leave it for you to decide which is which because you always do.

I used to be a Roman Catholic--actually, that's less than accurate or truthful. It's like saying I used to be an alcoholic. Those two statements have no past tense, or pretense (my attempt at a literary joke); they just are and in this case, I am both.

The jaded, faded imitation of a person I am today looks at his faith as a child and finds it easy to mock the boy on his way to manhood, but also envies him the beliefs he had. When I threw the faith of my fathers into the ocean of doubt, I had nothing to hold onto in its place because I never had the courage of my own convictions and could not develop any trust in those of anyone else other. 

Today is Easter Sunday the most important feast in the Christian liturgical calendar and (pardon my pseudo-theological seminary sermon) precipitant of the article of faith that makes us Christian if that's indeed what we are. Christmas gets the lion's share of press, carols, cards, shouted best wishes at one another, and window dressing. Quite candidly, it takes all the air out of the room in terms of holiday celebrations.  

Christmas gets marketing help from every wholesaler and retailer imaginable and why not? Christmas is a lovely story, wonderfully symbolic and simply beautiful if you don't want to think too much about it.

Take a look today in the New Testament of your choice and foreboding's afoot in every verse of every version of the events leading to Easter (those, by the way, are the versions and verses of my choice). And in one of the most ironic choices of terms associated with any aspect of Jesus Christ, is Good Friday, which marks His Crucifixion and Death (I went back and made the "h" a capital, not because there's hope for me but out of fear that there is no hope). And as you read the accounts, let's face it, the events of that day are absolutely horrible.

The crowd, the occupying forces, everyone, it seems has abandoned the Son of God who is sentenced to die (I'd say 'murdered' but some might argue the state does not murder) in an extraordinarily horrible manner. And yet.

It is both that death by Crucifixion but more importantly the belief in the Resurrection which followed that so many commemorate today that's the defining event for every Christian, even the ones who seem more like Simon Peter than even they should ever admit in this life.  I want you to remember this. Come on, try to remember.
-bill kenny

Wholly Saturday

I have never been to the Vatican, nor have I stayed at a well-known motel chain, but I know my way around the Stations of the Cross and the Lives of the Saints. I'm always amazed at the number of people who think Christmas is the origin of Christianity-others consider the beginnings to be Easter Sunday.

If the former is The Promise and the latter The Promise Fulfilled then today, Holy Saturday is the act of faith and hope that defines you as a Christian. The belief in the Resurrection which the New Testament portrays as the promised reward for the faithful servant is never so near and yet oh so far as it is today.

The earliest disciples had nothing to go on, unlike those of us we of the Brave New World Order. They had witnessed a crucifixion-one of the most egregiously horrific forms of a death sentence at its time. Cowering in an upstairs room, huddled together while fearing any sound and every footfall was possibly a signal someone was coming for them, they had no way to see the glory of Easter Sunday. All they could do was believe.

For them to believe as devoutly as they did between the worst day in the history of the world and its greatest day remains for me as a loyal son of Holy Mother Church, but a FARC for more years than I care to recall, the day which created the Christian religion, today the test and proof of faith.

From childhood on, I struggled against the suffocation that surrender to the traditions and the rites seemed to signify. I took no solace in unquestioning and unswerving belief, preferring what I understood the path of Thomas to be and finding no one who could answer my questions, absenting myself from the body of believers. How odd this declaration of freedom never created a sense of being free.

Not that I don't envy those of faith and think about the comfort that comes from that, especially as I did last night (as I have for years on Good Friday) revisiting a news archive to read again about the costs of war and who pays them with the death of Captain Nicholas Rozanski in 2012. He came from Dublin, Ohio, to be lost in the fog of war on the streets of Maimanah, an unremarkable spot on a map of a nation we have carried with us for now over two decades, unable or unwilling (I don't know which) to lay that burden down.

His death almost exactly nine years ago, and those of all the fallen and forgotten should be another reminder to those of us who are alive to redouble our efforts to be the best people we know how to be in The Now because The Next, as the New Testament illustrates, can be so lonely and uncertain without a reason to believe. And either you have a reason to believe, or you become one for someone else. In either event, when you do, every day is Easter.
-bill kenny

Shedding Off One More Layer of Skin

There is, preached Kohelet in the Book of Ecclesiastes, a season for every purpose it says in the Old Testament, seasons for everything and around the world today within the Christian faith we are within the Paschal Triduum. 

Monsignor Harding, wherever he is in all of eternity, would be wide-eyed with wonder that, of all that I have been given or taught, and of all that I have lost or had taken from me, that would be a term I would hold onto.

I know a lot of Christians who see the birth of Christ, Christmas, as the defining moment of their faith, and I guess if you work retail that's an attractive argument. As a child growing up in Holy Mother Church in the late Fifties and Sixties, I knew (and had plenty of nuns, Sister of Charity type, if I were to forget) for Catholics it was the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus.

I can still remember Sister Thomas Anne faintly smiling as she ticked off the three events on the fingers of her right hand: pinkie, ring finger, and middle finger (how ironic is that? (I'm lying, third-grader students had no concept of the significance of the middle finger, not even Bobby D' who was a pretty fast crowd all by himself)). 

She paused as she would note the similarity to the Holy Trinity, three persons in the One God. When I watched her do this same explanation, with the pregnant pause in the same place, complete with the slow smile of accidental recognition of her triad point for the next five years, there was still a sign of course, but, I must confess, the wonder was gone.

And yet, I suspect she, too, would be smiling today. It is Good Friday, a day of such momentous import to so many disparate elements of our historical, philosophic and cultural identity where, no matter your belief, or disbelief, you can take solace from the perfect sacrifice of the Son of God who became the Son of Man and laid down His life for all sins by all sinners. 

Even if you have hurts that can never heal, you can, if only for today, have hope, knowing there is a tomorrow.

-bill kenny