One of Us Has Gotten Older

I'm not sure I really understand what an immutable fact actually is. I believe an open-faced peanut butter and jelly sandwich will always land face down when you drop it, but I'm not sure if that counts as either immutable or a fact. And now I have a sticky kitchen floor so there's that. 

This is from a different decade (that's how long and longer I've been at this) and I believed it to be true when I first offered it and more so, perhaps, now. I called it:   

I Think it Started with George

I've rooted for the NY Yankees most of my life. My dad was a NY Giants fan and continued to root for them even after Horace Stoneham moved the ball club to Candlestick Park and my mom grew up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and remained one for many years after Walter O'Malley had led the way west and to riches beyond imagination for professional baseball and ultimately all professional sports. In the last decade or so of her life, Mom became more of a Miami Marlins and Tampa Bay Rays fan, I think, because of geographic considerations.

I see my Dad and Mom, being from two tribes in two different worlds as they were in the early Fifties, really like Romeo and Juliet (at the very least, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) against all odds, meeting and marrying, I can hear the swelling violins over the mighty Wurlitzer playing Take Me Out to the Ballgame (what? The only constant is change. Just go with it, okay?).

As a tyke to teen I rooted for the NY Mets even through the return of Wilie Mays, my all-time hero, to play for The Amazin's in the twilight of his career, nearly getting brained trying to play center field. We went to more than our share of games in Shea Stadium (motto: 'You can almost touch the airplanes taking off and landing!') and even as kids we could tell something was stinking up the field and it wasn't what the ground crew was using. 

These weren't the years of Tom Seaver and Tug McGraw, and You Gotta Believe and I Guess the Lord Must Be In New York City, these Mets teams were frighteningly bad, just ask Jimmy Breslin.

My younger brother, Kelly, and I went to a Mets game one afternoon with my friend George B, from Browning, and his younger brother when Roger Maris played for the St. Louis Cardinals and every time Maris came to the plate we, along with everyone in Shea, booed him lustily for all of his success with his former ball club, the Yankees. I did feel a pang of guilt when, years later, he died of cancer wondering if we boo-birds had contributed in any way to his demise.

But for most of over six decades, my team has been the Yankees (and their beer sponsor, when Mel Allen was their broadcast voice, was Ballantine). A decade or so ago, visiting our son living in Boston at the time, we wound up on Yawkey Way, behind Fenway on a Sunday game day against the Yankees and spotted the teeshirts with "Take Your 26 Rings" on the front with "And Shove 'em Up Your Asterisk (sort of)" on the back. 

Until then I hadn't realized the intensity of the passion that those who disliked the Yankees possessed. I've had friends with bumper stickers, "I root for two teams, the Red Sox and anyone playing the Yankees." Notice the past tense of the verb (kidding and sorry about keying the paint on your trunk. When you squint, it does look a little like the Yankees logo, weird huh?).

Imagine my surprise to come across an item on ESPN that at first made me smile, but now, has hurt my feelings, "Indians, NOT Yankees, Most Hated Team in Baseball" What? The Cleveland Indians, a Big Wahoo Welcome, and all the rest of the less than miraculous happenings along the Cuyahoga River, those Cleveland Indians? 

Obviously, this was all long before the Houston Astros elevated cheating to an Olympic event (though I guess you could argue the Russians beat them to that). I thought it must be a bad joke, like the two hundred and forty-seven sequels to Major League, which was one of the greatest sports movies of all time. 

Seriously, the Cleveland Indians? We're talking Bob Uecker over that huckleberry, Phil Rizzuto, 'just a bit outside' versus 'Holy Cow!' C'mon! But there it is in black and white, or whatever color electrons are on your monitor, 0.9 to 1.8, but I do take some solace with the amazing consistency of The Olde Town Team, who finished second. Again. 

I can hear the rending of garments all the way to Harvard Square. Burn On.

-bill kenny

My First Ever TED Talk

Talk about 'ideas worth spreading...'

Now go and have whatever kind of day you'd like.
-bill kenny

I Would Love to Stand Here and Talk with You

I recently endured a birthday (I would only use 'celebrated' if there'd been a pony ride (inside joke) but there wasn't. Again.) and I've taken to seeing repetitions and patterns in many instances and situations where perhaps they've actually visible only to me. 

Looking at where we are in the City of Norwich Budget Adoption Process (I'm working on a line of commemorative tee-shirts and coffee cups with a booth at the foot of the stairs at City Hall but capital letters is a good first step), all I can keep thinking about is how (much more) often we're going to continue in the same cycle of propose, react with alarm, scale back a little, grudgingly adopt while vowing next year will be different and then starting again the following year as if this one had never happened. Sort of like lather, rinse, repeat while watching Bill Murray in Groundhog Day (and now you where today's title is from). 

If Captain Yossarian in Heller's Catch-22 received a medal for going around the bridge twice, what time do you think our awards parade will start and who, among us, won't be marching in it? People prefer problems that are familiar to solutions that are not, and that's why we keep having the same dangling conversations with one another on the same aspects of our municipal budget every year. 

And then we're surprised, no, that's not the right word, shocked is the word I should use, just shocked that the same challenges we failed to rise up and address last year, and the year before, and the year before that, are still here and still unresolved. 

Talk about tradition. Which is what we do, talk. Mom used to say we had two ears and one mouth for a reason and we should use them in the same ratio, but too often we use public meetings and social media platforms to make sure we keep the No in Norwich. And then we make passion personal and become disagreeable while disagreeing (or am I the only one in this whole city like that?).

Monday night's City Council meeting with its tentative adoption of a preliminary budget for the next fiscal year should be an invitation, an incitement if you wish, to step up and speak out at this coming Monday's Second Public Hearing to tell the City Council on what and where you want your tax dollars invested. 

And yet, as so often happens, not enough of us will make a good-faith effort to offer realistic, reasonable, and reasoned proposals and counter-proposals to those on the City Council attempting to do what's best for as many of us as they can (even those of us who yell at them).    

The trouble isn't our words, however, it's the absence of willingness to transform words into actions. There's never a shortage of nay-sayers with a litany of 'coulda, would, and shoulda' because hindsight is always 20/20. 

Any success we hope to have in continuing to create the city we believe we deserve lies in bringing together pragmatists, visionaries, discouraged experts, enthusiastic beginners, and everyone in between because Norwich needs (just about) all of us and all the talents we can offer.  

Break the cycle. Otherwise, we'll do this all over again, next year.
-bill kenny

You Say 'How High?'

I happened across something the other day that one of my training instructors, Air Force Staff Sergeant G-----y, would have really enjoyed. 

Not sure if it would have pleased him as much as fucking with me while we were both in Air Force Basic Training at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, the largest US airbase in the world without a runway (he as a leader and I as part of the led), but I took solace in the realization that none of it was personal and all of it was designed to build character. 

Well, that's what I told myself, but I am a notorious liar. Cannot adequately express, forty-six years after it kept happening, how much I enjoyed him sticking the brim of his Smokey the Bear TI hat under the bill of my fatigue cap while staring into my eyes and yelling into my face, "Air MAN! When I say jump, you say 'how high?' Are we clear, college boy?" 

We were. And yet, there's this. 

Proving yet again, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Indeed.
-bill kenny

Alice Kramden Says Hello

As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. Never mind that I get weak-kneed on the top step of a ladder (a short ladder, truth to tell), I fell in love with the adventure part of the job. 

As an adult and now whatever we call people who are beyond being an adult which is what I am, I concede the idea of my being an astronaut is even more far-fetched than my being a professional baseball player and President of the United States (I was raised to believe you should have impossible dreams, and after enduring the Orange Shitstain's ineptitude of four years I don't think I'd have been as bad in the Oval Office).   

Still, my heart did skip a beat when I saw this on CNN.  

Hey Mother Earth, Won't you bring me back down? I've taken 'bout as much as I can....
-bill kenny 

The Circle Game

Depending on when you read this, our daughter will have already marked another anniversary observance of the hour of her birth. Be of good cheer, she's a night owl now, so the chances that she was still up at a little past four this morning when it was exactly the moment to sing a rousing chorus of 'Happy Birthday to Me' are pretty good.

If I'd not retired already, in theory, I'd be up and might have been tempted to serenade her using my Yakky Doodle voice to sing Happy Birthday, except she has her mother's enthusiasm for abrupt starts to the day and would have been in the foulest of moods for hours.

And that won't do, least of all on her birthday. I have a head full of memories and don't always sort wisely or well between what is real and what I remember as real (which causes me trouble and earns me stern looks). My wife has shoeboxes full of pictures of both of our children and in nearly all of them, Michelle is looking directly into the lens, into the eye of the person taking the picture. She has or shows, no fear of the world, another attribute she has from her mother.

Michelle and the love of her life, Kyle, are working on the next chapter of their lives, a chapter that will take them farther away physically than at least one father's heart would like as they, and she, continue to become a part of the bigger world.

She will always be our child-she knows this, we've told her this and she believes us. I'm not sure she's always comfortable with how often one of us (me) sees a four-year-old when she's saying something, though you'd think by now, I'd have abandoned that 'she's my four old' point of view as technically untenable. She should have such luck. Instead, I know that no matter how far or fast she grows and goes, she will always be our little girl. Happy Birthday, itty-bit!

You didn't think I still had this shot

-dad

We're Talking Serious Pony Rides

Today is the "Fastest Two Minutes in the Whole Dam World or Something Like It." It's Kentucky Derby Day, the Race for the Roses, and a hundred cliches that those who follow the Sport of Kings (and I wasn't sure what they meant for quite some time about that growing up) take as seriously as those who follow the World Series, the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup take their sports.

The difference being you don't get to ride a teammate around a track in anything resembling a counter-clockwise direction (I think; and do they change directions in Australia for the obvious reason) which is too bad because I imagine a placekicker riding around on a linebacker would be quite a striking visual.

All I know about the event today is what Dr. Hunter S. Thompson wrote in 1970 when I was barely eighteen years old. It tore my mind in two; your turn. And, you're welcome.

-bill kenny