Westward Leading, Still Proceeding

I got so caught up in the insurrection Anniversary Specials going on yesterday I blanked on a more traditional January 6 observance. My apologies and if I could I'd give you a gift card to Bed, Bath, and Myrrh.

When I was a wee slip of a lad yesterday was a very big deal, especially for Catholic school kids. Not as in 'yippee! we have it off!' or 'oh, it's a Holy Day of Obligation' but because some of the nuns called it The Feast of the Magi while others, and I think technically this was the correct term, called it The Epiphany and we were made to understand in many ways, it was the beginning of the tradition of gift-giving for Christmas.

I love the song in any and all of the hundred million variations that exist, and, to this day, the chorus actually sends a chill up my spine (I'm padding my resume just in case there's ever an opening on the College of Cardinals, be it in Saint Louis or elsewhere) "We three kings of Orient are, Bearing gifts we traverse afar. Field and fountain, moor and mountain. Following yonder star." 

In much the same way as we pledged allegiance to the flag years before we ever understood the meaning of 'allegiance' none of us knew what 'traverse' meant or what a 'moor' was, but we made up in volume what we lacked in knowledge (a habit many of us have carried into our adult lives, unfortunately).

When you're in third grade, which I once was, you wonder why the cartoon ghost is named for one of the three kings and how many r's and h's are supposed to be in myrrh (and no matter how often and how different you spell it, it never looks right, even when it is) and why anyone would give that as a gift to a baby. 

I can remember the nuns having difficulty explaining the Feast of the Circumcision and happily embracing its new name, Feast of the Sunday within the Octave of Christmas or Feast of the Holy Family. I suspect one or more of those same nuns would have had difficulties explaining to us technically, how Joseph was sort of Jesus' step-dad and exactly what a Virgin birth meant. Good for them that we were years away from those questions--not the case anymore here in the early light of 2022 (and this is progress, in what way do you suppose?).

What I recall from religion class was how the Three Kings followed "The Star" and encountered King Herod who was a puppet of the Roman occupation and paranoid about his own future and the last thing he needed was any whisperings about a Messiah. 

Supposedly he told the Magi to let him know where and when they found the Saviour so that, he, too, could worship Him (but an angel appeared to the kings in a dream and told them to find another way home that skipped Herod). The nuns told us about the Feast of the Holy Innocents, which didn't improve Herod's stock at all, and impressed me most deeply because it meant even then (though I was a little fuzzy on when, exactly, 'even then' was) how dangerous that part of the world was (and has remained).

Someplace, in my childhood is a young believer who thought it was a fitting cap on the Christmas season and read the short story of Jim and Delia and always loved the line, "Forget the hashed metaphor" without ever once understanding it. Hoping you do likewise.
-bill kenny

I Thought Elephants Never Forget

I scoured the Hallmark Store looking for a card appropriate for the occasion and gave thought to a visit to the Mike Lindell website to see if My Pillow was having a sale in connection with today being the first anniversary of the attempt by the YeeHawdists of Vanilla ISIS to overturn the November 2020 election that made the MAGA Muttonheads' Savior, Pantload45, a one-term President, and an all-time loser. 

Somehow, it doesn't seem (yet) to be the stain on the calendar the way it is on our history, but I have my hopes. For all of those who whinged '...but her emails!' raved on about the 'largest inauguration crowd in history,' and vowed to never forget 'the Bowling Green Massacre,' it seems to me you're gambling I've forgotten the Blue-Plate Insurrection Special served up piping hot not just on the steps of The Capitol but also in its hallways as belligerent, nearly-toothless gorms (so white they were visible from space) with no appreciation of history tried to make some of their own. and like everything connected with the asshat who was our collective misfortune to have as the forty-fifth President of the United States, it failed.

But, here's a little something to refresh your (selective) memory. And if you're counting on my forgiving and forgetting any time soon, yeah. NOPE.
-bill kenny 

  

Words into Action

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten. That’s a truism that has the advantage of also being the truth. This is how (and more importantly, why) Norwich, I think, so often finds itself still trying to find its place in the world much as it has for over three and half centuries and many of us who live here seem to cycle through the various stages of surprise and disappointment as each old year ends and the next one begins.

The Mayor’s State of the City Address Monday night to mark the first City Council meeting of the new year, perhaps because one is delivered every year, somehow loses its impact as a statement of intent and purpose, and that’s too bad because sometimes we can do with a bit of what Teddy Roosevelt called ‘the bully pulpit.’

I think planting a flag, signaling a direction, sounding a call to action if not to arms is more than worthwhile; the State of the City speech may be the single most important thing the Mayor, any Mayor, can say in a year, topped only by what they do the rest of the year. But it’s not just what the mayor says, it’s what we hear and whether we choose to listen, especially when what we need to hear and what we want to hear are often two different things.

Again, in November we had full slates of candidates seeking seats on both our Board of Education and City Council as well as for the office of Mayor. Some might say we were spoiled for choice but in light of the generosity of those who volunteer for long hours, contentious public hearings where speakers take turns contradicting one another, served with all the lukewarm coffee you could ever want, in what certainly do not look like jobs that are the most fun you can have with your clothes on, I think we’re just spoiled.

Our voter turnout, the pulse if you will of the heartbeat of our democracy and the key to any effort to improve where we call home, remained at about the same level it has been for too many years. Perhaps we should have started a rumor that there was an iPhone or PlayStation giveaway at the polling places? 

See? This is why I’m no good at this political stuff but let’s be honest, too many of us see government as something done to us and not for us, and all the brave talk about regionalization, mill rates, enterprise zones, zoning variances, and the other nouns, verbs, and gerunds of political grammar get lost in what one former Mayor accurately calls ‘corrosive cynicism.’

Those whom we’ve elected will soon enough feel the sting of our disappointment if they fail to guess what we want before we ourselves know what that may be, or how to achieve it. That’s unfair and all of us need to do better. We need to learn to speak and collaborate with one another to better use ideas, ideals, and pragmatic plans to build bridges that join rather than walls that continue to divide

The New Year was just this past Saturday. What could be a more perfect time to begin again than now?
-bill kenny

And Not One Was Stepped On

Our two children had a large amount of both Lego, and in their more formative years, Duplo all around the house. In light of the successes they've had in their lives as adults, I'm assuming the creativity that was nurtured as youngsters paid off. 

I lost track of the number of times I stepped on one or more of their blocks, but I think if this were what they were working on I might not have minded.

Say it with me: Everything Is Awesome!
-bill kenny 

Climbing Up on Solsbury Hill.

I came across an end-of-year article on "The 14 Best Apps You've Never Heard of" by something/someone called Cool Material. There's the usual suspects, weather and travel, and then there's RunPee.

RunPee, you say. What's RunPee? According to Cool Material: "Here’s a hypothetical: You’re at the movie theater and didn’t intend on getting the large Coke with the large popcorn, but it was literally only a dollar more than the regular, so you were like, “WOW, WHAT A BARGAIN!” 

"Before the previews are over, you’ve already downed half the soda. Now you’re filled to bursting with high fructose corn syrup water, and the movie’s about to start. You need a bathroom break, but you don’t want to miss any of the action. What’s a guy to do? BOOM. RunPee. 

"RunPee is an app that tells you the perfect time to run to the bathroom during your movie and gives you a synopsis of what you’ve missed when you get back. You’ll never miss an important scene again. It’s basically the best app since Tinder. iOS Android"

End hunger? Cure disease? Stop War? Why would you ever think technology should be applied to such issues when we have RunPee. You can keep my things, they've come to take me home.
-bill kenny

Not Even a Little Bit Creepy

I'm surrounded by technology I don't understand, and that's probably for the best because while I'm not especially fearful of it, I do know that if much of it were to become (or, in fact, already is) sentient, it would have little to fear from me. If intelligence were dynamite, I'd have barely enough to blow my own nose, if you follow my drift.

As a kid, I loved Disney audio-animatronics. They were as Brave New World as I could have ever imagined (or imagineered, as Walt himself might have said). From what I can figure out from this article, we're way beyond all of that now. 

Somehow, I'm not finding quite as much brave in this Brave New World as I did not so long ago. 
-bill kenny

So Far, So Good

Okay, it just got started admittedly, HOWEVER, this New Year has been pretty good, so far. I'll concede even as this posts at the stroke of midnight that at this moment I am sound asleep and have been for hours (and hope to remain in that state for a couple of hours more). But, all things considered, 2022 has been good. I'll take my small victories where I can find them, thank you, and would strongly encourage you to do the same. 

I hope despite everything that went on and didn't go on, that 2021 was good, and if not good, then kind, to you and yours. I'm welcoming the arrival of 2022 most especially for the hope and promise of what it may bring for us all. I realize a year from now some of us will not be here to read the update to this entry (or write it, for that matter, I suppose) but while the actors and actresses are changed and exchanged on a daily basis (in every aspect of our everyday lives), the play goes on. We change partners but continue in the dance.

With apologies to Dickens, 2021 was the best of years and the worst of years and 2022 will be the same. It's not really about the number of days and/or hours in a year, or a lifetime, but what we do with the space between the beginning and the end. I hope you have all the space you need for that which you need to do and look forward to talking to you for every day of this new year's adventure for as long as we both share the orb.
-bill kenny