I Know What Word You Thought I Typed

WARNING: The Surgeon General has determined blah, blah, blah, awful stuff, blah, blah, whenever it's Friday the 13th and fear of blah, blah, blah. The End. 

C'mon, none of us ever read disclaimers all the way through anyway so I figured I'd offer you a mock disclaimer, a slice of that mock apple pie made with Ritz crackers, and a tall frosty glass of something other than milk from a cow to wash it all down. Mmmmm. You got a little something on the side of your upper lip there, sunshine.

We've got the most highly developed brain of any species on this planet but we're also the only species who hate and fear one another for reasons such as different religions, skin colors, or political beliefs. So if any other species has the gift of speech (and I guess, the ability to read as well and a thumb that works a scroll ball) now might be a good time for one or more of them to ask aloud, 'how come the bi-peds are the crown of creation., anyway?'

On top of all those misplaced prides and prejudices (you don't suppose Jane is related to Steve, by any chance? I'm trying to imagine Fitzwilliam Darcy having a discussion with Oscar Goldman) we have the mother of all irrationalities, Friday the Thirteenth and the fear of it. 

Of course, it's only irrational if you don't put any stock into any of the literature or folk tales you've heard since you were young. There are seven-point two katrillion jillion websites (a number I just made up and have you ever known me to lie to you?) on every aspect of this day and date combination, and one's as good as the other, or as bad, depending on how you feel.

You might have a lucky number, or a special letter, or maybe a pony ride for your birthday (you ba$tard!), so far be it from me to pooh-pooh, pshaw, or tsk-tsk (I love when I can use classic ancient words; I am, after all, wearing Old Spice. And you thought I was kidding about the pony. And STOP clicking the link!) your values or beliefs. If they help you place your universe in order, that's fine.

I put all the cash in my wallet in order by denomination (Catholics go first, obviously) and then in sequence based on the serial number. My wife used to find this quirk endearing; now, not so much. She's helped me manage my compulsion by making sure I have very little folding money. Everyone standing behind me in lines everywhere as I used to put the bills in order is very grateful.

In a way, I guess it's counter-intuitive to wish you a happy Friday the Thirteenth especially since we'd be here all day on what a 'happy' one might look like. I'd say enjoy, perhaps savor it, as it's the only one we'll have in 2022. I don't know if Hallmark has cards, but, fingers crossed, I wouldn't be surprised. 
-bill kenny 

Redefining Dark Matter

I think we've all heard the expression, 'shit from Shinola.'  I have no idea where it originated or how it came into common (or frequent) usage. I think the best thing about it is it's helped nearly normalize a four-letter word that our folks told us to never use when we were small. As if height had anything to do with it. 

Speaking of expressions, we've all also heard 'death and taxes,' but as I've since learned there's another pairing, a cause and effect if you will, that's as inevitable and unavoidable. 

Buckle up, buttercup; this is a fascinating but disquieting read.  

As Kate well knows, though all of us are full of it, none of us thought you could stack it that high.
-bill kenny

Soft Shell or Hard Sell

The more things change, the more they remain the same. I first offered what follows almost a dozen years ago and it was, at best, my imperfect recollection of a really clever conversation that had happened upstairs in what was The Bulletin's offices in the late-90s when they were Franklin Street. 

The often ferocious reactions to the attempted reclamation and repurposing of 331 Main Street, aka The Y, is what sparked my memory. Anyway, from long ago:

Dave and Dan were standing on the dock near Howard Brown Park, crabbing. They'd known one another for many years and had watched as their city, so bustling in their youth, quietly disappeared one business, one restaurant, and one block at a time leaving nothing behind for anyone. For them, crabbing was more than relaxation, it was a diversion to take their minds off their city's troubles.

Except Dave had other troubles as well. As quickly as he caught crabs and turned around to drop them into his twenty-gallon catch bucket, one of the crabs already in the bucket would make a break for it. Dave spent almost as much time chasing fugitive crabs skittering down the dock and back into the river as he did fishing for them.

Dan took his crabbing at a very different pace. He worked with a small hoop net and bait cage, catching no more than one single crab at a time and when he did catch a crab he'd spend minutes turning it over, examining it from every angle, holding it up to the light, looking at the cheliped, the apron, and the walking legs. Sometimes, after concluding the examination, Dan would drop the crab into a child's sand bucket that was his catch bucket and the most recent captive would settle down in the water coming to rest on top of another unfortunate crab.

At other times, Dan, when he'd finished examining his catch, would simply throw the crab back into the river, rebait his trap and lower his hoop net over the side of the dock and resume crabbing.

As the hours wore on, Dave spent more and more of his time struggling to keep any of the crabs he'd caught in his dockside catch bucket, often first hearing the lid clatter as it was pushed off by one of the crabs, then chasing it down the dock before, with one final leap, it eluded his grasp and reached the freedom of the river. Dan watched Dave struggle, sometimes slowly shaking his head in sympathy, and, as the shadows grew longer in the afternoon sun, he offered his friend some advice.

"You're doing it all wrong," Dan said. Dave stared at Dan for a moment before finally pointing out, "It looks to me like we're both doing the exact same thing so I don't understand what I could be doing wrong that you're not. Point in fact, Dan, I've caught a LOT more crabs than you have but I'm not able to keep them because they never give up trying to escape and eventually get away!"

"Yeah," said Dan, "that's your problem. It's what you're catching."
Dave, by now, nearly furious could feel the gorge rise in his veins as he practically shouted at Dan, "how can there be a problem with what I'm catching? I'm catching crabs-you're catching crabs. We're both catching crabs!" 

"True enough," Dan agreed, "but you're catching all kinds of crabs. I'm only catching Norwich crabs." Dave stared at his friend for a long time. "What do you mean, you're catching 'Norwich crabs?' What the hell is a Norwich crab and how could that possibly make a difference?" Dave demanded to know. 

"It's the most critical difference," said Dan. "With Norwich crabs, when you have one and put him in the catch bucket if he tries to get out, all the other Norwich crabs hold on to him very tightly and keep him from ever succeeding."

When I was told this story now over twenty-five years ago, I thought it was extremely funny. It never occurred to me that it was also true (but it doesn't have to be). 

If we, and by "we" I mean you and me, whoever and wherever we are, don't learn to let go of the hurt and anger from previous failures and choose instead to reach for rewards, despite the risks, at our next opportunity, be it economic development, learning new things like clog dancing, or letting someone into our lives, this story goes from being very funny to being very sad all the way to being our last story and the one that becomes our epitaph. 

Trust me on this one.
-bill kenny 

Imagine a Glass Onion in an Octopus's Garden

I made my living for decades with words (and yes, that probably explains why I had to set up a GoFundMe page in order to retire), but between us, I have no words to describe this.

Aside from surreally beautiful.
-bill kenny  

Som man säger på svenska: Get Back, The Sequel

I live in a house filled with IKEA furniture. From our earliest years as young marrieds in central Germany, my wife and I shopped in IKEA, in Wallau as I recall. There was, and remains, something very 'this is not furniture like my parents have' about what IKEA offers, and for me, that's an inherent part of the appeal.

Of course, grabbing some Swedish meatballs and lingonberries is now one of the attractions when we travel to New Haven to our current nearest IKEA store, though there's plenty of room (with parking) for one, in my opinion where I live in Norwich, Connecticut (and if you're an IKEA site selector, contact these folks to talk about some of the places you could set up shop right here in the Rose of New England). If it helps seal the deal, folks around here love lingonberries (or will once they know what they are). 

Anyway.
As it happens IKEA is not just a great place to buy furniture, it may also be in the running as a great place to sell the furniture you bought from them that you no longer want or need. Or as they could say in Stockholm, Begagnad Reinkarnation (though I'm guessing they probably don't). 

I can see a black-market springing up for previously-used Allen wrenches or as they apparently really do say, insexnyckel. De där fräcka minxarna!
-bill kenny

You're Tethered to Another

I think my wife needs a new mirror and perhaps that's what I should have gotten her for Mother's Day. In the mirror she currently has, she sees what four-plus decades of life with a loon has brought her and what raising two children born in one culture but who grew up in another can do for the lines on her face, the corners of her mouth and her state of mind. 

I think the most telling is when you do so much of it by yourself because the man you married is still sorting out who he is. She's way too hard on herself. I can clearly see, even without my glasses, the most beautiful woman in the world, and I cannot imagine her as anyone else, ever.

When my wife told me she was pregnant with Patrick, our oldest, I was so taken with 'becoming a father' it took me forever to realize the woman I had loved and married was also becoming someone else-someone who could better prepare our son and later our daughter, Michelle, for the world. 

I remember all the small shopping excursions to map where every element of the nursery could be purchased (she was reluctant about buying anything before the births, the tug of cultural superstition being what it was), the calculations and deliberations on what to buy, how many of it to purchase and where to store it/them, and my complete failure to accurately imagine how our lives would change with the birth of a child.

Man Smart, Woman Smarter especially in my case, and thank goodness for that. I can remember Patrick at five or six, clutching a toy in the Wallau Toys "R" Us in West Germany (they had over 55 stores in a reunited Germany; I never got to see Geoffrey in Lederhosen for which I'm grateful), walking past me to ask Sigrid if he might be allowed to take it home and after she agreed and he'd placed it in the cart, I said to him, 'hey buddy, you could've asked me-I'm your Dad, you know.' And he agreed then added, 'but she makes all the decisions' and continued walking down the aisle.

It's true and more than about toys and I wouldn't want it any other way. My wife has treated skinned knees and broken hearts, has reviewed countless hours of homework assignments, repaired 'but those are my favorite jeans' so expertly the kids across the street thought they were store-bought and not only gave us a family, she made us a family. Probably as true in your house as well, my two children and I look to my wife as the fingers on the hand look to the thumb. I can never accurately portray who she is and convey what she means to me.

So today is the day we officially celebrate the wives and mothers we love with the help of the greeting card folks, the candy companies, and all the florists (and now there are candy flowers, edible arrangements-talk about shortening the distance) and if we're very lucky, they know we know that one day is not enough--and a lifetime together is still so often too little.
-bill kenny

Back Then the Alphabet Only Had Fourteen Letters

This is from a long time ago about a time even longer ago(er). Wow. I called it: 

Sayonara Kid, Have a Nice Day

I cleaned out my work desk yesterday for the delivery of a new one. I know what you’re thinking, ‘how empty is this guy’s life that he’s writing about getting a new desk?’ You’re the one reading about it, so you tell me. Et Tu, Brute?

The desk was in the office I first worked in when I arrived from Germany in the fall of 1991 when I wasn’t sure of where I lived (let me clarify: I knew it was Norwich; I just didn’t know the name of the city). I told people I lived in Norwalk because I'd heard of that place, an answer that got some stares and glares when in response to ‘how long does it take you to get here?’ I’d answer ‘about twenty minutes.’ 

That answer always got me the rejoinder, that 'well, take it easy-we don't have the autobahn around here.' (like anyone could mistake two lanes of I-95 North and South for the A3 nach Koln.)

At the time, I couldn’t understand the looks of incredulity as people offered me that advice. I’ve since become inured to them. Point in fact for about two weeks, I couldn’t find the house I lived in after dark, because I got lost. I kept that to myself since I didn't think that had anything to do with how fast I was going.

The desk was, aside from me, the oldest thing in the office and as the years went by, it filled with the detritus of the decade-long daily grind. Actually, I just remembered that wasn't true-the computer on the desk was the oldest thing (third oldest to be honest) and was a 286 something or other with, wait for it, Windows 1.0. No lie.

In the various drawers, I found foolscap with notes and names of people from a decade and a half ago with cryptic additional information that may have once had value but is now long lost and gone. Clearing out a bottom drawer I surprised myself with two framed photos of my children from ‘back in the day’ when they were very much children in primary grades at school and these were the portraits that were done on Picture Day. 

I hadn’t realized how much I missed those kids until I saw them again and smiled because I’d put the portraits away for safe-keeping, so safe I’d lost sight of them. I took them home so my wife could preserve them as I can't even do that right.

I was digging through another drawer, in theory to clear it out, but actually to dump its contents into a container while the old desk goes away and the new desk is moved in. Then the contents of the container will be emptied into the new desk drawer for the remainder of this century or longer and we go round and round and round in the circle game. 

On a small piece of paper, neatly cut out from the return corner of an envelope, I found the address of my Mom’s brother, Uncle Jim, whom we buried two years ago. It stung to realize I’ve been so self-absorbed that staring at it might have been my first time thinking about him since his passing.

New things are nice-in moderation. I have a new office and with it came some new responsibilities and I appreciate greatly the concern the people I work for have for me in going out and getting ergonomically spiffy (I don't think that's the actual term, but could be) furnishings to perhaps encourage me to continue to work for them. 

Like so many across this country, in light of crash and burns in a number of retirement plan investments, I'm now signed up for WUD, so no worries. And I have no life (free-will decision, mine) so having a new and empty desk drawer to put the memories in is only necessary if you make some. Otherwise, I'll be keeping my pencil case there.
-bill kenny