Of course, he did, and so, too, should you. This is World Bee Day, not to be confused with World Spelling Bee Day (cool your jets, LeVar). Though I think an argument can be made that our lives (and lifestyles) without pollinators would spell disaster, so there's that.
But you don't need scholarly tomes, a dab of pop music wisdom will do ya.
Semi-carnally.
-bill kenny
As an undergraduate on the banks of the Olde Raritan half a century ago, I followed Rutgers lacrosse, in the sense that when there were home games I went to where they played with a small group of acquaintances and a large amount of beer and got ossified watching the lacrosse team run around and do whatever lacrosse involves.
I don't remember much about the games, or Rutgers, or most anything from that era of my life (which upon reflection often seems more like an error) except the drinking of large amounts of beer. I have concluded memory is over-rated.
I mention all of that because I fell in love with this story from the moment I started reading it.
And, yes for obvious reasons, you should be able to buy your very own Scrotie kit at Dick's.
-bill kenny
In case you wondered otherwise, this is my opinion based on what I perceive to be facts (your mileage may and probably will vary). A lot of not just my thinking about who we are and how we do business/live/school/shop/and all the other aspects of peopling has, I concede, been changed forever by the last two years of COVID and the Greek Alphabet of variants in our lives.
Just wanted to put that out there in case you mistakenly thought you'd find 'the answer' in what follows. Sorry; as we used to say in the Air Force, 'if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?' and before you ask, no, I'm not.
As we've discovered, or should have thanks to projects like The Lofts at Ponemah Mills, Thermos on the Thames, and The Mill at Indian Leap Apartments, when we reimagine Industrial Age factory space for all ages and incomes, sometimes what we see depends on what we look at.
And, yes, before this goes any further, I am willing to concede that you can accomplish a lot more not just in Norwich, but anywhere, with a bright smile, a big idea, and a bag full of money than you can with just the smile and the idea. As a matter, my evil twin, Skippy, highly recommends making sure the bag is full to the top
That said, back in 2010, we who lived here approved a bond to foster and fuel development in Chelsea. No one in Norwich was more enthused about that bond proposal or more strident and vociferous (some suggested 'obnoxious') in urging its adoption than I.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, including the annual Shakespeare Festival, that help determine the gap between the promise and the actual performance when we speak of the number of new businesses established (and still extant), the expansion of the City's Grand List, and the growth in revenues for Norwich Public Utilities.
How we've done, as I mentioned earlier, has a lot to do with our frame of mind. Could things be better (however you define better), sure; could they be worse (in light of the last two years, how would that be possible?). I'm not peddling sour grapes, just the w(h)ine of observable facts.
A wise man (well, a wise guy) once told me there are six phases to a project: Enthusiasm, Disillusionment, Panic, Search for the Guilty, Punishment of the Innocent, and Praise and Honors for the Non-Participants, From where I sit, we expend too much energy and emotion at the Searching for the Guilty phase at the first sign that our project isn't going according to Hoyle.
As a city, we do great beginnings but as we press on and approach the middle our resolve seems to falter, and too often we start looking for the exits to bail out or for scapegoats to blame. Here in the third decade of the 21st Century, Norwich needs to be mobile, agile, and hostile (in the last instance I'm talking about a degree of self-confidence in ourselves that may look like arrogance to others. Between us, living here for thirty years I still don't see the self-assurance we should have).
Trying to re-engineer and rebuild a perfect downtown one building at a time (from Burnham Square to the Carroll Building where Main meets Water Street) keeps coming up short, I'd argue, because we always run out of patience before we run out of money, and then we run out of money. But here's the thing: it's okay; we can try again.
The infusion of money from the American Rescue Plan, as earmarked by the City Manager and the City Council, can be the start of a process that's partly economic development and, quite frankly self-help. We don't have to be great to start, we just have to start to be great.
We should be proud of our schools and teachers and our terrific public safety professionals and volunteers as well as world-class public works and public utilities infrastructure. The thing we who live here really need to start to believe in is ourselves. Let's spend one moment less moaning and mooning over what we don't have each day, and one moment more celebrating what we do have.
The world keeps changing and we need to do the same because unless we keep moving forward we will inevitably fall behind. Entropy or Excellence. We can remain prisoners of our past, or choose to be the architects of our future.
-bill kenny
We've all heard the expression, 'no news is good news.' I've never really understood the logic behind that conclusion, unless its opposite is fake news in which case, yes, please with a double helping by all means, and have reached an age where I doubt proof is forthcoming anytime soon.
Anyway. I'm not sure if this is no news, good news, or something else.
In an increasingly unstable world, all I can say to Akihiko and Hatsune is good luck.
-bill kenny
I am, as those who have met me can attest, the most caustically cynical person if not on Earth than at the very least in this hemisphere.
If our paths have yet to cross, let me congratulate you on your good fortune but also point out the laws of probability being what they are, your luck is bound to run out at some point. Thank you in advance for being a good sport.
I was out walking yesterday afternoon on a beautiful day here in The Rose of New England (you are familiar with New England, I hope; we are where the history comes from) and as I made my way around Chelsea Parade, just steps from my house, I saw the flag was at half-staff.
I think I felt a shiver of pride (did your cynicism warning light just come on? It should have), that at a time when we cannot and will not agree on basic human rights for every single person; where we've decided poverty is the fault of the poor, themselves, as a punishment for not being wealthy; when we've reparsed the meaning of The New Colossus to apply only to those enumerated in the Constitution (or was it the Magna Carta?); where worries about propping up Wall Street overwhelm efforts to rescue Main Street; when lies on a scale and scope not heard since Goebbels was doing public relations for the TeppichKauer fueled ignorant, ill-informed, and aggrieved mobs of almost all white men to storm our Capitol for the first time since the War of 1812; and prostituted our mass media to create echo chambers that allow us to demonize everyone and anyone with whom we disagree from the comfort of our own living rooms, my fellow Americans, we've found something to both celebrate while blaming all those we already hate!.
It's something we did to, rather than for, ourselves because, let's face it, there are entirely too many of 'those people' (and you know the ones I'm talking about) so we more or less evened out the odds by quarreling and quibbling for so long all while doing as little as possible for as long as possible to address the horror of Coronavirus-19 that it has now killed one million of us. And shows no sign of slowing much less ceasing.
No wonder we're so proud to call ourselves the greatest country on earth.
-bill kenny
I'm not a big fan of the neuralgia of nostalgia. At a tick over seventy (still within the speed limit in some states), I realize there's more in the mirror than up ahead but I don't spend a lot of time looking back because that's not where I'm heading.
All of that is a preface and prelude for a short chapter out of the story of my life from over a half-century ago and I wish I could say it makes me smile, but it doesn't but there's always a chance it will with you.
As with all old stories, it starts with old technology, in this case, America On-Line, AOL. Remember when these were the three happiest words in the English language? Strange days indeed. Did you know at one point AOL bought Time Warner and seemed to be unstoppable? Yeah, that's another story for another time. Now, like Netscape, Prodigy, Blackberry, and Palm Pilots, it's another Ozymandias.
Except, Percy, I still have an AOL email account. I've forgotten about it more often in the last decades than I've remembered it, but it's still around and still receives mail. Not that long ago, and sort of the precipitant for today's meanderings, I had an email from one of the two preparatory schools I attended for high school.
My father was headmaster of the Lower School and I was, I always assumed, a scholarship child in the Upper School. I (we, my dad and I) commuted from New Jersey and I think aside from George B, who lived in Brooklyn, everyone else lived in Manhattan. That actually changed junior year when my father recruited the very tall son of a fellow who got on the train with us in Metuchen every weekday to attend school and play basketball. Not necessarily in that order as it turned out.
Lots of things happened fifty-two years ago and among them was my dad leaving his position with the school and our family moving to Rhinebeck, New York, for what felt like about an hour but was at least a week to ten days, and then we moved to East Rutherford, New Jersey, where he took a position at a prep school in West Orange where I, as a sort of sullen BOGO I guess, completed my senior year. That prep school closed after my class graduated and I suspect the real estate overlooking New York City fetched a pretty penny.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago in the AOL mail was an invitation from my first prep school to attend a fiftieth reunion celebration that was rescheduled because of COVID-19. By the time, I opened the e-mail the date of the event had passed, not that I would have been even vaguely tempted, but what struck me was a photo attached to the email and how many of the names I could match to the faces in the photo.
One of my favorite sentiments if not songs from The Beatles is George Harrison's contribution to SGT Pepper, "Within You, Without You." There's something reassuring (if not also a little ego-deflating) about the idea that 'life goes on within you and without you.'
For someone like me who has a rather inflated opinion of himself, it always catches me up a little short to realize how much of what exists beyond my control, temporal or otherwise, existed before I arrived on the scene and will continue to do so after I exit stage right, or left.
So as sobering as this article was for me and my ego, taking it to its logical extreme with this little play-at-home extension was truly soul-crushing.
If it's all the same to you, I'll show myself out now and will create an absence similar to the hole in a bucket of water when you pull your fist out.
-bill kenny
