What Hath Jimmy Buffett Wrought?

Is there anything more popular, universally loved, and ubiquitous when we're naming food entrees than pizza? Maybe, and I'm suggesting only maybe a cheeseburger. 

Love 'em? Heck, who doesn't, right? 

As long as you haven't eaten or are planning on eating anytime soon (or ever again if you view all of it), you might want to check this out and then rethink where on the food pyramid you're placing that next cheeseburger.    

I'd say Guten Appetit, but who are we kidding? 
-bill kenny

The Original Anti-Fascists

What had seemed like a beginning in the near daylight off the coast of Normandy in France, seventy-eight years ago today was actually the end, if you will, of the planning phase of Operation Overlord and years of planning from an embattled outpost, England, left to fight on practically alone after the fall of France in June nearly four years earlier.

This time last week we were all talking about those 'who made the ultimate sacrifice' and 'who paid the ultimate price' and here we are today commemorating an event that marked the beginning of the end of the murderous darkness and mayhem into which first Europe and ultimately the entire world descended that resulted in the deaths of over sixty million people, marked the end of the British Empire, helped redraw the maps of Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East and redivided much of the world into communist and non-communist spheres of influence.

The personages and personalities we always associate with this event are enormous and epic and their fame is well-deserved but I found an old clip, its source made me smile, that focused more, and more accurately, on the hundreds of thousands of men leading lives quiet desperation, who did what they were trained to do when they were trained to do it, and thought in nothing larger than one-step increments.

They struggled and died by the tens of thousands wading ashore from the landing craft to the beach, getting off the beachhead to an embankment for cover, rejoining a unit, and moving forward, a footfall at a time, until the trickle from the beach became a torrent and that torrent became a flood facing murderous opposition from men who in many respects were their twins, but were on the other side for reasons that had as much to do with accidents of geography and birth as with ideology and politics.

Back in 1984, I had an opportunity to retrace the assault on Normandy with a US Army unit who took their history very seriously. Busloads of us, all living and stationed in Germany, arrived in considerably more style and comfort than the advance party in 1944 to discover every, or seemingly every, bar in the city limits of Normandy is called 6 Juin. 

At the bar (whose name you can guess) across from the church where a US paratrooper's chute had gotten snagged in the steeple and John Steele supposedly died in a hail of bullets from a Wehrmacht defender, spotlights illuminated the church top and a parachute still billowed as a human replica dangled and twisted from the rigging. As it turned out, he didn't die but was captured by the Germans only to escape and rejoin his unit.

Army chopper pilots are tough, hard cases, but even they softened when we toured Pointe du Hoc where the US Army's 2nd Ranger Battalion achieved the impossible and it was but one brief moment in a non-stop amazing story of heroism that went on for weeks that summer as twelve allied nations, Australia, Canada, Belgium, France, Czechoslovakia, Greece, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States pushed inland, driving back an enemy that had nearly half a decade to prepare for just such an attack but had failed to calculate the selflessness of the sacrifice that hundreds of thousands were willing to make so that generations of unborn could have the freedom to do as they wished, even if, too often, that freedom included ignoring the enormity of the sacrifice so many had made for them.

The beaches of Normandy are quite beautiful if you don't mind looking at the remnants of the Mulberry Harbors that the Allies needed to use to stage reinforcements and supplies prior to the final assault on the beaches themselves.

The seagulls and sandpipers run ahead of you, by just inches, often backward staring up at you, the flightless sojourner, walking among the crashing of the waves trying and failing, to imagine the carnage and chaos that covered every inch of these beaches all those years ago.

Our final day there, we devoted to the Normandy American Cemetery, a beautifully sad or sadly beautiful island of peace and calm created to honor those who died for those whom they never met but whose lives were made possible by their sacrifice.

Today, if only for a moment, think about those men and, in looking at the challenges you face in your life, resolve to make a difference as best as you can, in much the way they did, alone and far from home and hearth on a beach half a world away.

-bill kenny

Bagel Seeds by Another Name

I usually (quite often to be honest) have dry cereal for breakfast. Many people call it 'cold cereal' as opposed to oatmeal which is hot I guess though because it has the consistency of wallpaper paste I've never been tempted to try it. Ever.

I don't put milk on my dry cereal. Tangent alert: I worked for a fellow in Germany who earlier in his career had worked for an ad agency in Frankfurt am Main who landed the Kellogg's Corn Flakes account and discovered their biggest challenge was in getting German families in the middle part of the 1950s to STOP putting orange juice on the cereal and instead use milk. I have no idea if the story is true but then I came across this and now I don't know what to think.

Anyway. I don't eat a large variety/assortment of cereals, mostly Cheerios (not the chocolate ones), and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Cheerios, their box says, is good for me. Some people say 'tell it to the marines,' others, like me, say tell me more. Fair enough. 

I'm seventy with enough medical maladies to fill up three people's charts. I always measure twice before even thinking about cutting once and will take very seriously the perspective of Joe Jackson until I shuffle off this mortal coil.
-bill kenny

Past Shipwrecked Daughters of Wicked Waters

Sometimes through all the noise, you have to strain to hear the melody.

Sail on, Sailor.
-bill kenny

Five Years Is but a Moment

Five years ago, today, I said goodbye to my mother as my sister Kara held her cell phone to Mom's head as she lay dying in a hospital bed. I have no idea how Kara had the strength to be able to do that as Mom made an effort to speak to as many of her six children as she could in the time she had remaining.

That, as much as anything in the almost eighty-nine years she lived was Mom: her count, her cadence, her priorities. Always focused, always forward. 

Sigrid found this picture, which she took when Mom came to visit us in Germany in 1989.
We appear to be discussing how much more we should have tipped our hairdresser.

From what I know (or think I know) of my siblings and their lives, I think she taught us well by her example every day for all those years. There's not a day that passes when I don't think of Mom and know that the sadness and tears which always accompany those memories are followed by joyfulness in my heart for being her son.
-bill kenny

The Kids in the Hall

We've all encountered people with sweatshirts or tee-shirts that say 'ask me about my grandchildren.' I, at some point in the past unknown to me, have been apparently fitted with one that says 'tell me about anything; I don't mind.'

I was in the local grocery yesterday afternoon behind a fellow carrying a lot of stuff in his bare hands, without the benefit of a shopping cart or a basket. I've had that happen, where I get ambushed in the baked goods by freshly made oatmeal and raisin cookies while I sort of have my hands already full (A reach exceeds grasp kind of moment). 

Have there been times I've parked the item I originally came into the store to get and bought a lot of other stuff, taken it all out to the car, and then returned to purchase the original item? Yes, guilty as charged.

Not sure what was happening with this fellow. He was pushing a bag of charcoal briquettes in front of him but did not seem to have any meat in his hands you would normally associate with grilling (and I don't care to imagine where else he might have put it). 

When he started mumbling, from where I was behind him (I scrupulously enforce that ATM space rule when I'm in line. It will never be my hot breath you feel on your neck and vice versa) I thought he was talking to the scandal magazines alongside the gum and candy. One of the most sobering aspects of growing old is how, as I've aged, less and less of the headlines or pictured celebrities mean anything to me at all.

Anyway, Marty Mumbles seemed to be talking to the magazine with what looked like Mel Gibson and (maybe) his girlfriend as a thumbnail-sized photo on the cover. The fellow wasn't talking to Mel, as it happened. I looked up to realize, as he stacked his stuff (and '12 Items or less' became a suggestion, exactly when? I missed that memo) as high as he could on the smallest possible amount of space on the conveyor belt, he was actually talking at me. 

There was a reasonable amount of frantic head nodding and eye-blinking, not a lot of eye contact, which was of no help at all in understanding a single word of whatever he was, or wasn't, saying. All the while the cashier was scanning his stuff, he had his back to her, addressing me. I always get these guys so I just bided my time. When she announced the total, I had to point him, using the smile and nod technique (and NO sudden movements) in her general direction so that he realized the ride was just about done. 

Of course, he wasn't prepared to pay and went through his pockets looking for cash, paper, and coins, before defaulting to a credit card, all the while jabbering away to anyone (else) who made eye contact.

When I handed the cashier my sole item, she remarked that she hadn't seen me 'in here with that guy before' as if I made it a practice to collect strangers in the night. I thought about telling her just that and then decided silence, in my case, was golden. Besides, if I dawdled, I'd be late for the cookout, and that would never do.
-bill kenny

Confusing Loud with Smart

In recent years, I've taken to gathering much of my news and information from a variety of online and/or physical television and/or video and/or newsprint. The platform isn’t as important to me as the content, and I'm giving away my age when I tell you how much I enjoy my morning coffee with a side of newsprint or local tv news and how sad I get watching the disappearance of independent news sources leaving us, whether we know or care at all, in an information desert.

I suspect the decline started before we came up with 'fake news' for anything we disagreed with, and I fear we’ll soon need a new pejorative because that one has and lost its sting from overuse.

I don't require news to come with analysis which is just captioning for those with critical-thinking deficits. Just give me the facts and I'll draw my own conclusions. I dressed myself this morning (you, too?) so I'm confident we can understand basic cause and effect dynamics and relationships, be they foreign policy or economic growth without a panel discussion or interpretative dance. (But thanks for the offer).

Except...when our information sources just feed and fuel our own beliefs, it's silly if not suicidal to then be surprised that we can't seem to create and sustain a consensus on an issue, any issue, from public health to public safety, and I worry about who we are becoming.

“E pluribus unum” (‘from many, one') was replaced by 'Ego hic loquitur!' (I'm talking here!). When did this happen and more importantly, why? When you read our history, we seem so possessed, purposeful, confident and driven. We also had a great deal of good luck from the beginning.

We stumbled towards and into Independence--some of the Founders who traveled to Philadelphia in the summer of 1776 weren't firebrands yearning to be free. Others may have gotten hijacked on their way to the Jersey Shore—but they at least got their gym, tan, and laundry accomplished. The rest, as they, was history. Lots of sparks and heat but greater amounts of light, so bright that to this day it illuminates the path we walk.

We have been and hopefully will always be a nation of strivers, of seekers, of what happens if I put some of your peanut butter on my chocolate questioners. Here, you try it and tell me what you think. There’s a lot to be said for sapiosexuality and at one point we were the world’s pin-up poster.  

And part of who we are is the not-giving-up, the-how-does-this-part-go-on-to-that-part questioning until we figure it out. And we don’t take no for an answer (Sometimes our problem is we don’t take yes either).

We're a nation of loudmouths (I got a megaphone one year for my birthday and used it to demand pony rides for my next one) who don't always listen to each other's words but who, at the end of the day used to be able to look into one another's eyes and see the heartbeat behind the polemic and understand the person with whom we are disagreeing isn't evil or ignorant, but just different. And they were looking at us the same way.

So, what happened?
And when do we start to fix our problems instead of arguing over who created them?
-bill kenny