Six Months Later

Maybe as a kid, my memories were different but I grew up believing we played and rooted for one sport at a time per season. We had baseball in the summer, football in the fall, basketball over the winter, and homework in the spring.  

I never warmed to hockey basically because it seemed, in addition to being played for most of the year when 'the season' was concluded and the playoffs started, that almost everyone who had played during the interminably long regular season played all over again in the playoffs. 

My childhood favorite sport, baseball, has apparently concluded that A Season That Never Ends is the best idea to help the sport retain fans and maintain relevance since the 'let's put a guy on second base to start the tenth inning if the game is tied after nine' suggestion.  That's as may be though I think a home run derby or perhaps a spelling bee has a certain charm as well. 

Anyway. 

Opening Day when everyone's team starts out in first place and the start of the campaign when your hometown heroes would go undefeated (hey! you never know) was April 7. Today, six months to the day after that Opening First Pitch, the playoffs begin that will conclude, eventually (one hopes) with a World Series Championship. Assuming anyone still cares.
-bill kenny  

All Rise

It's weird, there's no Major League baseball at all today.
I can't be the only one who thinks it feels strange. 

Ok. Now I feel better.
-bill kenny

Notes on Votes

I’m a traditionalist when it comes to exercising my right to vote; I always do, whether at a polling place on Election Day, an absentee ballot or just voting with my mind (very popular in some circles I’m told). Not so popular I suspect are observations I’ve offered previously as we prepare to cast ballots.  

There’s a good bet the only space on your front lawn NOT covered by autumn leaves will, or already does, have a sign urging others to vote for a specific candidate for everything ranging from Governor, through members of the Senate and House of Representatives to seats in both chambers of our legislature in Hartford. I like to think in my next life I’m going to be the person who makes the wireframe legs that the signs fit on. That looks like quite a growth industry even in tough financial times.

Living here in the heart of New England (suggested motto: “Where American History Comes From”), I wonder what Sam Huntington would make of all the signs (and especially the television advertising) -or Benedict Arnold for that matter. Both are Norwich Native Sons, though we're all more than a little ambivalent about Benny.

I believe, after a little bit of adjustment for the tenor and times in which we live, they’d be the first to point out that citizens offering to serve (which is what we’re voting for (and/or against) in November is as old as our nation and so long as we have neighbors willing to offer themselves for office, we’ll have a healthy democracy.

If you’ve read this far and are waiting for me to attempt some form of endorsement for any of the candidates on all sides of the aisle, you can skip the rest of this and check out Garfield in the comics section (wow! That cat sure likes lasagna, doesn’t he?).

My point: it’s none of my business for whom you vote nor is it any of yours as to how I cast my ballot. What is important and I cannot stress this enough, is that if you are eligible and registered to vote, then you owe it to yourself and to the rest of us to cast an informed ballot.

Our city, state, and nation are run (only) by those who show up and vote. No one and nothing else counts. We live in times of strident partisanship and finding a balance between sometimes dramatically differing perspectives on everything from vaccination to taxation can be an often-thankless task. We’ve reduced our election color wheel to red and blue for reasons that, when you consider it, have nothing to do with the way any of us think about ourselves and our lives.   

Look at everyone offering themselves as candidates and, if you must do some (more) research to learn enough about someone to make a decision about support, don’t be shy or lazy about doing so (that’s why God invented Google, right?) and keep asking questions of the candidates, and of yourself, until you are comfortable with the answers that will shape your decisions.

Elections are open book quizzes if you wish and despite campaign literature to the contrary there are no right or wrong answers. But remember, poor leaders are always elected by good citizens who chose not to vote.
-bill kenny 

Always Remember

I first offered this, or something very much like it, a decade ago, and am returning to it today because the world does move in a circle even if that circle seems to be a straight line.
At the time I called it: 

This Is the Way the World Will End

Today at sunset is Yom Kippur, for those of the Jewish faith, the day of atonement. It is a day of repentance and fasting for personal and community/communal sins committed in the course of the last year in the hope of forgiveness-with forgiveness being the critically important aspect.

I was raised a Catholic who was taught to see Jews as (also) people of the Book (the Bible) but who limited themselves to the Old Testament and a God of Vengeance and Punishment. Jesus, as I remember, came we were taught to fulfill the Old Testament and by so doing and living, and dying, create a New Testament. I think my problem with my church became reconciling the New God with the Old Testament one-after all, what kind of a loving Deity would crucify His own Son?

All those years on and music such as this (All Vows) to mark the commencement of the Day of Atonement, has convinced me that while I may have lost faith in my church, I'm not sure I've abandoned a belief in God if that's Who inspired such beauty, majesty and ineffable sorrow in one piece of music.

Present-day Israel, surrounded on three sides by enemies and on the fourth by the sea could not be in a more precarious position than the Jewish people themselves have been since the start of The Common Era. And yet, countless persecutions later, they stand, as self-anointed as God's Chosen, and regardless of your own religious beliefs or depth of your persuasion, you have to admire their devotion to Him and their belief in His providence for them.

Yom Kippur ends tomorrow evening.
There's this prayer to mark its end, a version of which I found online many years ago but has now disappeared as produced and recorded at a synagogue, perhaps the only synagogue to this day (I actually don't know), in Frankfurt am Main in Germany.

It's a house of worship I can still see clearly in my memory from the strassenbahn fenster (streetcar window) as I passed the Sud-Bahnof on the trip back and forth to work for many of the years I lived in Deutschland. I assume it is still there.

I traveled a long way to some nearly-forgotten point in my own past I thought I had passed out of and all it took was an act of faith, though not mine or my own, to return.
-bill kenny      

Ransom Notes Keep Falling Out of Your Mouth

It's not every day or even every lifetime (for those into reincarnation) when I'll devote one of these missives to something as incredibly personal as music. 

But we're both in luck because I've found a song of such shimmering, glimmering, translucence, and beauty you'll now be hearing it all day, assuming you click on this. 

I knew you would and that you're glad you did.
-bill kenny

No Fuel Like an Old Fuel

Staring at the overcast when they weren't actually raining skies for most of yesterday, seated on my porch watching all manner of vehicular traffic race up and down the street (the best thing about the broke-ass pavement we had for years in my neighborhood was it cut down on folks speeding. Those days am over now, by jingo, by gum.) made me realize how grateful I am to have a car. 

Let me bend your eye for a moment on the topic. The capital of the State of Connecticut, Hartford, is about an hour's drive from Norwich. I have no idea if you were to attempt a journey by 'mass transit', how you would do it but I daresay it'd take more than an hour and perhaps more than a day. I've read some interesting articles on the impact of the automobile on the American Way of Life (the right to keep and bear cars should have been included in the Bill of Rights, seriously). 

When you look at our older cities and neighborhoods anywhere across the nation, you can see from the center to the outskirts, like the rings of a tree, how the internal combustion engine became the infernal comedic device in so many instances, with us as the punchline.

If you don't think God has a keen sense of humor and a delightful sense of irony, why else would he have installed every insurance company known to man (and a couple to the beasts of the field, according to their logo) in and around our capital city making Hartford Ground Zero for the insurance industry? What a crack-up He is! Can I get an Amen (with a collision waiver? Alleluia!)

Ours is not a state, and this side of the Connecticut River most especially, not a region where relying on buses and trains gets you anything more than frostbite and long hours of travel. Sort of helps you get a better understanding of how people get addicted to a variety of controlled and uncontrolled substances--and you can make a short movie of mobility junkies, getting a hit off the gas pump--taking a deep drag off the high octane bong and snorting a line of Ultra 93. Talk about Mercury Blues.

In Connecticut, our idea of addressing issues like soaring energy costs and greenhouse gases is to build MORE roads, with more lanes so people can drive to where they're going even faster. As for arguments that an investment in mass transit will yield economic development benefits as well as improve our urban and suburban quality of life, we can't you hear you-we've turned the radio up. All the way to Eleven.
-bill kenny

I'd Guessed Fife or Miller

We get more television in my house than I have the ability to watch (much less attempt to enjoy) so when I saw the CNN headline about a "Barney" documentary, I clicked the link before my brain had fully absorbed what the words on the screen said.

Well.  

The glow from the electric fire doesn't feel quite so warming anymore.
-bill kenny