Labor Day 2023

 

Hazel Dickens

Phil Ochs

Sweet Honey in the Rock

-bill kenny

Almost an Homage to Seals and Crofts

We're using some of the Labor Day weekend to try to put the yard in order for autumn and everything that is to follow and that means the days are drawing down for the hummingbird feeders as they hit the highway and become a very much limited-time offer in these parts. 

Their crystal meth is sugar water with red dye (though I've been told they are color blind so why red is more attractive than other colors I know not why, just that it is) but they are not the only creatures attracted to it or to the dispensers that hold it.

I came across this little guy this afternoon. I watched as he walked up the giant wrought iron holder. You can't see it in the picture but the hook at its top is what holds up the cage that houses the feeder, down the wire that secures the feeder to the housing, and directly to the feeder opening from which the hummingbird sips.

What the ant can't see, I'm assuming as I don't know how good their eyesight is, are all the ants who worked their way through the dispensing nozzle and ended up in the feeder reservoir where the nectar is. Once in there's no way out. That's the clump of small black dots we can see floating at the top of the nectar.

This ant eventually gave up attempting to get in and if it's possible they have feelings, may have felt defeated and discouraged as he retraced her/his steps back to the nest at the end of another shift on behalf of the colony.

He never realized how close he'd come to death from the very thing he was chasing. Just me, or does that sound like everybody we know?
-bill kenny

We Changed Just Like the Leaves

Wasn't it last week we were looking forward to the Fourth of July holiday? And with Labor Day on Monday, I'm supposed to believe the Summer of 2023 is over? 

Where's Teeny Tom (Tiny Tim's alter ego, the one who wants it to be Christmas all the year through)? Page him to whatever color courtesy phone is nearest the nice weather. I'm not a big foul weather fan--to be honest, the only place I like ice is in my sparkling adult beverage.

So another summer has come and gone-for those who've lived through the winter of our discontent, the best we can hope for is a Second Summer and then a lovely fall that mysteriously and miraculously blends effortlessly into a beautiful New England spring. 

What's that you say? Winter. Sorry, I can't hear you and there's no point in speaking up or repeating yourself; I still can't hear you. I understand the restorative powers and the role each of the seasons plays -I don't choose to enjoy winter. Ever since I didn't get that new sled for Nikolaus Tag a couple of years ago, I'm over it.

Truth to tell, considering the speed with which this summer passed and the number of us who had fervent hopes but few plans for what we were to do with it, perhaps what I should learn is to enjoy the days while they are here. 

Anticipation is great (and perfect on burgers just not at Mar A Lago) but savoring the flavor of the moment, while in the moment may be something we old people (who think we're not) should cultivate and not try so hard to avoid.
-bill kenny

The Summer Had Inhaled

Leave it to the unofficial closing of another summer to make me nostalgic, bordering on maudlin. Technically, I'm enjoying my 71st Labor Day, though in truth, I have no memory of the earliest ones and I've yet to get a clear sense, despite a reasonable amount of reading, of how old we are before we have memories. 

Is that true for you as well?

I'll suddenly flash on something from my childhood and not be altogether sure if it's real, or a remembered clip from a movie--my Mom's youngest brother, Paul, when we visited her parents in Elechester out in Flushing, Long Island, (before the World's Fair and Shea Stadium), always calling me 'droopy drawers' and pulling down my trousers and laughing. I can recall being a small child helpless to prevent this and enraged at my own impotence (though not realising that at the time that's what I felt). 

Growing up, I always heard relatives say I looked like Paul, which made me tighten my jaw and hold on to my pants. I think they said that because we both had freckles and lots of them. I know my coloring made me burn up in the sun as, after twenty minutes without sunscreen, 

I looked like a lobster and when the burn finally faded, I wasn't tanning but peeling. At times later in our lives, my sister Kara reminded me of Paul, especially when she laughed which is a little odd because by the time she was born, Paul and his family were living out on the West Coast and rarely came east. 

I flash forward to that same uncle in the back seat of my car, with my father's step-brother, Father Jim (an actual priest) in the shotgun seat, as we rode to the cemetery in East Millstone, NJ, to bury my father. I think that may have been the last time Paul came east as some years later he was diagnosed with I-no-longer-remember-what from which he died. 

I was in Germany, in the era before cheap long-distance phone calls and the Internet so letters and cards were the bridge from home and I learned we only read you when you write and no one likes to write bad news when it's still news, so I learned of his death months, if not longer, after it had happened. 

When I was a kid, we hadn't yet gone back to school, that happened after Labor Day and when the New Year began, I'd always look ahead on the calendar to see when the first Monday in September was, always hoping for the 5th or 6th, as if wishing would make it so. Thank goodness we now structure school calendars by union agreements and not on any educational goals, requirements, or needs.

I've never attended my high school or college reunion--one of the places I worked for some years used to hold worldwide reunions every two years, in different locations around the globe and I never worked up the interest the passion, or, in all honesty, the courage, to attend any of them. 

I have a growing-more-dim-by-the-day memory of being one of 400,000 at Watkins Glen in upstate New York for the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and The Band, but all three of these bands are long gone with nearly all the members dead and the souvenir tee shirt "Ball 'n' Boogie" went from the dresser to the rag bin to the garbage decades ago. 

My cohort grew up in the swamps of Vietnam and in the aftermath of the murder of JFK, MLK, and RFK. We survived Timothy Leary better than he himself did, had parents who didn't understand us (until we became them as it turned out) and stayed up late to watch a man walk on the moon. 

We were part of what sociologists call the Pig in the Python generation and yet, I suspect when the last of us has passed (and we will, which, when we were kids, was inconceivable) we'll have left a hole akin to the one in a bucket of water when you pull your fist out. 

And it'll be our children's children who'll wrestle with the consequences of our decisions on the environment, on energy, on public financing, and worldwide diplomatic outreaches and these days, as hard as we think they are, will be viewed as the Golden Ones as they "hang round 'neath the vapor light." 
-bill kenny

Java Jive

My parents had a percolator coffee pot. Metal with the grounds in a basket that went on a spike that stood in the pot and you put a cover on it after filling the pot with water. There was a glass bulbish top through which the heated water would pop and the darker it got the sooner you had coffee.  

Not actual size

Yeah. Seems like a lot of work, because it was. And then God, or someone, invented Starbucks and the only requirement was that we learned to speak in tongues. 

Well, sort of. 
-bill kenny

We May Be Lost but We're Making Great Time

You take a day off from the noise of the news as I did last week, and you get so far behind they're piping in daylight to you. I thought I closed my eyes but for a moment but when I opened them, we were very definitely no longer in Kansas, and I’d lost both my bike and my little dog.

I was stopped in a local grocery by someone who wanted me to know just how wrong I was recently to encourage people to work harder to get along (my words). That’s not what he read or got out of it, and aside from proving my point I don’t think our two minutes in the produce section benefited anyone.

Dr. Gerry Harvey created The Abilene Paradox which postulates organizations/societies fail because they cannot cope with agreement, NOT disagreement-and because we’ve become a society of people who tell one another what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear, we are getting deeper and deeper in Big Muddy and all of us are too polite to take meaningful action to stop it.  

I’m not sure why we’ve become these people: speaking out in a supermarket to someone who can change no aspect of municipal government as opposed to speaking up at a City Council or Board of Education meeting where there are opportunities to affect meaningful change.  

When you read our history in school, we seem so possessed and driven. But when you dive beneath the surface, the movie's a lot different. 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. 

Some of them got hijacked on their way to the Jersey Shore--some were Steve Carlton fans waiting for the founding of the Phillies. KIDDING! (About the Carlton part), but you might’ve guessed where this is going. Accidental Excellence. When we get it right, we don't know how we did it and we can't seem to do it again.

That shouldn’t mean we give up or settle for what we've got. If we used that mentality there'd be BILLIONS of people on the shores of Western Europe, and Africa as well as Eastern Asia (all standing on one another's shoulders by now, I suppose), staring across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans trying to figure out what was going on 'over there.' (And a group of indigenous peoples on the North and South American continents looking nervously over their shoulders.)

And it's that not-giving-up, the-how-does-this-part-go-on-to-that-part of discovery and invention that helps define who we are. We're a nation of loudmouths (I got a megaphone one year for my birthday; I 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, somehow, should 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 maybe a knucklehead, or is that just me?). 

And they are looking at us in the same way. Walt Kelly's Pogo was on to something, and we could all probably benefit from spending a moment speaking to, NOT at, one another even if in the heat of the moment it’s near the fresh vegetables. Any excuse to lettuce reason together.  
-bill kenny

Too Short Here

Summer, that is. 

Or did you think I meant life?
-bill kenny