Some Days This Stuff Writes Itself

My email system(s) are so much smarter than I am-they automatically (and mysteriously as far as I can tell) can sort spam from real correspondence before I ever see it. Considering how easily distracted I am by almost everything that's probably a small mercy for me.

After a certain amount of time, days I think, the spam folder empties itself into the trash as we roll merrily along and I remain blissfully oblivious to whatever havoc could have been unleashed by a message. 

Except every once in a while my curiosity gets the better of me and I peek into the spam folder for a glimpse at what I am missing. More often than not I encounter a fragment like this from yesterday's mail harvest, "I am a Beautiful Midget girl I just need some fun." 

Good to know. Forewarned is forearmed. 
-bill kenny

Far Between Sundown's Finish

 Haiti, Gaza, Ukraine, Uyghurs, and the refugees on the unarmed road of flight.

Here in the Land of the Round Doorknobs, the rest of the world is just low-voltage noise that we pay close to no attention to. Instead, we're outraged when gasoline prices are more than a dollar a gallon as the Founders intended. We have a Congress that bans TikTok but doesn't have the balls to do the same for assault weapons. 

And we're sleep-walking to a national election in November where one of the major parties' presumptive nominees is currently facing multiple and more felony counts on various charges and has been found guilty of sexual assault and stealing from his own charitable foundation. Of Thee I Sing.
-bill kenny

Talk about Fear of Flying

I came across a story the other day in my local newspaper and laughed, for a moment, until I started to think about all the times I've flown and how many times I might have been involved in a similar situation and never realized it. 

Luck of the Irish perhaps? Not helping calm me down, if you didn't already know this, is I hate to fly. And this pair are now yet another reason why.

At least their airplane was larger than the one that flew me from Philadelphia to Groton-New London Not Quite International Airport all those years ago, where every passenger (all ten of us) had both a window and an aisle seat.
-bill kenny

A Penny, or Perhaps More, for Your Thoughts

We're about to enter the most serious time on the municipal calendar, the annual deliberations and processes that produce a city budget. I've been a Rose City Resident for over thirty years but while the actors in speaking parts may change, the movie really and rarely does. 

We all want 'nice things': good schools, paved streets, excellent public safety and infrastructure, as well as hope that somehow despite the increases in prices we see every day on every store shelf, the goods and services delivered by our local government will somehow cost less this coming year than they did this one. Spoiler alert: Guess what won't happen again this budget season? 

We can feign surprise, unhappiness, and even anger but we want what we want, and it has to be paid for. Historically, humans formed government early on as a means of creating a collective (defense) to provide for individuals and we've just merrily rolled along ever since. When times were/are good, everyone smiles, and when times get tough we become unpleasant.  

Perceptions of reality are reality. For every chart and index you can show me that says we are living well (albeit also well beyond our means), I can produce one that says never have so many had so little while so few have so much. And we're both right. 

Sadly, until relatively recently we've been able to muddle along and compromise for something we thought was the greater good but now for lots of reasons I don't pretend to understand we prefer argument to agreement and seek to blame one another for circumstances we very much do control.

Nationally, I fear we listen too much to people on all sides of the aisle who claim government no longer works and, when elected, set about proving their own point. Locally, we have far more in common than what separates us, putting us more or less in the same boat (in all three rivers); it's usually more a question of how much we're willing to pull together on any given oar on any given day to get us to land every fiscal year. 

We'll read it again real soon enough in newspapers and on social media platforms, 'this is a difficult budget season that requires hard choices,' or words to that effect. Of course it is, governance is hard work and we're lucky to have friends and neighbors willing to help do it. All the budget babble is code for having to choose between what we want and what we want right now.

Proving perhaps God does have a puckish sense of humor, our City Manager will offer his first draft of a budget on April 1. I know, April Fool's Day, though I don't think any of us will assume he is joking. Before we get to that point on the calendar, maybe a read-through of our current budget, adopted last June, will help give us a sense of perspective and proportion. 

You'll find a schedule of all the hearings for all the departments here. All hearings will be live on the public access TV channel as well as available on the city's website for review.   

You may have read recent news stories on the 33% increase in the city's grand list which at first read is astonishing except we had a city-wide reassessment so this year's budget formulations will be even more fraught with anxiety and concern as mill rates are recalibrated and need-to-haves and nice-to-haves, struggle for pride of place in the final calculations. 

This is a year for stubby pencils and open minds and hopefully, more consensus than contention. All of us need to commit to the idea that government supports programs delivering the best quality, most necessary, and lowest cost public services for our collective good. And nothing else.
-bill kenny

My Fair(est) Lady

I've never been a hockey fan-actually, never much for ice skates. We have a beautiful Ice Rink in Norwich that we went to when our children were younger (and so were we come to think of it) but I don't think I've been in it for the last two decades or so. It's me, not them.

Back to the hockey. The first time I saw her she was wearing a Buffalo Sabres hockey jersey, a souvenir, so to speak (as I was to learn) from an earlier relationship. (I'm fine with the memory because I got the girl in the jersey.) To be honest, if the Sabres, or any hockey team had looked as good in their jerseys as she did in this one, I'd have become a huge fan of the struggles to capture Lord Stanley's cup years earlier.

She was tall, taller than I, thin, with long straight hair. I had seen her in a club Chris and I went to in Frankfurt am Main's Sachsenhausen district and this was later and we were at another place, "Old Smuggler's", beyond the Hauptwache near the Eschenheimer Tor district.

She was, and is, so beautiful, I forgot to breathe and the moment I saw her I knew I would marry her. I didn't know her name, know how to meet her, or know anything about her but I knew I would marry her.

I'm not a person with a strong religious faith (me, not Him) but by the time we got engaged forty-seven years ago on Palm Sunday (the 3rd of April it's engraved in my wedding ring), I came to believe that it wasn't, and couldn't be. coincidence or happenstance that had crossed our paths.

I cannot conceive of how wretched my life would be without her--how, in a hundred different ways every day, everything I do and everything I am is because of her. She almost makes the day begin. Happy Birthday, Angel Eyes
.

Yes, Please.

Where was this on those cold winter days, not just of my long-ago childhood but of recent weeks? 

Yes, maybe it's not heaven in a bowl, but I, for one, say, give it a chance!
-bill kenny

Rise and Shine

If you have recently risen from bed and are slightly out of step with the rest of us, perhaps you failed to advance the clocks in your house before retiring. If it's of any consolation, you are not probably alone. Some of us deal with the annual 'spring forward/fall back' routine better than others. 

To me, it's another way we're separate from all the other lifeforms on the planet. Animal, vegetable, mineral, most everything else adapts to the 'gets dark later/gets bright earlier' hot and cold parts of life on the Big Blue Marble, but not us. We impose, or attempt to, ourselves on our environment and surroundings.

We create a concept we call "time" and then work on its division into seconds and minutes that added together we call hours and then gather twenty-four of them (no other species does, aside from the rabbit in Through the Looking Glass), pronouncing that to be a day.

We then line up a bunch of days into something we call a week, combining them in various clusters of varying lengths called months  concluding here, my dear, with that which we call a year. Not bad for bi-peds with big brains and opposable thumbs (and basic cable).

For the next couple of days, most of us will be out of sorts and/or out of sync and will blame it on shifting of those damn clocks. I'm not sure that's valid for anyone other than the people working the 11 to 7 overnight shift (who had an hour shaved off their day today, but work nine and get paid for eight at some point this fall), but it sounds great and we all do it. Why we really should be ouchy and grouchy is that so few of us have a plan for what to do with the extra daylight. More's the pity.

We could start a garden, read to a child, go for a walk, visit with a friend, spend more time with a loved one, fly a kite, ride a bike, paint a fence (or a masterpiece) or write a letter. Of course, you could say, we don't need more daylight to do any of those things. And you're right, we don't. So why don't we just do them?
-bill kenny