A (Christmas) Rose By Any Other Name

I was walking around Chelsea Parade as is my custom (those 10,000 steps a day will not walk themselves, right?), and as I walked down the Broadway side, and passed the flagpole to my right I fast-forwarded to the end-of-year holidays. I was reminiscing about one of my favorite traditions, the Christmas Rose that Public Works and Public Utilities used to erect every year around the time of the Winterfest Parade. 

When the preventable plague, COVID-19, overtook all of us, part of the collateral damage as our world changed was the Christmas Rose was not constructed that year. I very much looked forward to the following year only to learn that during all assembly and disassembly, and wear and tear as well as 24/7 exposure to the elements, the Christmas Rose was beyond salvage or repair.

I suspect throughout the years, much of the display had received homegrown and handmade repairs and refurbishment. In today’s economy, the cost to create and construct a new one, in terms of time, talent, and treasure would be prohibitive. In a universe with never quite enough for all the ‘need to haves’ even a fanboy like me is forced to accept a new Christmas Rose could only be a ‘nice to have.’  

But passing the flagpole and thinking about the Christmas Rose led me to wonder about an outdoor holographic projector to recreate A, if not The, Christmas Rose. I know, ‘You need to get a life.’ Thank you, I’ve had one. As Springsteen sang, ‘I ain’t here on business, baby, I’m only here for fun.’ And exhorting you to think about this is my idea of fun.

I found a YouTube wizard, reallyMello, who has become my frame of reference on this quixotic (not chaotic) quest. He created four videos detailing his outdoor Halloween holographic project and here’s where they started.

First, and to answer your question, I believe it can be accomplished, but because of an accident of birth (I was born handsome rather than smart; also, delusional), it will take many hands and minds better than mine (=yours) to make this happen, assuming the permissions whose number I cannot begin to imagine, can be granted.

And no, it will not come cheap though in looking at what seems to be the logistics required for this, I don’t think it’s beyond the financial grasp of a modest GoFundMe page effort as no more than $5000 should do it (or perhaps the newly-resurrected Sachem Fund might be a vehicle to consider although this project would have nothing to do with Chelsea Gardens (Attempted joke)). 

Intended by no means to be exhaustive, we’d need a projector, holographic screen as well as a sturdy frame (REALLY BIG) for a large amount of tulle fabric, and a USB flash drive to hold as many images of the Christmas Rose as we can scrounge up.

Also, critically important and integral to the success of this project, are people with the knowledge and skillsets to put this all together, literally and figuratively.

Count me out, sadly. I once cut myself so deeply with an apple corer (while trying to dry it) that I had to visit the Backus ER which gives you a gruesomely accurate insight into my handyman credentials.  I used to specialize in being decorative rather than helpful but since my looks faded, I’ve been sort of in limbo.

I think we could do this, but we’d have to work together. 

What do you say? Can we, and more importantly, will we? Let me hear from you.
-bill kenny

Eighty Years On

I offered what passes for thought on this subject not too many years ago, and not that you asked but I think they bear repeating. When I first offered them I called this: 

Some Short Thoughts on the Longest Day

I believe the farther out in space we go, the more alike we look. It’s only when we re-enter our atmosphere that the effects of gravity and tribalism become more pronounced. 

Residing as I do in Global City Norwich, I smile as we punctuate our lives with a growing variety of celebrations of so many of the different stories we are as the people who all happen to call this place our home.

I wanted to emphasize the importance of stories because when we speak of History, which is really the story we tell ourselves of who we are and how we came to be, we usually think in terms of capital letters and monumental events, forgetting that all of us are the authors of our own tales of our time here on earth.

Today marks the 80th Anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe at Normandy, France, always called D-Day. In deference to and respect for, Edward Shepherd Creasy, who authored “The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World,” almost a century before the beaches were stormed at Normandy, D-Day wasn’t just a battle historians have concluded ultimately won World War II and saved Western Europe, but may also have been the milestone in our country’s journey of political, social, military, and economic ascendance in a world landscape littered with sometimes petty parochial and ideological loyalties.

We think of larger-than-life men and monumental moments when we study D-Day and there are many to choose from but we risk losing sight of the human element of our own humanity in the details that the day involved, which is what we should remember.

The survivor stories, so many people in the same device, fighting not only for something grand and noble like a Free Europe and, by extension, the free world but also for one another. 

They sought out a protected position where the sea met the shore while being raked by weapons fire without rest or respite as waves of troops waded onto the beaches and wrote with their blood and sacrifice the first chapters of what was to become our modern, Post-War World where we hoped cooperation would replace confrontation.

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to walk the beaches of Normandy and struggled to imagine the carnage and brutality of the conditions on that day and the courage it would have taken to overcome them. It’s a way of learning history that books and classrooms, while important, can’t really touch, but for many of us the stories, more so than the lessons, are all we have.  

And many of those D-Day stories are deservedly well-known while others are less so but I’m always struck in reading and remembering June 6, 1944, by what we, the inheritors of the world those who never saw the dawn on June 7, have done with it. And by how much harder we should still work.  
-bill kenny 

Remembering the Original Antifa

Tomorrow marks the 80^th anniversary of The Longest Day, D-Day.

I was traveling with a US Army Helicopter Company from Hanau, Germany, to walk the beaches of Normandy, France in the late spring of 1984. Walking, as we did for hours in the sand, can wear you out and the fatigue is profound and overwhelming.

I could only wonder what, on D-Day, a GI with a seventy-pound rucksack, and all hell in front of and around him, was feeling. We had done interviews earlier that morning with elderly Frenchmen who, as men our present ages and sometimes only boys, had been accidental witnesses to history, triangulating linguistically, as they spoke no English and we, no French. 

One of them, to the undisguised scorn of the others, admitted he understood 'some German' and so I would ask him, Auf Deutsch, a question that he would rephrase into French and ask a neighbor who would reply, which he'd relay to me in German and which I'd then translate into English.

When you read about Normandy and the planning and staging that led up to it, it feels very different than when you walk the beaches you've read about. There's a taste in your mouth from the salty air and a breeze coming off the water that carries the screams of the gulls even farther.

I wondered if those struggling ashore, from the landing craft or parachuting down onto those maintaining their watch on the Atlantic Wall, had a moment to take in any of that. On a day when so many would die, was there a final split second to savor life? There was no one to ask except those we visited the next day, unable to answer for all eternity, at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.

After you've struggled to climb to Pointe du Hoc (up the stairs carved into the soft stone and NOT the way the Rangers had to, directly vertical), you can almost, but not quite, grasp what it was like for the soldiers of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, first to seize this emplacement and then, as the Nazi High Command realized, finally, the invasion wasn't a ruse but the real thing and threw itself at the Rangers trying to drive them over the cliffs and into the sea, how they held their positions for two days.

The 80th anniversary of D-Day is more than a date on the calendar. It's a reminder that evil can and must always be defeated. No matter the cost or the price. Young American men had been in Europe decades earlier, during World War I, the War to End All Wars, which didn't. What they couldn't know as they waded ashore and struggled to stay alive long enough to shoot back at those shooting at them, in less than a year, all the shooting in Europe would be over.

How much we've learned as a species in the eight decades since is a matter of debate and discussion (and for some, despair) as the young men, of all sides, who survived D-Day pass from our earth at a rate of thousands every day, taking with them every memory and meaning we might have shared, assuming we had cared enough to ask.

Santayana noted 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' but those who remember that it was Santayana who said that are themselves also few and far between.
-bill kenny

Black and Hairy

True confession time: I don't do well with wee beasties including centipedes. silverfish, and most especially spiders. Actually, in particular spiders. 

I understand their role in the circle of life and I appreciate all the good things they accomplish, like elevating my heartbeat when I accidentally walk through the middle of one of their large webs.

I'm sure we look as creepy or maybe even more so to them than they do to us but I am not a fan and would not be terribly disappointed to never for the rest of my life encounter a spider of any size or color at any time. 

Arachnophobia is fairly widespread but here's something that may surprise you, spiders can have it too.

Second true confession time: that knowledge doesn't afford me nearly the amount of solace I was hoping for.
-bill kenny

All Things Must Pass

Seven years ago today was the happiest and saddest day of my life. 

Happy because our son, Patrick Michael, and his life's love, Jena, announced their engagement. As my wife and I were leaving our home in the early afternoon to attend their engagement party, one of my sisters and then one of my brothers texted me that our Mom was hospitalized near her home in Florida and was not expected to survive the day. 

I wrote what follows after she passed that afternoon seven years ago leaving a hole in my heart that will never heal. 

I knew my mother, Joan Marie (Kelly) Kenny, every day of my life. She died yesterday afternoon after being briefly hospitalized for an infection in an artificial heart valve that slowly overwhelmed her body.

Through the miracle of technology, I was able to speak to her on a phone held to her ear while I said goodbye if by goodbye I'm allowed to include sobbing uncontrollably while apologizing for crying and being comforted by the woman who gave birth to me and my brothers and sisters.  

Mom died very much as she lived, with quiet determination on her own terms and with her eyes wide open, rarely blinking because she knew losing sight of where the bastards of this planet were, even for a moment, could be catastrophic. There was nothing she would not and could not do for her children as I know all too well.

There was, in the end, too little, I, as her oldest could do for her. Kara, my sister who was with her in the hospital, told me Mom's heart was slowing down and she was sleeping more than she was awake so I was grateful she was awake when I called so she could hear me tell her how much I loved her one last time in this life.

Mom believed in heaven and I have no doubt that after her sometimes hellish almost nine decades here on earth that is where she is. Mitch Albom wrote, "When death takes your mother, it steals that word forever." The only solace I can find in that thought is that forever is only my lifetime and no longer.
-bill kenny

What Else Is There?

I've spent a great deal of my time here on the Big Blue Marble, walking a tightrope of 'What to do' balanced against 'When to do it.' It's left me very little time for the most important question of all, 'Why?' but I learned long ago to never ask the question if you can't stand the answer.  

I am not someone who would employ a life coach, mostly out of fear that they would redshirt me and then what would I do? But I enjoy the idea that there is a way to lead an optimal life (not sure if that means a happy one or a productive one) and came across an article that reduces the day basically to an equation and all I (you) have to do is plug in the numbers and do the math. 

I have a Fitbit (who doesn't right?) watch/fitness tracker that tells me far more than I have ever wanted to know about myself including how many breaths per minute I take and what my sleep patterns look like (some months I'm a Turtle, it says, and others I'm a bear (when I'm the latter I prefer Charmin')) so I loved this line from the article, "We found the optimal amount of sleep was 8.3 hours, while for light activity and moderate to vigorous activity, it was best to get 2.2 hours each."

The article was written for/about Australians though I suspect the farther out in space you go the more alike we look, especially when bumper to bumper in the hamburger drive-through lane. I kept thinking about Yossarian's buddy, Dunbar, and his desire to prolong his life through boredom. He might just have been on to something.  
-bill kenny

Paging Neal Sedaka

Today starts the SIXTH month of this year. I'm still working on the excuses I'm offering for not attending New Year's Eve parties that marked its beginning. I can only assume that's why Neal's "Calendar Girl" is stuck in my head. At least I hope that's why. 

June is not only bustin' out all over, it's full of events, holidays, and observances.
This is just what is happening today, never mind the other twenty-nine days:  

Atlantic Hurricane Season Starts 

Dare Day 

Dinosaur Day 

Don't Give Up The Ship Day 

Drawing Day or Pencil Day 

Flip a Coin Day 

Global Day of Parents

Heimlich Maneuver Day

International Children's Day 

National Black Bear Day*

National Bubbly Day 

National Cheer Coach Day 

National Family Recreation Day 

National Go Barefoot Day 

National Hazelnut Cake Day 

National Learn to Row Day

National Nail Polish Day 

National Olive Day 

National Pen Pal Day

National Pineapple Day 

National Play Outside Day 

National Prairie Day 

National Trails Day 

New Year's Resolution Recommitment Day

Oscar the Grouch Day 

Say Something Nice Day 

Stand for Children Day

Turtle Races Day 

Wear a Dress Day

World Milk Day 

*We here in Connecticut got a head start this year on observing this one, though NOT quite all of us if I were honest. I'm still surprised at the number of black bears in the state, especially considering the cost of living here.  

It would be appropriate, especially today, 'So meet a bear and take him out to lunch with you. And even though your friends may stop and stare. Just remember that's a bear there in the bunch with you. And they just don't come no better than a bear."
-bill kenny