Der Countdown Läuft

I don't usually pay a lot of attention to calendars, but the Quadrennial Convocation of Evangenitals, Corporate Scum, and Ammosexuals a/k/a the Republican National Convention is more or less only a moment away. 

I think I just summarized their entire party platform and saved you three days of viewing. You're welcome!
-bill kenny

Just Put Your Lips Together

I am a whistler and the worst part of that is I don't always realize I'm doing it. 

A couple of days ago, someone shrieked at me to 'pipe down dammit!' while I was whistling what turned out to be Gunter Gabriel's nearly-forgotten (not by me) evergreen Ohne moos, nichts los (nothing happens without money). That I was the only person on earth who would have recognized the tune, including Gunter himself, isn't really the point, nor is it that it's never okay for people in the church's other confessional booth to use that tone of voice. I didn't realize I was whistling under the influence (of being happy). Dammit? In church?

It also happened in a hallway while I was passing through. Not sure why I was whistling Solsbury Hill specifically but I like that song, not that it's ever a requirement or would stop me from whistling. Two different folks doing that askance and aghast look theater made me realize not everything needs to be at maximum volume or velocity.

One of them demanded to know 'What do you think you're doing!?!' Well, I said, I'm whistling but I'm keen to hear what it looks like from where you are. He didn't even attempt a rejoinder-just went right on into another question, 'Why are you whistling?' I was tempted to say because humming is silly but decided against that as more eyes and fish faces were turning towards me.

I don't mind being different. However, I do mind being beaten up for being different and people with no appreciation for good music wouldn't hesitate to thrash me within an inch of my life, or even go metric if they could get closer. Of course, it may well be precisely because they do appreciate music that they'd smack me like a grey haired pinata with a bald spot.

I knew better than to tell them I would next attempt I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman. They'd have probably asked Commissioner Gordon to club me like a baby seal.
-bill kenny

A Choice of Cancer or Polio

You may think I am describing the current state of national politics in the United States as the 2024 Presidential Election grinds on and the Publishers' Clearing House Prize Patrol van circles the block around the White House looking for a parking spot in our nation's capitol district. 

Except you'd be wrong. I don't care if Biden takes naps, or goes to bed at eight PM or drinks his bathwater. Biden on his most awful off-day is infinitely better than an unindicted insurrectionist who's already been found guilty of sexual assault and of thirty-four felony counts.  

But as I said, that is NOT the US Presidential election I am describing in the title of today's polemic. This one is. 

And as unpleasant I find the prospect of the 2024 elections, I'm a little more concerned about 2025.  Another reason perhaps why the root word of history is story.
-bill kenny

Morose Motorist's Meanderings

I fall into mental ruts that are hard to escape. I wrote earlier this week about automobiles and have been sort of fixated on them since them. Doesn't help that I've also been driving, thus reinforcing the depth of that habit. 

I find myself alone with what passes for thoughts almost always in my car, which doddering curmudgeon that I am, is funny because life and times for my generation goes full circle. 

When I was coming of age, the driver's license and the open road (and all they promised, if not always delivered) was a rite of passage. And here I am, very much as I started, a long way from home on a dark highway, lost, but making great time.

It was the era of Springsteen's chromed invaders-GTOs, Malibu SSs, Olds 442s, Buick Wildcats, Mustangs, 'Cudas and Chargers at the top of the list. Gas lines the size of garden hoses and all of us, the dweebs included (present!) knew the cubic displacement and the brake horsepower. MPG at a time when gasoline was thirty-five cents a gallon was a nonsense concept and was never explored.

We traveled in packs but were often alone. Our music was transitioning from AM radio to FM and we struggled to move from converters to tape decks, almost always eight-track, with FM receivers. I remember taking the back seat out of a car to make room for ludicrously sized speakers that were very important to me but I can't remember why. Because, I suspect; just because.

Driving a car was only slightly less important than having one of your own. I can tell you as a parent myself, two times over, I've checked the Declaration of Independence as well as the Constitution (and the Bill of Rights) and there's nothing in any of them about teenage vehicular operators. But we grimly pursued the quest for an auto as if it were fire, and our offspring churn and burn in the same way for the same thing.

Growing up in the sixties, we were the pioneers who 'experimented' with pot and sex, sometimes at the same time and sometimes not so much. We were all psychedelic capitalists who believed dope got you through times of no money better than money got you through times of no dope. 

Many years later we invented the Real Estate Collapse and Stock Market Meltdown (all caps for a reason) and were absolutely stunned when it happened (now I know why we called it dope).

I watched older neighborhood boys sent off by my parents' generation thousands of miles away to places I couldn't say for causes I accepted as good and true because my government told me it was so. And now, it's my generation sending our children to other wars that are eerily familiar and I know just how good we've gotten at lying-but I don't know who we're fooling. And now, I try to recall what I traded away to get what I have.

I don't calculate the cost or the worth of those transactions, since those may be numbers that are too unhappy at any hour, but especially in the early ones. I think I prefer to drive in the dawning and the gloaming. When you don't know (or care) where you're going, any road will get you there. 

Those with whom I travel always seem as lost as I and the roads lead everywhere and nowhere. Keep the windows rolled up, crank the climate control and turn the tunes up. It remains what it has always been from the start until now, a dark ride.
-bill kenny

Choice, Chance and Change

Please consider joining me this Monday evening at City Hall in Council Chambers at 6:30, BEFORE the regular City Council meeting. I wouldn't ask if it wasn’t important because you have demands on your time and attention. It’s the third and final presentation on the Chelsea Harbor/Downtown Mobility Study. 

I know, you just read the title and snorted probably more derisively than dismissively but you're wrong. After three-plus decades of living here, I'm as weary and wary as you are of poems, prayers, and promises involving downtown that end up as nothing more than brave words. This time is different and this time different is better.

If you haven't yet, check out the website. As you'll read, the Southeastern Connecticut Council of Governments (SCCOG) and the City have partnered with VHB, a consulting firm for this study. It's a key component in Norwich's efforts to provide safe and accessible streets for all including pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists, and transit users of all ages and abilities.

I attended the first presentation at Otis Library in late October with about sixty or so other wide-eyed hopefuls and had hoped for even more people at a session held a month ago in City Hall that offered an update and a progress report. Bygones.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a first step, but we expend so much energy arguing about why we cannot undertake an action, often choosing sides and attacking one another, that we never even try to put on our shoes and thus remain rooted in place. And then complain  'Nothing ever changes.' 

We take comfort in the unhappiness we create. Even after all my years of living here, I'm still impressed (and more than a little depressed) with how often and facilely we play the victim card. News Flash: No one can make you a victim without your consent. Silence equals consent so speak up and speak out. 

I was and am impressed by the audacity of the study's vision, fueled by an optimism I fear not very many residents of Norwich have (but should) combined with a core conviction that while by ourselves we cannot do everything if we are together we could do something. In this case, that something is to start the resurrection and resuscitation of an urban core that has been allowed to decay and descend into growing disrepair for (I'm only guessing now) at least half a century or more.

We've all witnessed proposals for Chelsea more times than any of us can count (I also liked the Utopia adventure the best). But those in the past were designed by private real estate owners or transportation design engineers looking to inflate real estate prices though rarely values, or to move vehicles as rapidly as possible from Point A to B. 

The Chelsea Harbor/Downtown Mobility Study. is resident-centric. It’s not a ‘build it and they will come’ vision but rather, ‘Here we all are in the same device, let’s make it better.’ As you'll learn Monday night at the presentation, three options are being proposed (but my heart beats fastest for The Rose Bridge because it does the best job of drawing the RITC, Thayer’s Marine, and The Marina, closer together to Chelsea with enough additional greenspace to offer venues for events that have traditionally competed for use of Howard T. Brown Park). However, come, listen, ask questions, and make up your own mind.

You're asking 'Where's the money for this pipedream?' That's an excellent question and part of the answer as I understand it, is the project can be piecemeal, as funding and material/approvals permit, and as wants/needs and desires develop. Isn't it time we stopped wishing great things would happen in Norwich and started making them happen for ourselves?

The presentation is this Monday at  6:30 PM in the City Council Chambers. Please attend and remember The Three Cs: Choice, Chance, and Change. You have to make a choice to take a chance if you want to change. 

See you Monday.
-bill kenny

Free Fallin'

It's a perfectly natural and almost universally experienced fear: the fear of falling. I've conducted more than my share of gravity checks and have a healthy regard and respect for the difficulties folks my age can have with maintaining balance, 

That said, here's a horror story that makes me woozy just reading about it, much less surviving a fall of FOURTEEN THOUSAND FEET.   

And if you're not too unnerved after reading about Emma Carey's adventure, watch this and she'll tell you all about it. 
-bill kenny

Happy Birthday!

This is one of my three most favorite days of the year, the birthday of our son, Patrick Michael. He's a happily married man now, but I knew him when.....this is from a long time ago. I called it: 

The Ticking of the Seconds, Minutes, and Hours

Our son, Patrick Michael, celebrates his birthday today. My wife was responsible for making a husband from a not-especially-promising pile of a man. 

Our son rocketed me from husband to father. At the moment we learned of Sigrid's pregnancy (or should I more precisely say 'when I learned of'), I stopped being afraid to be a father. Patrick has helped make it the best job I have ever had.

He is the firstborn of two parents who were, themselves, first-born. There has been in his life no crap that we have thrown at him that one or the other of us hadn't experienced ourselves when we were children and had vowed 'I'd never do that to my kid when I have kids.' And we lied, and he turned out fine anyway.

Somewhere in our basement in Norwich, Connecticut, is a Benjamin Spock book I bought before Patrick was born in the Stars and Stripes bookstore beside the Exchange in Frankfurt am Main, which, when you walked across the parking lot, ended at the "World Famous Topper Club" (Don't get me started on the what it was world famous for stuff, okay?) and across from the street from the Topper (and the AAFES gas station) on the far side of Bertramstrasse, was #6, where I worked.

I bought the Dr. Spock book because my parents had a Dr. Spock book. Ours wound up in the basement of the apartment we lived in on Ahornstrasse in Offenbach, down the hill from the Bieberer Berg Stadion, home of the Offenbach Kickers, a First Division (Bundesliga) football team fallen on hard times and a fixture with delusions of adequacy in the Zweite Liga (Second Division).

Not too many years later, Patrick played on a team sponsored by OFC in one of the Youth (Jugend) divisions. I think he never really enjoyed playing American soccer, because he was too familiar with how the sport was supposed to be played. 

Time Flies. It must. How else to explain how the child I serenaded with I've Been Working on the Railroad for two hours in the Geburtsaal on the day of his birth is two and forty years today.

We were so foolish when Patrick was born- we didn't know what we didn't know. We had all kinds of books not just Spock, English and Deutsch, on child-raising, like we were building a bookshelf or baking a cake (both of which Sigrid has done, on more than one occasion and, I think at least once, simultaneously). 

Patrick was not much more than a toddler, running at what seemed like the speed of light, when he tripped and fell in the hatbox-sized apartment we had as the rockstar couple before Ahornstrasse and split his forehead open and bled so profusely we had to call an ambulance. Both of us can still see the scar no one else can, because we know where to look and how scared we were for him.

He was the child at the kindergarten just up the street from the apartment house who figured out how to slip the latch on the gate so he could go home 'in case Mommy is lonely' and then he'd go back to school, usually before anyone noticed he was missing (always crossing the street, always at the corner and looking both ways). Sometimes he brought a few chums home as well since he was the 'Ami kind' and had toys and such from the PX of which his playmates could only dream.

One evening he explained to both his mother and I that almost everyone in his class had a little brother or sister and served notice that he wanted in on the action and preferred ein schwester. I'm not sure how much biology he understood at four but decided to NOT chance getting the answer I couldn't stand to a question I refused to ask.

On the day Sigrid gave birth to Michelle, Patrick told me he'd changed his mind and wanted a little brother. It pained me (not at all) to explain all previous orders were considered final. 

When Oma Amerika (my mother) came to visit us, as East Germany was imploding, Patrick left us speechless at a gasthof outside of Wuerzburg by explaining to her (in English) he couldn't eat any more lunch because he was full. To this day, I have no idea where he learned my language but he did a fine job of it and was far better with mine than the dog's breakfast I made of his mother's.

When I was single, I couldn't imagine being married (judging from my social life, neither could anyone else). After we married I couldn't see myself as a father, and today, one of the reasons I am, is celebrating the anniversary of his birth with the woman of his dreams. 

I hope he knows how he has helped shape our dreams and hopes. 

And the best thing that you can do is take whatever comes to you. 

Happy Birthday, Patrick.

-bill kenny