Summer Held Its Breath Too Long

It's hard to believe the golden summer for which we so yearned while slogging through snow and ice this winter, has, for all intents and purposes, come and gone. Those plans for vacations and days off we hoped to enjoy have had their 'best used by' dates disappear before our eyes and here we are at that place on the calendar where we start the next season and turn the page.

If you have children in school, the end of summer is old news. You knew it was gone as you readied them to return almost two weeks ago now. What's that about time and how it flies? What happens when it's crawling?

If your children are grown and gone, you're still aware of school as the buses wend their way throughout town while elsewhere groups of youngsters of all ages trip and troop across sidewalks and crosswalks, all in the name of learning.

Many are still hitting the stores with lists of school supplies and struggle to juggle after-school activities, jobs, and fractious households that don't run themselves. Soon many will be back to managing families the way a horse runs: one footfall at a time, rarely, if ever, looking far enough ahead to see if our path is taking us to where we want to go or, instead, leading us over the proverbial cliff.

Now, and when city budget discussions heat up in April, is really the only time we devote any thought to education which is unfair to children, teachers, parents, and actually, to all of us. This is not an advocacy for more money for schools-there isn't any more money, but, and it's a cliche, if you think education is expensive, try calculating the cost of ignorance.

You and I went to different high schools together and trust me on this one-different elementary schools, too. Our schools were so different from the ones our children attend, they could just as easily be from another planet. Actually, without putting too fine a point on it, it was a very different world and when you look at us now, the society and culture we inherited from our parents and then look at what we are giving to their grandchildren, the 'stuff in the middle' is our doing.

A glance at a newspaper, a TV screen, or a computer monitor is all you need to confirm our world is a dangerous and different place now. Gone or going is the industrial age, being replaced often rudely and without ceremony, by the knowledge age. 

This is typed on a workstation keyboard. Our (grand) children live in a world of hand-held digital devices that make our desktops and laptops look like Gutenberg's press. Access to information, the how-to, and the what-you-do-with-it-next are the world they and theirs will live in, and lamentations about how that's not what school was like when we were young help no one at all.

Stasis in life and in learning is foolish and fatal. Everyone with an interest in education, and that means all of us, must recognize the purpose of education should be to learn the rules of life better than anyone else so that you can change the rules. Always a good thing to remember, especially as the seasons change yet again. 
-bill kenny

Braced for Mother Nature

We do this every this-time-of-the-year here across the Northeast, in varying amounts: preparing for a visit by one of any number of hurricanes that will either wreak untold and uncalculated havoc or just threaten to blow us all away and/or drown us in rain. 

And when we look just slightly to our South, there will always be someone who got it worse than we did.

My wife spent a great part of her yesterday storm-proofing our yard--securing all the stuff (benches, feeders, bird baths) her boob of a husband walks by every day with open eyes and never sees. 

The stuff, that, in a strong wind, gets blown right through a window or lifted over a fence after which I react with dumbfounded shock and incredulity because I am incapable of linking cause and effect in a timely manner for any practical purposes.

In a way it's good that she did that since I can recall being a small child, when Mom and Dad rented bungalows in Atlantic Highlands, watching hurricanes come in off the ocean while standing on the beach. 

Their sheer power thrills me still. I don't know why. 

My favorite part of The Wizard of Oz is when the house and everything else is lifted by the tornado and I used to wonder growing old (as I've never grown up) if you could really and truly ride a bicycle while in the funnel.

This is serious stuff for many people and I don't mean to trivialize it or minimize its might or its majesty. As a matter of fact, I'd point out I'm doing just the opposite. While many of us have already and/or continue to stockpile milk and toilet paper (that's how we roll here in New England, pun intended) because if you reach the magic number, nothing happens and Gravity's Rainbow passes over you, 

I'm somehow comforted by the thought that there are forces more powerful than any we can create or unleash. And at some point on the horizon, silhouetted against an open sky, you, me, and the most powerful or wealthy men and women in the world look exactly the same as the eye of the storm descends upon us. 

No matter who we are, what we own or do, we are all finally and fully equal and can only hope to hold on until the heavens clear. I'm just never too sure about the something good part....
-bill kenny

So I Hang Upon My Altar

I accept that summer is over but I'm not ready for what comes next, much less whatever it is we call what we have right now. If I didn't know any better, and I admit  I usually don't, I'd wonder if I'm not a stunt double in a Leonard Cohen music video for Last Year's Man. 

I mean, it sure feels like what he's singing about, and not just here at my house but across the region as everywhere you turn on the East Coast, hurricane season is the topic of concern.

I'm not really worried so much about the rain as I am about what Dylan Thomas referred to as the dying of the light.  Almost everyone my age I know, and there are not nearly as many of us left as I'd have thought should have survived to this point, is, like me, bone weary all the time.

We get up tired, slog through our days semi-comatose, and crash on couches in middle-class fever dreams we never envisioned ourselves as ever living in, to go to bed and fail to dream and get up and do it all again. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm disappointed in myself and in my life, so far, but I'm not unhappy. I met and married someone who loved and who still loves me though I haven't done anything remotely lovable in a ridiculous number of years. 

We have two children who are now, themselves, adults and who are getting on with their own lives rather nicely without us, which is the whole plan as I remember the orientation briefing at Dad School from back in the day.

I, and by that, I mean my peers and I didn't crash or go down in flames, we surrendered a little bit every day until we really ran out of things to give away. We traded our blue skies and beliefs for BMWs and shipped good paying jobs to low-wage third and fourth world nations so that their people could have an opportunity to earn forty cents a day making sneakers that I buy at a hundred bucks plus and never even think twice about it.

In another fifty years, some of those places are going to have indoor plumbing and potable drinking water, and those people, or maybe only the ones who survive until then, will want to put up a statute for folks like me. Don't worry about it, you're welcome and keep the cholera blankets. Hell may freeze over and you could use the warmth.

At some point, we turned into our parents, who are laughing their asses off now as they really didn't do as terrible a job as we kept insisting they had. And considering how we could fuqq up a one-car funeral procession (twice so far and don't ask me about the wet dream in the desert), it might have not been a bad idea to quit while we were only slightly behind instead of pressing on and losing sight of the entire caravan. 

We thought the future was Twenty Questions but, instead, it proved to be Hide 'n Seek in a dark room. And I take the one who finds me back to where it all began, when Jesus was the honeymoon and Cain was just the man. Same as it ever was and I knew coming in that going out would be the same.
-bill kenny

I Don't Know if I'm Dying or About To Be Born

Coincidence, said Albert Einstein, is God's way of remaining anonymous. A couple of weeks ago, arriving by mail, was David Crosby's final album in this life, For Free. 

It's brilliant but what first attracted me was the reports of a collaboration between Croz and Donald Fagan, two more (to my mind) disparate musicians I could not imagine. That song, Rodriguez for a Night, was what whetted my appetite to finally buy the album some three years after its release. And in light of his passing, it makes this song transcendently beautiful.    

Now, about the coincidence part I referred to earlier.
Sitting at my computer while listening to Crosby's album through my hearing aids (this is, after all, the age of miracles and wonder), wandering across the internet, I found the onlyvistonce.com website.

I think Al was on to something, I really do.
-bill kenny

Who Would Choose a Felon and a Liar?

The former President of the United States and current and thirty-four time convicted felon, Donald J (for Chickenshit; the J is invisible) Trump, staged himself quite a photo opportunity on the last Monday of August at Arlington Cemetery. 

What kind of self-absorbed asshole gives a 'thumbs up' in a cemetery? 

It was the third anniversary of the Kabul Airport Attack that cost thirteen US servicemembers their lives and was set in motion in no small part by Pantload45 himself and his then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but blame, as is well known, is better to give than to receive. 

Trump's moment at Arlington was yet another opportunity for self-aggrandizement, this time with family members of dead service personnel serving as props. They should be grateful for good weather since the former Commander-in-Chief is notoriously less than fond of rain. Funny thing about the self-proclaimed lover of the military. He's a life long fake and a phony. 

Given the opportunity to, himself, be a member of the US Armed Forces, he was unavoidably unavailable to join the 1,857,304 inductees who saw combat in Vietnam. There were too many Vietnam War casualties from New York, but his name was never in danger of appearing here. 

I often wonder who on that list was the one who may have replaced the deferred-Don in a rice paddy and instead came home in a body bag while he was cheating contractors in all Five Boroughs of New York City. 

As a convicted felon, he is not eligible to serve in the US Armed Forces much less to be their Commander in Chief.  He is a failure as a businessman, as a President, and as a human being, If you're looking seriously looking at him in November, you need to look in the mirror and if the view still doesn't bother you, congratulations.
You deserve one another.
-bill kenny 

DIY DEI

I'm dating myself, and I've reached an age where I probably should be carbon-dating myself, when I mention The Last Whole Earth Catalog (Access to Tools). It was, before the Internet and Google existed, as close as possible to being an internet of things as a book could ever hope to be.

Most people remember it, if for nothing else, than its cover of Earth, a photo taken by one of the astronauts from Apollo 8 who walked on the moon, called Earthrise. I've always felt it was the most eloquent proof that the farther out in space we go, the more alike we look.

I mention all of that because a Norwich Native Son, (technically he was born down the road in New London), John-Manuel Andriote, whose writings span medicine, music, and children's literature, once noted in the pages of a column he used to author in his hometown newspaper, The Bulletin, if America is a melting pot, then Norwich is a saucepan.   

I love John's simile. It's both truthful, true and absolutely nails it in terms of describing our city. Norwich is a  terrific example of Robert Palmer's Every Kinda People. Thanks to efforts by Global City Norwich and the outreach on behalf of our children by the Norwich Public Schools, there are many ways each of us can help celebrate all of us and in the end, for my money, that's what a community is and should aspire to be.

This Monday, September 9, the abstraction and the reality meet again at Chelsea Parade beginning at five in the afternoon, rain or shine (so let your smile be your umbrella) as the the Rotary Clubs of Norwich (Sunrise- Noontime-RCC) hosts Celebrate Cultural Diversity.  

It's an annual celebration of the too-many-to-mention cultures that we have here in Norwich and the surrounding towns. The goal is to increase awareness of our region's cultural diversity and to highlight and spotlight the area’s many available multicultural resources. 

In our current politically charged atmosphere where Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, DEI, are too often depicted as some sinister and subversive 'threat to our way of life' (your mileage on 'way of life' may vary, btw), the celebration is an affirmation of what we already know, or should, about one another. 

Yes, we are different, and quite often very different, and yet, despite those differences, what we share and why is so much larger and more important than what separates us. 

When you come, you'll learn there is no inside because there is no outside. Leave the idea of 'us or them,' at the corner of Washington Street because at Chelsea Parade it's just 'we.' You'll be mingling with the Pluribus that complements the E and Unum. 

Admission is free and there will be at least two metric tons (by my reckoning) of family-friendly entertainment for all. Have my sense of direction (People tell me where to go all the time and still I get lost)? Easy-Peasy. Chelsea Parade is across from the Norwich Free Academy.

The Food Tasting tickets are $10 per person and will be in high demand as things kick off at 5 pm with a scrumptious sampling of ethnic foods to enjoy, all from local area restaurants (some of which you'll discover perhaps for the first time), and you'll swing and sway to music from the many places around the world our Norwich neighbors call home. Bring the family, as children under six years of age eat FREE. 

As the afternoon becomes evening, there's the seriously important business of presenting the Lottie B. Scott Diversity Award and a Community Diversity Award to the resident and an organization, respectively, who helped promote peace and understanding across our city.

It's an opportunity to meet friends you never knew you had and in these times who among us couldn't do with a few more friends, right here where we all live?
See you there.
-bill kenny

Money Doesn't Talk

And most of what money screams is obscene. 

Robin Williams once observed "Cocaine is God's way of telling you that you have too much money." These days, with all due respect to the late Mr. Williams, it's real estate, baby.

In the not too distant past, one in every five hundred of us in this country experienced homelessness. Last autumn, on average, every night over ninety thousand New York City residents availed themselves of homeless shelters because they had nowhere else to stay.  

We all know/are/were someone one paycheck or less away from being on the street. And yet, we continue to consider ourselves the richest nation on earth. So what might it cost to 'fix homelessness?'

Yeah, sure seems to be expensive especially when we have more far more will than wallet. Speaking of wallet AND the obscenity of money, try this on for size, starting at $9,400,000. 

Maybe they have Moving-In Specials. Remember: If you don't ask, you don't get.
-bill kenny