Many Happy Returns

Our two thoroughly adult children surprised my wife on Wednesday for her birthday. 

Our son traveled from Florida, while our daughter and her spouse sojourned from Virginia, and all rendezvoused at our house moments after she and I had returned from a birthday breakfast. 

I was about to set off on a walk when a person, my son as it happened, emerged from behind the wheel of a Tahoe Side-of-a-House Sport Utility Vehicle and signaled for me to turn around so I could watch his sister maneuver her car into a parking space. 

I laughed and laughed with more happiness than I'd felt, just guessing here, since the last time I saw them. 

We came in through the back door of the house and, since I'd left just moments earlier, I teased my wife in the living room, 'how can you miss me when I never go away?' and she came around the corner to, I suspect, ask me why I was back so soon. 

The question was never asked as she teared up immediately when she saw who was standing in the kitchen (and I mean everyone but me; me, she sees all the time and cries often but for a different reason). 

They treated her to a birthday lunch and hours of smiles and memories before departing to their respective hotels and journeying back most of yesterday from whence they came.

I'm always overjoyed when they come to visit and always cry when they leave. Wednesday was no exception.
-bill kenny 

Jottings from Jonah

When I was a wee slip of a lad, my parents rented a bungalow in Atlantic Highlands quite near to the one my grandparents (Mom's Mom and Dad) rented every year. 

All the bungalows were built on stilts made of concrete blocks with plenty of room for kids like me to crawl around underneath and explore. Not that there was ever a great deal of adventure to be found under the bungalow (sounds like the title of a Hardy Boys' Book, doesn't it?).

I'd be on the beach every day, most often with my grandfather (I just realized he had many grandchildren, but I was his first grandson). We'd dig in the sand on the beach, trying to reach China (and never quite getting there). Other times, we'd walk along the water's edge and turn horseshoe crabs over; I was terrified of them. 

We'd spend hours where the water met the sand, tracking the boats, large and small, and on too many occasions, at his insistence and instigation, we'd wave to the people in Europe, whom he assured me were standing on a beach similar to ours and waving back. I was never able to look hard enough to see them, but he assured me he could and they were, and that was good enough for me. 

Sometimes on weekends, my father would take me along when he went fishing off the pier at the end of the beach, and I watched in wonder as he bought a small cardboard box of frozen bait, killies, that, as the day progressed and the temperatures climbed, thawed and became tiny, living fish.

In recent decades, the only time I've been near/in the ocean is when my wife and I visit my brother, Adam, and his bride, Margaret, DTS. My brother thinks I go for the shore and the sea when I actually go to spend time with him, but no matter. 

Flip-flops and bathing suits, even if all I do is sit in a Tommy Bahama chair for hours on end, listen to the roar of the ocean, and watch the seagulls race up and down the wet sand. 

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and perhaps because of this little knowledge, I may be able to avoid danger. Somewhere, W. C. Fields is nodding his head and smiling.
-bill kenny

Like Breathing Out and Breathing In...

Confirming your suspicions, I am NOT a gentleman, but I know a few, and they insist a gentleman never reveals a lady's age, so I shan't either, but today is one of the three most important birthdays in my life. It's the birthday of my spouse. I'm revisiting some long-ago words in her honor.

I've never been a hockey fan- actually, never much for ice skates. We have a beautiful indoor ice rink in Norwich that we went to when our children were younger (and so were we), but I don't think I've been near it for at least a decade and a half. 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 then later at another place, "Old Smuggler's", beyond the Hauptwache near the Eschenheimer Tor district.

She was, and still 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, how to meet her, or 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-eight years ago, I came to believe that it wasn't and couldn't be coincidence or happenstance that had crossed our paths.

At Sigrid's birthday party on Sunday

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!
-bill kenny

So Long, Norman

With all the talk from the FFS, Felonious Fecal Stain, about his ongoing and all-consuming effort in reinventing/deconstructing/privatizing government, it was only a matter of time before that perennial whipping boy, the United States Postal Service (USPS), bubbled to the surface.

Of course, the Mango Mussolini's been busy renaming the Gulf of White Guy Persecution, making English the 'official' language of the United States (when we all know MONEY is the only language here in the Land of the Round Door Knobs), and bringing down the cost of eggs and all manner of groceries. 

Let's face it: USPS is a money-loser, but in fairness, it has help. In essence, USPS is a pioneer as no other enterprise anywhere on the planet funds, in advance, its employees' pensions (before they've earned them or contributed to them).  Benjamin Franklin would be so proud- or not.

Admittedly, the Post Office can't compete with the likes of the late and lamented Sears Modern Home Program.

BUT, and it's a big BUT for a reason, tell you what would make Ben Bust His Buttons (attention grunge rockers! That name would be perfect for your band). Did you know that at one time, right here in these United States, you could mail children? And I don't mean pictures of children or clothing for children; I mean small humans. 

Perhaps that's what inspired Christopher Clark, in New London, Connecticut, to make a little postal history of his own (not that he's going to be remembered on a stamp or anything). I'm sort of stumped by what he needed the brass knuckles for, unless it was to ask less than nicely for overdue postage.

Somewhere, Mr. Zip weeps. 
-bill kenny

Best Wishes, Northern Neighbo(u)r

It's happened on the second Monday in March since 1977, but I'll be the first to admit that I didn't know that until I looked it up: today is Commonwealth Day in Canada.

Bonne Journée du Commonwealth et mes excuses pour le sac de merde en manteau orange se faisant passer pour le président des États-Unis.
Merci de votre gentillesse. Et les coudes en l'air !
-bill kenny

From the Day We Are Born

If you have arisen 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 (aside from **). 

If it's any consolation, you are probably not alone. Some of us deal with the annual 'spring forward/fall back' routine better than others. Some, not so much. And as it happens, all this very-nearly-time-travel comes with a cost and a price each of us pays, directly or indirectly.

To me, it's another way we're separate from all the other lifeforms on the planet. Animal, vegetable, mineral, and 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, except the Hare 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 bipeds 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'd be right- we don't. So why don't we just do them?
-bill kenny  

American without Tears

In the whole 'flood the zone with shit' approach that the Petulant Peach living in the White House has made his trademark, I guess I can't be blamed for missing the executive order a week ago today to lower the price of eggs. 

JUST KIDDING.

King Canute, in a fancy suit, signed an executive order making English the official language of the United States of America. Take that, Greenland! 

Couldn't make it any more bigly

I, for one, am impressed with the courage it took to make a language he can barely speak, and badly at best, an official ANYTHING. I am braced for when he makes bone spurs our national vegetable. 
-bill kenny 

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