Like a Break in the Battle

We live in a most amazing age, or could if we could get out of our own way.

As residents of a planet where, via the electric fire of television, we watched the murder of a President, a walk (actually more like a skip) on the moon, the tearing down of a Wall that divided a continent and a nation, and the destruction of buildings and thousands of lives in a flash of jet fuel, steel and glass, it's sometimes easy to forget we are, each of us, skin- covered miracles.

Helping underscore this assumption (actually for me, more like an article of faith) I can offer you only one example as 'proof', conceding I don't know that it proves anything but, everyday we get up and amaze and amuse, often in unequal parts, the other seven billion or so of us on this ant farm (with beepers) we call home.

Some days are so hard, it's almost impossible to celebrate yourself, no matter how important that is to do--it's okay, watch this, and celebrate someone else, and know we can do this, too.
-bill kenny

A Modest Black Friday Proposal

I was going to get up before I went to bed and write something, just in case you thought I might do that in honor of today being Black Friday in US retail, and then I remembered that my Mom raised crazy children, but not stupid ones. 

I was impressed, watching all the TV commercials yesterday during the Macy's Day Parade and reading the papers with all the inserts (the newspapers actually looked like the Sunday newspapers in terms of thickness, didn't they?) at the early hours, so many stores had for today. And the rewards that so many offered for sleep deprivation.

But what if your city hall opened at 4 A.M. and gave you a 25% discount on overdue/past-due property taxes? Would you line up the way you stood out in front of Big Box Joint this morning to get one of the 75-inch TVs they had for under $500? 

Or what if the state DMV office offered a driver's license or vehicle registration at half off to the first 100 folks through the door when they opened at five? Heck with that, what if DMV just let you pick the photo for the license instead of keeping it a secret until after it's been laminated? My photo ALWAYS looks like a raccoon having a seizure because of the black rings under my eyes and how their camera is designed to always catch me in mid-blink. 

Finally, what if the IRS gave you a 10% discount on your earned income credit for stopping in between 4 and 6 AM? Would the line in front of their building look like that hungry mob circling the Target store, trying to score this year's electronic accessory,  or some of those size 44 Triple-E jump boots?

You ponder all of that. I'm heading out to church because if I get there before 5 AM, they have a twofer on plenary indulgences and I need all the indulging I can get. 

-bill kenny

Grateful for this Sheltered Space

Maybe where you live the preparations are already underway. Maybe you're borrowing chairs from neighbors who were planning on borrowing them from you. A search party to locate card tables has been formed, and the aromas already emanating from the kitchen are causing mouths to water.

Thanksgiving may be the only holiday in America where many of us become, if just for the day, math majors as we try to compute how many hours, how large a turkey needs to be in the oven at how many degrees so that it can feed a houseful of family and friends we've invited to join us for dinner. And let's not forget how many side dishes and who's bringing what--all important elements on our national Day of Thankfulness.

No matter how rough times have been leading up to this week, and for a lot of us they sure have been tough, we still make that extra effort as we put a smile on a care-worn face and enjoy the warmth of home and hearth.

Let's face it, the smiles have been in short supply in recent years. Many of us have seen local businesses fade and then close, and neighbors move on and away in search of something more than we have right here, right now. And in those households still here, a lot of us are doing a little more with a little less than we did last year.

Despite what you may think, we're the fortunate ones. When you talk to those who help out at food pantries and kitchens such as Saint Vincent de Paul Place, they'll tell you how the need is again greater this year than it was last year, and we all remember how last year, too many were in need of too much.

And while the big headlines on newspaper front pages in recent weeks scream about the legislative Armageddon to come in Washington, DC, in January, closer to home, many of us whisper and worry about the cost of heating oil and a winter that has yet to arrive.

On a brighter note, next Saturday is the Winterfest Light Parade, followed by Light Up City Hall. 

Ready or not, the holidays are here, and as we gather family and friends closer to celebrate, hopefully in the rush and crush of events we can remember strangers are friends we haven't yet met and light up a life the way we'll light up City Hall as we give one another hope when we celebrate Thanksgiving.

-bill kenny

A Lot of Things Have Happened....

It may be slightly premature, and in light of the year some of us have already had and the forecast of challenging times yet to come, perhaps even presumptuous, but all the best to you and yours as the holiday season begins in earnest.

We can lose sight of the blessings for which to be grateful as events blur as they rush one into the other with tomorrow, Thanksgiving, chased by Black Friday mall sales that start in the middle of the night, as seasonal celebrations intensify and temperatures drop.

Instead of enjoying a moment to appreciate the gifts of hearth and home that we have, we sometimes look to the lives of the famous and fortunate and yearn for that which we don't have. The ringing of the Salvation Army kettle collection bell doesn't cause us to count our change along with our blessings so much as to worry about for whom the bell tolls and when it might be ringing for us. We should be cautious, but not fearful.

We have much to be thankful for as a city. We have hundreds of volunteers, not just for the lighting of City Hall and the Winter Festival Parade, but also as coaches in youth sports, advisors for after-school activities, and members of boards and committees involved in nearly every aspect of our municipality. Each of us has a neighbor who has a community project, and each one of our neighbors can say the same.

We have professional emergency medical services and own our own public utility. We have teachers and schools the envy of cities ten times our size, a community college that calls Norwich home, a spectacular public park, and a location between Boston and New York, straddling two popular casinos in the middle of Mystic Coast and Country here in the Northeast Corridor, like few other places.

We've not yet turned the corner as a city, but we're getting there with every new participant in a neighborhood watch, every new small business that opens, and every time someone new moves into one of our neighborhoods. Norwich in years past waited for the world-now we are ready to be a part of a larger world, and to be more active and engaged with it and one another than we have in decades.

There are challenges ahead, and perhaps not the easiest of times awaiting us. But we should be thankful we have one another and are developing the confidence to live out loud. Don't mourn what we've missed, celebrate what's yet to be. To those whom much is given, much is expected-and we should expect much more from our city and from ourselves, not just this holiday but everyday.
-bill kenny 

A Lesson Learned (Finally)

I've been around for quite some time, and far longer than many might have wished (it's okay, I feel the same about you). I grew up in a 'get along by going along' environment but have discovered as I've aged without mellowing that all of that is just not worth it anymore.

Now, when I hear or see bullshit (insert your own example; in recent years, I've taken to citing the White House), I just call it out. I don't have the time left on earth to waste being patient, polite, or trying to please people. And as it happens, I'm not alone.  

"Neural Pruning." Sounds like a grunge band from Seattle.
The merch is fire, I'll bet.
-bill kenny

Phor Sure?

I love Major League Baseball, not just the season that goes on forever, but also the off-season, or the Hot Stove League, activities. Even when some of the activities that catch my eye have nothing to do with the players on the ball clubs, I'm drawn in. 

Not sure what to make of this headline: Phillies sue to block Phanatic from becoming ‘free agent’

I cannot claim to be a Phillies' fan, unless we're talking about the sandwich shop down the street from my house. And to be honest, I'm not sure how the Phantic could eat an IVO, or down a couple or three of the Cheesesteak Jawns without getting some on his fur.   

I'm hoping that the lawsuit doesn't give Mr. Met any big ideas. New York City needs all the love it can get.
-bill kenny

Phillies sue to block Phanatic from becoming ‘free agent’

A Puff and Stuff

Because I stopped twenty-nine years ago (on 30 September 1996), last Thursday's Great American Smoke-Out Day went by in a puff of --well, you know what kind of puff. I smoked three packs a day for about twenty-two years. I started out smoking Pall Mall Reds (my father had smoked them for all the years growing up as a kid that he smoked before he quit). 

They were cigarettes that other new smokers (we were all college kids, and let's just admit that smoking tobacco was akin at times to a palate cleansing exercise and leave it at that, okay?) were reluctant to bum as they were unfiltered, so you needed to dry lip, or you flossed to remove tobacco from between your teeth.

I'm not a former smoker-I'm a recovering smoker. I don't know if it was the nicotine or the tobacco or whatever chemicals were supposedly put in cigarettes, but I was, and am, addicted to and always will be. Even to this day, I miss smoking a cigarette, despite everything I know and believe to be true about the health dangers associated with it. 

And, hand on my heart but also on my wallet, smoking now is a danger to my precarious financial health. (Now sounding like an old codger, mainly because I am) I can remember back in the day, at the Air Force commissary at Rhein Main, buying a carton of cigarettes for (maybe) six dollars. By then, I'd traded up through Pall Mall Golds to Benson & Hedges. Now, if I'm reading the signs correctly, it's about twice what it was for a pack with well over half of it in taxes, federal, state, and whatever anyone can get away with.

I was in the last generation to watch TV ads for cigarettes and remember slogans like "I'd Rather Fight than Switch!", "A Silly Millimeter Longer, 101" and "Come to Where the Flavor Is". Look at gyroscopes of old TV shows, to include newscasts, and you'll see Chet Huntley (of Huntley and Brinkley) smoking on the news set, on camera. Cigarettes were everywhere-there were "Show Us Your Lark Pack" commercials that eventually provoked the genius who was Stan Freberg to respond as only he could.

I stopped completely because I knew if I didn't, I'd die from some health condition created or aggravated by smoking. That my health is so poor now, but that none of my maladies have anything to do with cigarettes, makes me smile, albeit ruefully, at how the Lord's sense of humor is so often puckish (and 'p' isn't my first choice for the first letter).

The biggest challenge after I stopped was what to do in the car while driving. It was the most natural thing in the world for me after putting the car in gear, just to light up a cigarette, and for many months after I stopped smoking, I struggled. 

It was odd, too, to get used to how food tasted when you finally descended from the cloud of smoke. On the other hand, I didn't miss that 'licked an ashtray' feeling in my mouth when I first awakened. And oddest of all, and to this day I don't get it, all the years I smoked, I couldn't smell cigarettes on someone else, simply unable to detect it, and now, I get almost ill when standing next to someone on an escalator who was just outside on a smoke break.

I try to take it easy on people who continue to smoke, because I appreciate how hard it is to give it up, even for a day, even with all we know about what happens to us if we can't stop. So if you struggled with the nicotine monkey and were able to keep him at bay for the day, good on you, and maybe today, you can take another step. 

And if you tried but couldn't do it, don't worry-you have the power to make any day you want your very own smoke-out day. Nowadays, you can kick the butts in the butt, if you so desire. Save your Zippo for those live shows now that you've sworn off cell phones.
-bill kenny