What were once vices are now habits

Last Thursday, as billions in paper wealth were melting down and evaporating (watch out for that hole in the ozone layer!), I bought gas at one of my local branded-gasoline stations and felt as if I were getting a crazy steal by paying only $3.55.9 a gallon for regular. I've never understood the point nine jazz--we buy NOTHING else that I know about in monetary increments like this, except fossil fuel. The only other item that sort of reckons in fractions, is, I believe, Ivory Snow bar soap ("99 and 44/100ths% pure" ) unlike Natalie Wood but much like Sandra Bullock, it also floats.

I did the division I do every time I buy gas, by dividing the gallons purchased into the miles driven and then I enter that number into my notebook to track my gas mileage (I am so anal, I know; but it's a hobby that harms no one). The numbers on my Forester differ from the numbers the manufacturer uses from the EPA tests, but I like mine better because they are real in the sense they reflect how I drive on a tankful of gasoline as opposed to that 'city/highway' split the advertising always talks about.

I don't suppose you'll be surprised to discover I save the gas pump receipts, in order (of course) and store them next to the notebook. Here's what I found sobering as I struggled to pull the handbrake on the euphoria I was feeling as I drove away from the pump. On the the ninth of October 2007 , I had also purchased regular gasoline and had paid $2.79.9 a gallon but doubt very highly I felt like dancing when I did so at that time. Talk about harshing my buzz.

What changed in a year? The frame of reference. In a larger sense, the scale of life grew beyond my ability to maintain it in perspective. Imagine how I felt this past Saturday when I bought gas at twenty cents a gallon less than I had previously in the week only to learn from my daughter who stopped in the same station in the late afternoon that she had paid six cents a gallon less than I had that very same day.

Suddenly Big Oil isn't a terrible monopoly anymore making unconscionable profits from the labor of hard-working and freedom loving Americans. As it turns out, give us what we see as cheap gas and we'll follow you anywhere, even over the cliff. That T. Boone Pickens guy can take his energy self-sufficiency plan and stick it where the oil derricks don't pump (I'm kidding-go back and click the link and get involved!). Another couple of days and we'll be having a Gas Station Owners and Operators' Appreciation Day with parades and floats, assuming any of us have any money worth anything to pay for it all. We're becoming the Weimar Republic and you can look up what happened after that party ran out of ballons.
Ein Reich, Ein Volk, und autofenster saubern with every fill-up.
-bill kenny

Sedaka's Back-or Synchronize your meeting calendar

Upfront, none of the meetings in the Rose City this week have the promise of drama or trauma of last Monday's City Council meeting ("Give me active adults over 55 years of age, or give me a zoning variance") or Thursday's third installment of the Mayor's Economic Round Table (this time on Property Owned by a Private Corporation Not Interested Enough in What Was Going On to Attend) but the issues confronting our fellow citizens and residents are important and their decisions help shape the way ahead and the road forward for all of us here in Norwich.

Speaking of which, tomorrow afternoon at 5 in the Public Works Office at 50 Clinton Avenue (you know where Norwich Ten Pin is? That neighborhood) is the Public Works and Capital Improvements Committee meeting. This is technically a standing committee of the City Council which is why its three permanent members are aldermen, Messrs. Bettencourt, Coutu and Desaulniers. Wondering about the progress of infrastructure improvements or investments in Norwich? These are the people to ask, and this is the forum in which to do it.

At 6:45 PM in the Otis Library (and where, btw, is the handicapped parking for the library? It's not in front of the building nor on the side street. I hate to say 'nowhere' so I'll just say I don't see it anywhere) is a meeting of the Downtown Neighborhood Revitalization Zone Committee. I've no idea as to its membership, goals or progress. But if you go, you could share what you learned and I'd help spread the word. Promise.

And, sort of dovetailing (at least in my mind) at 7 PM is the Zoning Board of Appeals meeting at 23 Union Street. The ZBA is a five person panel who do not have one of the easier, volunteer jobs in our city.

Wednesday shapes up as an informal Day of the Child, judging from the meetings slated to include the Children First Norwich Readiness Council at 9 in the morning at the conference room in the Dime Savings Bank on Route 82. Their website is looking for volunteers and since their Events page is a release written in the future pluperfect tense about something that happened thirteen months previously, that might be a place to help out.

There's a Board of Directors meeting in their media center at 5:30 PM for the Integrated Day Charter School to whom the Norwich Board of Education chose almost a decade ago to not grant a local charter (click here for an interesting comparison of this school to all public schools not only in Norwich but in Connecticut). My two children spent parts of their growing up years in Integrated Day when it was three classrooms tucked into the downstairs of the William Buckingham School on Washington Street.

At 6:30 PM. the Youth and Family Services Committee (you'll find them on the City's website as the Youth Service Advisory Board) meet in Room 335 of City Hall and the Norwich Golf Authority hold their monthly meeting at the Golf Course at 7. PM. Remember to replace your divots (that's all I know about golf-that, and what Mark Twain once noted about it ).

Thursday has a meeting at ten in the morning of the Housing Authority, whose website information is 180 degrees out from reality in terms of time they meet and where.

The Board of Commissioners of Public Utilities (the folks who have something to say about the rates for sewers, water, natural gas and electricity) will hold their meeting at four PM in the Courtyard by Marriott over on West Town Street (perhaps all the rooms in City Hall were booked for other events) with a 5 PM meeting of the Historic District Commission in Room 210 of City Hall (I guess not all the rooms were booked) and a 6 PM meeting of the Ice Rink Authority at the Ice Rink rounding out the week except for....

Also Thursday night, starting at 6:30 in the Rose City Senior Center, but most certainly NOT restricted to seniors, is a health-care accountability session sponsored by the Caring Families Coalition. I'm hoping this is an attempt to get everyone who provides and/or receives health care in the room at the same time to better work on a large-scale concept of accessible and affordable universal care as opposed to pouting, posturing and finger-pointing so many of us confuse with 'solving the problem.'

We all hope for the best when addressing issues so large and complex they threaten to engulf us that we often forget hope is not a plan. We mean well with no way to do well. With tens of millions of uninsured Americans, it's hard to imagine a more pressing issue nationally or locally that needs a resolution. To have a conclusion, though, we need to start-maybe Thursday is when we do that.

Some years ago there was a quote I enjoyed because it sounded great, 'it takes a village to raise a child' but its specific meaning got lost in the tall grass. It became a truism without ever being the truth and the thought really should have been 'it takes a village to raise a village.'
It does take each of us, every day in some way, to improve where we live for ourselves, our families and our neighbors. You don't have to live in Norwich to make a difference to those of us who live here, and vice versa. Ask John Donne after the bells stop ringing.
-bill kenny

Quoting from the Book of Vonnegut....

As we near the first Tuesday in November and hopefully think more and more about the large issues that afflict and affect us nationally (pause while you silently list your Top Five; hey! Stop moving your lips!) I want to dwell not so much on worrying from the top down, but working from the bottom up.

I don't know what I don't know, which is a curse and a blessing in many ways. When I was a kid, I didn't know about gravity, but I watched George Reeves as Superman and thought the trick to flying was a cape. I still have one-but now it comes with a sense of caution and lowered expectations. At least there are fewer emergency room visits, proving experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.

But it seems more and more to me, those who get what they want are the people who've decided that rules are for people who don't know better. Manners and mores are private rules and ethics are public ones, and too many seem to have neither. The schemers always beat the dreamers. They have an agenda and NO conscience and we have only a hazy notion of the former and far too much of the latter.

The grubbers and grabbers think The Good Lord gave them two hands so they could take as much as they want and two pockets to put it all in. We struggle to teach our children what is right and fair. They hire lawyers and execute secret covenants. They buy those they can't bully and bully those they cannot buy. Instead of arguing over a principle, be it large issues like universal access to affordable health care or local issues such as land use and smart growth, they trap us into arguments about specific topics and use 'love me, love my dog' arguments that leave everyone poorer for the exchange, while nothing is revealed.
Many of us have the best local government money can buy-our officials become accidental chattel and the only real question is how much will this cost? For too long, for a variety of reasons, too many of us have assumed those whom we have placed in charge know best. And for even longer, those in charge have believed they not only know EVERYTHING, they know everything BETTER.

Across the country, from town to town and city to city, we have pursued zero-sum politics and, practically without exception it has created streets in need of paving, not only sweeping, sewers that cannot rid us of our own waste fast and safely enough, a police department more and more regard with jaundiced mistrust even as those who serve battle low morale and dispirited zero leadership, more firemen than Ray Bradbury ever dreamed you could have in Fahrenheit 451, and school systems where the instructional staff generates point papers and PowerPoint slides to explain that their failures in the classroom with our children are the result of invisible and far away others that only expending more money can possible fix.

You've read it here before, we are all we will ever have to rebuild and reinvent where we live. And that's as it should be, as we are all we shall ever need. For purely perverse reasons, we now believe if we do nothing we can do nothing wrong and forget that every Brave Dream begins with a leap of faith. We chose to live where we choose to be, and while that varies from one to the other, it's what has brought us all to the places and spaces we are in. So many people in the same device.

All that we carry is all that we are-and it includes our hopes for a better life for our children and ourselves. We cannot continue to allow those whom we have selected to elect to be so cavalier and unmindful of our dreams. There's an old Spiritual that sings about "I am but one-but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something." We are not too late and we are not too few. Now is the time and we are the people.
-bill kenny

Do You Remember Walter?

I had a visitation, as much as a visit, the other day at where I work. Someone I had not seen and (quite frankly) not thought about for over a decade, stopped in on his way to something else he was doing in his life. There was an awkward instance as I shuffled through the mental Rolodex trying to place this person, somewhat weathered and care-worn, in the file of a memory I have.

He actually had to tell me who he was and what we were to ourselves, one another and our employer as I was doing the 'smile and nod' I've taught my children. When confronted by a Hare Krishan, trapped by a Jehovah Witness, challenged to accept Jesus (no hyperlink necessary) as my personal savior, or to sign a petition banning the bustle skirt, I just smile while gently nodding my head and making some, but too much, eye contact with the conversationalist and keep moving. That's really the key--like those who settled this great country of ours. Always keep moving. Westward Ho!

Of course, trapped behind my own desk in my own office, the effectiveness of the smile and nod is severely degraded. And, as it turns out, the visitor was, or more accurately, is a nice enough person whom I met when we were both hitchhikers, but he had his ear tuned to the roar of some metal-tempered engine on an alien distant shore. The years, to be blunt, have not been kind to him.

Listening to him recap, in less than a minute, ten years of life and have enough time left over to punctuate it with "y'know?' six or seven times (sorry, I keep track of that type of transitional filler-it signals a deeper and more profound emptiness) when I clearly did not know, nor care, was painful enough. When he stopped, I realized it was my turn and I didn't want one.

Some days my evil twin, Skippy, is cruel to be kind but that's often lost in the churn. That may have been what happened next. I asked my guest why he was in my office and what he wanted--not because I'm oh-so-important and my time is a rationed commodity more precious than gold but because listening to him and watching who he was and remembering who he had been I was struck by how badly both of us had managed the passage of time.

I freeze dry people-how I saw you last is how I remember you. When I saw my brothers, or some of them, and sisters a few months ago at the funeral for my mom's brother, I was struck by how 'old' my mother was-as if it were possible for a person to have a child who was 56 and yet she, herself, be forty. My mental scrapbook of her and my siblings has lots of fading and faded photographs and it was hard to reconcile these people with those memories.

Meanwhile, back in my office, my visitor sensing that you cannot step into the same river twice, because both it and you have changed, glanced at his watch and did the 'look-at-the-time' aria from the operetta of his life, said goodbye amid mutual reassurances we really should get together soon (which will happen in the future with the same frequency it has happened in the past), and stepped through the door and out of my life again.

" Walter, you are just an echo of a world I knew so long ago. If you saw me now you wouldn't even know my name. I bet you're fat and married and you're always home in bed by half-past eight. And if I talked about the old times you'd get bored and you'll have nothing more to say. Yes, people often change, but memories of people can remain."
-bill kenny

"It is not every day that we are needed"

In the amount of time it's taken the Earth to circle the sun once, I've been hammering at the keyboard writing this blog. Thank goodness the Earth is better at its job than I at mine. It's funny how it so often seems to be one step forward and two steps back. What provoked me into launching this last year was a state of cynical self-absorption I saw within local politics. And it still incites and drives me.

As Macbeth noted, "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day/To the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." Especially in light of his last line, I hope if you have a sound card, you'd consider turning it off. Thanks.

A year ago in Norwich, CT, where I've lived with my wife, Sigrid and (until they became adults, themselves) our children, Patrick Michael and Michelle Alison, we were embroiled in a strenuous discussion on the various philosophies and schools of thought about economic development and smart growth. That we were having this discussion at the top of our lungs so loudly that none of us could hear what anyone else was saying wasn't so much sad (though it was), as merely business as usual and not just around here.

For the last couple of weeks (it really could have been for months, but we didn't pay attention), unhappiness has been building over the actions of the Continuing Legislative Committee on State Planning and Development and, more precisely, the inactions of the City of Norwich and those who represent it, in connection with a change of land use for an area of the city whose residents were caught unawares by what is seen as a fait accompli. As happened last September and October, large number of residents from across the city turned out at Monday's City Council meeting.

No one was interested in discussing (at least Monday night) the idea of incorporating an 'active adult community' into a designated space and place as noted with the Plan of Development somewhere in Down City, or Chelsea (both nicknames, seemingly, for a downtown Norwich that is, imho, often more theoretical than actual)-no, we were Searching for the Guilty and we do that well because we have LOTS of practice. J'accuse! (us everyone, especially that little Tiny Tim brat 'and your wretched little d--'OH, nevermind!)

What would be nice, as someone who goes to a lot of City Council, and other municipal, meetings would be to see an ever increasing and expanding group of engaged and energized citizens in attendance. Lots of folks voted last November 'for change' and I guess went home and looked for it in the couch cushions of the sofa on the sun porch.

Insanity, say the pundits, is doing things the same way you always have and hoping this time the result will be different. I would imagine, without checking, I've written a variation of that line two or three dozen times in the last year in this space. Why do I find that funny? The joke's on me.

We, each of us, need to be the change we wish to see in the world (another line I've used more than once). We need to understand all the help we will ever have to address local, regional, national and international challenges and situations is within each of us and can and will be found nowhere else. We are all we have-and all we will ever need. Too many of us are waiting for Godot, oblivious that it's Samuel and not Josh. "We are all born mad. Some remain so."
-bill kenny

Kissing the ugliest sheep, again

I've concluded, after having sat through the latest debate and reading the news stories and the analysis (= "let me inflict my particular point of view on you, Mr. or Mrs. Cretin and speak in authoritative tones so that, metaphysically, I convert my opinion into your facts") that this Election Day we are frighteningly close, and growing ever closer, to getting exactly the kind of government we deserve. I do not pretend to be happy about that.

Are we there yet? Am I the only one sick of hearing about how Barack Obama made 'Smores with a domestic terrorist? I guess not, as Sarah Plain has worked it into her stump speech. Do I know how many aircraft John McCain crashed while he was a Navy pilot? I'm assuming this is important because Air Force One costs a lot of money and they can't lock the cockpit door.

C'mon--someone needs to stop the hair pulling and the 'Mom! He started it first stuff!' And it needs to happen in the now. First of all, there's more than two bozos in the clown car (see? In a battle of wits with me all three Senators and the Governor are unarmed). And we need to remind the two primary actors in this drama that there are others running, albeit with limited hopes for success, because substance should matter more than style. Steak should trump sizzle-even for a vegan (Hey! That might make a catchy slogan).

Use the tools available online, fact check and others like it, or this one from vote.org that solicited the two major party candidates on a raft of issues (maybe one or more of them will resonate with you?) and claims to offer their verbatim responses. These aren't the only places to check, by any means, nor should any of them be the only measurement you employ to decide for whom to vote. But you need to choose-it's freedom OF choice, not freedom FROM choice.

But in a mean-spirited demolition derby of a national election, which is what we are having now because at some level that's what we want, we already need to focus on November 5th which is the day after this Bonfire of the Insanities and Vanities is extinguished. All of the 'hockey-mom attack dog', 'genius at verbal self-immolation', 'too black', 'too old', 'too different' and 'too much the same' arguments, if that's what they ever were (and I doubt it) will have melted away by the dawn's early light, leaving us all to marvel that the sun does, indeed, come up and we have to make our peace with vox populi and its consequences. E Pluribus Unum and not WTFO.

We went from negative to terminally toxic while the balloon drop was still going on at the national conventions. I met your children-what did you tell them? And don't think I'm being dramatic or sentimental when I mention our children. Remember how we grew up vowing not only to make a difference but to be the difference? How's that working out? Pool ain't in but the patio's dry. As long as we stick someone else with the tab for our actions and our inactions, and then get the heck out of Dodge, it'll be alright. Yeah, about that.....

Who's going to repair the planet? Create real wealth for all instead of vapor trails in account ledgers? What about health-care and human rights or the politics of need versus greed? Don't tell me what 'we' need to do-tell me how we are going to do it.
We kept saying to our parents, 'just you wait'. So far, so good-so what? All they wanted for us was the best and look at what we've settled for and what we're saddling unborn generations with. We are the only ones we can count on to help ourselves now, so let's begin today. Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl. Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.
-bill kenny
Housekeeping note: As it wasn't (and still isn't) on the City of Norwich's website as a meeting for tonight (glad I found this on The Day's website), wanted to correct something I incorrectly concluded on Monday had been canceled. The Mayor's Economic Roundtable on the Norwichtown Mall (unencumbered by the presence of the mall's owners, Edens and Avant) will be held today at 5:30 PM in City Hall, though there's more than enough room in the NT Mall itself for such a meeting. The previous two sessions of community leaders at the roundtable have discussed the Norwich portion of the Norwich Hospital Property-I am not aware of any conclusions developed or decisions made as a result of those discussions.

Yo-Yo's wit and wisdom

Yossarian explained to Nately that the enemy is anyone who tries to kill you-it doesn't make any difference which uniform he's wearing. Somehow, you're not amazed my personal hero would be a character from a work of fiction, now are you? Yeah, I know-typical.

Part of me has always been confused about the reasons for a Department of Homeland Security. Maybe it was just me, but I don't think so as there were (and are) millions of us. I enlisted and then re-enlisted, in the USAF, and took an oath that said, in part, 'to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic'. Sounds to me like I was already an employee of the Homeland Security Department but we had a different name for it. More significantly, I'm wondering if perhaps I missed the larger discussion on the meaning, Constitutionally speaking, of 'domestic enemies'.

This isn't an "Eat the Rich" screed, because to the rest of the world, we are the rich. In light of last week's Wall Street Shuffle, is it possible Dow Jones is a fellow traveler? Are brokerages a front for domestic enemies? We just came up with more money than my little brain can comprehend to rescue the secret government--the folks whose decisions cause my family and yours to have to choose between making a house payment or buying fuel oil, because we can't do both, can we (not anymore). The very same White House that assured us Saddam and Obama were shoe-shopping and that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction in the potato cellar (while simultaneously knowing that NONE of that was true) asked a sleepy-eyed and bed-headed Congress, who bought without question a package of emergency measures no free society can stand, or withstand, the Patriot Act, for boxcars of our money to avoid an 'economic catastrophe', but for whom and at what cost?

When the Kenny Brothers (sorry Adam and Kelly) can't make payments on their credit cards, it's a family issue; when it happens to the Jonas Brothers, it's in People Magazine but when Lehman Brothers has written checks their backsides literally cannot cash, it's a national emergency. Wasn't it Calvin Coolidge who noted 'the business of America is business'? As GM goes, so goes the USA. Except the wheels fell off that idea, literally and figuratively, decades ago. Sic transit Chevy Corvair (I owned one and it was as awful as you've heard).

The USA is the #1 exporter of military hardware (and the ancillary training to support it) in the history of our species on this planet. Why can't we don't do anything else as well, except consume four times the amount of natural resources as any other nation on earth? Some of us, well-meaning I know, would like to blame 'the government'--sorry, I can't really go there. I remember something about 'we the people, in order to form a more perfect union' on one of those documents we keep in a museum vault (while also ignoring it in daily life), and realize we have done this to ourselves.

We've created a caste system where everyone stands on everyone else's shoulders to get ahead or to keep from falling back--and the men and women in our military are no longer an extension of foreign policy, they are the embodiment of that policy. Notice how the State Department hasn't gotten any larger, or how economic outreaches to 'third world' nations haven't grown, but how everyone on both sides of the aisle in Congress thinks we need to add 100,000 trained soldiers, another air wing, another division of Marines and an additional newly constructed submarine for the respective branches of our armed forces. Why would we build this capacity if we're not intending to use it? And don't think for a minute who we choose on November to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is going to change the deliberations on our ways and means. New brooms, but old dust-that's what we'll get because that's what we want.

Two hundred and thirty two years after John Hancock signed his name so large and boldly on the Declaration of Independence that George III could read it without glasses, I wonder, if he could see where we are now, what we've done with this incredible democracy that he and so many of his fellow countrymen (who, technically, didn't even yet have a country) pledged their lives to create and defend, if he wouldn't ask for the white out. As Mao purportedly said to Nixon, 'how do you know one Revolution was enough?'
-bill kenny