Norwich Meetings 15-19 March 2010

As John Wayne, celluloid hero, observed in The Cowboys, 'we're burnin' daylight' especially now that we've in Daylight Savings Time. This is a week of activities across The Rose of New England suggesting some of us know how to put that hour of additional daylight to good use...by meeting indoors and...well, okay so that sentence started off like gangbusters before fading (what does that remind you of? And, no, I didn't mean your former spouse.)

The Senior Affairs Commission meets at nine this morning in the Rose City Senior Center. The last time they met, says their minutes, was back in November. Considering the number of residents we have who are seniors (some of us are also post-graduates, I might add), it's good that we have such an advocacy group.

At 5:15, in their offices at 1649 Route 12, in Ledyard, is a regular meeting of the Southeastern Water Authority. I still think they should erect a statue of W.C. Fields in front of the building to make it easier to find the building though I can understand their reluctance to do so.

The City Council has a full agenda tonight at seven-thirty in Council Chambers at City Hall (and they had a shortened weekend, after meeting with the Board of Education for the better part of two and half hours Saturday. You'll have to take Andy and Kathleen's word on that as citizen reps as the three of us were the only ones in the room who didn't have a dog in the hunt, but will be paying for the license and the trips to the vet, usw...).

Tuesday afternoon at five-thirty in the Buckingham Memorial building (in downtown, up the street from Otis Library and down the street from where the Y was) is a regular meeting of the Public Parking Commission. Their last meeting was in January (I especially enjoyed the entry, AFTER 'Old Business' entitled 'Anything Else Brought Before the Commission' though my heart always beats faster for 'The Dog Ate the Part We Didn't Like'.) I wish there were some way of involving the Police Department more directly in this commission's work, since, no matter what minutes I read, there's always interaction with the public safety officials before any public parking policy changes are made or implemented. Seems to me the shortest distance between two points are chairs at the same meeting.

At five, in the conference room of the Norwich Public Utilities building at 16 Golden Street it's a special meeting of the Board of Public Utilities' Commissioners.

At 5:30, in the Latham Science center on the campus of the Norwich Free Academy, it's a regular meeting of the Board of Trustees. Considering how relationship NFA and the Norwich Board of Education has in educating our high-school age children, and the amount of money required from the city to accomplish this, I'm always surprised at how few Norwich residents (you don't have to be a parent to have a piece of a tuition bill) have an interest in this institution.

At six in Room 210 of City Hall is a regular meeting of the Personnel and Pension Board, whose members have a major impact on the attractiveness of Norwich as a potential employer, in how they oversee the investment of city employees' money in pension plans. As the turbulence in the world's financial markets in the last eighteen months have, I think, helped underscore, measure twice and cut once.

And at seven in the Planning Department's basement conference room at 23 Union Street, is a regular meeting of the Commission on the City Plan (who've so far NOT been a part of the Saturday workshops the City Council is holding with the 'Alphabet Agencies').

Wednesday morning at eight thirty in their offices in the Norwich Business Park is a regular meeting of the Southeastern Connecticut Council of Government whose website fails to comply with Public Act Number 08-3. So if vague generalizations that SCCOG is doing wonderful, if not especially well-defined 'stuff' for the region is enough for you, worry no more. If it's more specific information you seek, good luck with that.

Later Wednesday morning, at nine, in the Community Meeting Room of The Dime Savings Bank is the Children First Initiative/School Readiness Council meeting. I would assume in times of budget austerity, little is of more importance than effectively marshaling every resource, be it material, financial or human, to support our children's education so in theory I applaud the CFI, except, as always, their website is pathetically out of date and completely ineffectual as a means of information and/or persuasion on the issues they are facing face and how can help them better succeed. You'll miss every shot you NEVER take.

Thursday at five, in Room 210 of City Hall, is a regular meeting of the Historic District Commission. There's a been a lot of discussion on historic or heritage tourism and the advantages and costs involved in such an initiative. Where the rubber meets the road on these ideas is where the members of this commission are located. There are January meeting minutes but none from February.

And at six, in their conference room in the Ice Rink on the New London Turnpike, it's a regular meeting of the Ice Rink Authority who had, as a reading of their February minutes indicates, a very successful winter in terms of business and visitors. I've been accused of skating for years, but it's great to see a part of the community for over a decade and a half continue to expand its outreach and enhance the quality of life of not just the residents of Norwich, but of all those who use it.

That's it for the official meetings for this week. If you'd like to become a part of something bigger than yourself and not only make a difference, but be the difference, stop in and drop in on a meeting of any of the advisories, boards, commissions and committees-after all, it's our friends and neighbors who are members so you're bound to know someone in the room. Together we are much smarter than individually and, let's be honest, we can use all the help we can get, especially one another's as we weather the winter of mixed drinks.
-bill kenny

Here's to the struggles of the silent war

The future arrived a little earlier this morning than it did this time yesterday. I'm never sure what to do with this extra hour of daylight I have--I'm equally at a loss as to what to invest the extra hour of sleep in at the moment in the fall when we move the clocks back. If only Bernie Madoff had expanded beyond money and into the time and space continuum, how much easier our lives might have been. Except in Arizona and Hawaii, seemingly.

We're the only species, to my knowledge, that divides temporal moments into arbitrarily measured units. I'm especially impressed that all of us on the globe have agreed to use the same increments; none of this 'how many centimeters are in an inch or yards are needed to be a kilometer?' stuff. Sixty is sixty until and unless it gets to twenty-four though when we start rolling it into months, the accounting gets a bit ragged.

Remember the Social Security Lock Box as one of the ghosts of a Presidential Campaign Past? Maybe we could use that for Daylight Savings Time as well. I think most of us across the globe have some form of it (hand on your heart, were you surprised to discover North Korea didn't observe it? Yeah, me neither. Perhaps the Dear Leader doesn't have a watch) and I have to believe if we all put a little into the kitty, we might have ourselves quite a tidy sum of minutes and hours we could redistribute to those who made a hash out of it the first time around.

You scoff, because you don't see a practical use for this saved time? Let's say, you want to go for a swim, but you've just eaten--one quick call to the DSTLBAC (Daylight Savings Time Lock Box Advisory Committee, 1-866-MIN-UTES) and there you go, catch a wave and enjoy. Unless you're a shark of course-and living in Sherwood Forest. I don't know if they have to wait after eating anyone or anything.

-bill kenny

I Brake for Mothra

Do you remember when people spoke about things made in Japan in a derogatory tone? Before your time, probably (I wish I could say that, and mean it), but we did. We even had a snappy little jingoistic two word put down the seconded of which was 'crap' and the first word rhymed with it. Oh how superior we felt as we laughed and got into our 1963 Terraplanes with the white-wall tires and eventually got the bad boy started and drove away. Those were halcyon days.

The awful thing about that line was that it was true-but it didn't stay true. Every year, more of what we had in our house and garage was made elsewhere until ALL of it (or just about) was and it was pretty easy to do since in some areas, like auto manufacturing, the US guys just got sloppy or stupid or something. That, too, is an overstatement and a generalization, but it hides a reality of a self-fulfilling prophecy that crept in, on little cats' feet and stamped "paid" to the dream of unending good times and decent wages in many parts of the country.

We always speak of Detroit when we say US automakers, but I remember applying, with John Cornell while we were both at Rutgers, for a summer job at a Ford plant in Metuchen, New Jersey (they built Torinos, I think) and there was a Saturn assembly center in Spring Hill, Tennessee. One's gone and the other's not long from being gone.

And now 'Japanese' cars, come from exotic places like somewhere in Indiana, probably near Dan and Marilyn Quayle's PotatoE Farm, and the Nissan, Honda and Toyota folks are all heading the same way. Those who've concluded in print and electronic media that 'American-built' vehicles are inferior (because they're built by Americans?) should walk east until their hats float.

Perceived quality problems soured us on Seeing the USA in a Chevrolet. My mom tells me I used to watch Dinah every afternoon, sitting on the coffee table in my parents' apartment and would blow a kiss right back at her at the end of her show. Kiss my butt, Burt. Dinah, I saw you first, even if he ended up with the Flying Nun in a Trans Am (for crying out loud!). Now it's one of the 'other' guys' turns to have recalls and repairs. We're back to smiling smugly, except no one has ever confused a Prius with a Pinto or a Corolla with a Corvair. Sing this altogether and see what happens.
-bill kenny

She Makes My World Stop

She can barely tolerate Springsteen and winces when I start on my 'Bruce at the Festhalle on His first German Tour' story which I will NOT recount today. She's convinced Bob Dylan cannot now, nor ever, sing and that goes double for Neil Young, because he also can't play the harmonica or guitar according to her. She was a devoted Barry Manilow fan at a moment in his career when he was so commercially sweet, my teeth ached listening to him.

Where there had been just she and a husband was to be also a son and then later a daughter. She raised them both, it's their father with the case of arrested emotional development, practically on her own since her spouse gave his time to total strangers, not for days on end, but for decades-and she never missed a beat in creating from a home and hearth a safe haven for them all.

Not even on the day he came home, on a date of this very month nineteen years ago, to tell her she and the children would be leaving the only home they'd ever known and moving to a country on another continent, that, of the three, only she had been in (and that was twice for holidays) did she hesitate or look anywhere else but straight ahead.

Adding to the degree of heart wrenching difficulty in a relocation of close to 4,500 miles was a landing in the area first settled by the Pilgrims at about the time of year they, too, had arrived (but she stuck the landing). And she was to discover being a stranger in a strange land meant swallowing the bewilderment, frustration, humiliation and indignation often created by disinterested bureaucrats who required a rain forest of completed forms before issuing her a card of one color, but called by another, in order to remain with her family.

She is the most headstrong person, if not on the planet, than at least in a specific house at an address in Norwich, Connecticut, despite some stiff competition in that department from a daughter who has her self-assurance and belief in her own abilities from her mother. The child's brother has his easy ability to make friends with people he's just met from his mother and she is the reason why neighbors can abide her spouse, I suspect, since he came with her and she's wonderful so there must be something she sees in him (she does wear glasses, after all).

There's nothing she cannot repair or mend which is a skill that comes in handy because her husband has a gift for physical destruction that approaches an art form and she has as much patience as each project requires, even if all of them require all of it all the time. The number of events and happenstances that had to happen in a specific and given order, for this woman from Offenbach am Main to meet a dweeb from Central New Jersey and make his world stop completely is incalculable.

The life that she has cannot be the one she thought she was getting when she said yes a lifetime ago and it's certainly not the one she deserves. Sometimes the ride has been very dark (as in dunkel night time, a small child offered in Gerglish nearly two decades ago). If the power to make today, her birthday, a national, or international holiday, were mine, I would use it, but it doesn't make a difference to her that this will never happen. She does not miss what she cannot have.

I can only wish her happiness today, her birthday, and marvel, yet again, that she shares her life with me. I never had a girl who loved me half as much as this girl loves me. You gotta hold on tight to her. She's a real emotional girl.
-bill kenny

Same World, Different Jane

Someone once told me 'if you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there for them.' Well, I do remember them and I was there, so go fish. On the other hand, I can't remember who told me that Sixties line, so perhaps everything is everything....how ironic would that be?

I was in high school in the late Sixties and in college to start the Seventies, with a draft lottery number of four. I can remember Jane Fonda, not so much for Barbarella ( how could anyone forget her in that?) or "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" but for her non-cinema activities during the Vietnam War. There are a lot of people, all these decades later, who are as passionate today about "Hanoi Jane" as they were at that time and if you weren't there, or haven't read American (and World) History of that era, go read about it now (the fourth link, above, is an EXCELLENT start) because none of what follows has any meaning without context (Sort of like Zen stand-up or knock-knock jokes in Esperanto).

When I moved offices last week, one of the items I moved myself, aside from the photos of my family, was a rubbing from the American Veterans' Traveling Tribute Wall that helps me remember a prep school classmate, Roy O., a handful of days older than I, who joined the Army and died in Binh Dihn Province, South Vietnam, less than four months after arriving in country. I've finally accepted we are everyone we've ever met, and despite the urge at times to run from who we see in the mirror, there's nowhere to go.

I thought about Roy, Hanoi Jane and a whole book, if not library, of my life yesterday while reading about Colleen LaRose, who calls herself (the accounts say) Jihad Jane. I cannot wrap my head around the world view required to be the person the news reports describe. As Jackson Browne sang, 'It's like a song I can hear, playing right in my ear. I can't sing it, but I can't help listening.'

I can't carry a tune, but I can now remember the words. As military intervention in Southwest Asia began, I signed up for Department of Defense news releases. I continue to receive electronic advisories identifying US military casualties, because someone has to bear witness to the selfless sacrifice without judging or putting a thumb on the scale. I still remember opening a news release a year (maybe more) ago reporting the death of a soldier whose name was the same as my son's. I dissolved into tears, DESPITE knowing this was NOT my son...I cannot imagine the heartbreak of a parent whose child is actually on such a list.

And then I read another news account about Jihad Jane, and realize the world still makes no sense. I hoped,and perhaps actually believed (if only for a time), that knowledge was power and learning was critical to understanding (so eventually we get smarter as a species and unspecified wonderfulness ensues) and then I come face to face with Jihad Jane and realize, learning and progress are seamless but hatred and violence are mindless and relentless.
-bill kenny

The Other Beckett

I was a child in Central Jersey, a short pants, romance, learn to dance, get dressed, get blessed, try to be a success child, when construction on Route 287 began. I grew up and older, if not wiser, went to college, to Greenland, to Germany and eventually a decade and a half later, I came back to the United States and became a thorn in The Rose of New England. Much of my family still lives in New Jersey and after a handful of visits in a number of years, I was stunned to discover on one trip to see them that Route 287 was in fact, finally finished. All the little pieces had been tied together and the various strands woven into one highway. I may have actually stopped the car on the shoulder and gotten out to touch the road.

We're on the verge of a similar epiphany here in Norwich. I've taken to calling it the Samuel Beckett Regional Intermodal Transportation Center because everything eventually gets a name, and for about a decade and a half, this project has seemed right out of Waiting for Godot. Except, it's here now and no matter how we feel about its existence, cost, value, purpose or function, those discussions have already been had.

The one we still need to have, and all the other wrangling kept us from it, almost by design, is where do we go from here. The adage, "Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan," comes to mind and yet as a city and region, we remain stuck in second gear. Is this just more Accidental Excellence-when something goes right, we don't know how it happened (or don't believe it happened), so we can't do it again? Or is this more of the One Big Swing mentality we insist upon here, despite all evidence to the contrary that it doesn't work?

Remember when the Heritage Center was going to be the start of the return of downtown Norwich? Then that was followed by the construction of the Mercantile Exchange, the development of Artspace, the rehabilitation of the Otis Library, and resuscitation of the Wauregan Hotel, in no especial order (I'm sure, I've left some initiatives out for which I apologize). And now here we are again, in the waiting mode.

We've forgotten that if nothing happens, then nothing happens and if you have failed to plan, you've planned to fail. Sins of omission and commission are sins-sorry, not my rule; check with the Guy upstairs. There's a toast some of us know better than others, 'Next Year, Jerusalem." Implicit in that hope is a means of achieving the goal, to include having a map and a route and milestones to mark your progress.

The Mayor and City Council (or most of them, to be precise) are working with a small group of agencies who are the heavy lifters for development to create a plan with clearly defined goals and the means of achieving them. The Council, Mayor and City Manager are also wrestling with the next budget at a time when austerity has replaced prosperity and all of them could probably use a break but they won't get one. And when we sit on our hands at public meetings, assuming we show up at all, we've picked a side in the outside versus inside debate, a debate that none of us can win. Somehow, they (and we) need to have every aspect of who we are and where we are going laid out before all of us at the same time, so that we can work on the whole and not continue pell-mell and piecemeal.

"Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!"
-bill kenny

Corrective Eyewear for Near-Sighted Giant

Interesting how life imitates art (or would if this were anything more than artifice). Adam (one of) my brothers yesterday recounted his preparations for participating in a half-marathon in April by running ten miles Sunday morning. I admire his strength of purpose and dedication to a cause and envy him his mobility though I worry his years behind the plate during softball season are starting to catch up with him.

I'm more than familiar with the seasons' passage as it was a year ago, today, though I was dead to the world when we circumnavigated the hourglass, when I had total knee replacement (TKR) surgery for my left knee. After about a decade of pain from life as a contact sport, I had degenerative arthritis in both knees-a uni-compartmental (inside part of my right knee) three years earlier had brought some relief but I had delayed the inevitable because I didn't want to ruin my chances for that career as a parcel delivery guy (you gotta have the legs for those shorts they wear in the summer. I could see me telling some secretary signing for a delivery, 'Hey sister, my eyes are up here').

I'm lying, of course, but not about the location of my eyes. I was terrified, even though by the time we arrived at the landing zone and the jump master checked the rigging, I was an expert on the operation. It was, believe me, NOT a fear of the unknown, but rather the consequences of the known that had me in a cold sweat as we counted down the days. I also hate the orange gelatin they give you in the hospital-close your eyes, put a spoonful in your mouth, and try to guess what it is. You'll never even get close.

I got out of the hospital on my wife's birthday which just proves the world is a giant knock-knock joke with us as the punchlines. I imagine the novelty of having me wish her a happy birthday when I was not skittering sideways like a crab (or Axl Rose, now that I think about it) wore off long ago and there I was with a cane, but no top hat, being just the kind of guy you want to share your birthday with.

I expect to be considerably more mobile this Friday for her birthday than I was last year (because I cannot be less mobile, I hope) and I'm thinking okay, so I missed Dancing with the Stars (again), why not take her ballroom dancing and trip the light fantastic, or at least the first part? I'll do a two-step, quick-step bossa nova, a little Victor Sylvester and some Rudy Valentino. You should see me movin', right across the floor. Hand me down my tuxedo, next week I'm coming back for more. I'm hoping, push comes to shove, to apply a cold orange Jell-O compress to get the swelling down (from where she brains me).
-bill kenny