The Petty Pace Picks Up

This is the quiet before the storm in my house and yet it's a place I have been twice-once very recently and once exactly twenty-two years ago today. 

I work for the Federal Government-feel free to sneer, many people do and I have unkind thoughts about each of you since I am keenly aware of how good I am at what I do but how many obliviots are uncontaminated by any clue. Fair enough.

I spent most of  this past summer not getting paid 20% of the time because the cretins we elected to a variety of offices in the our Nation's Capital are too petty and pusillanimous to understand what the word 'compromise' means. 

There were things in my house, probably like yours for similar reasons, that we did without because we didn't have the money. Feeling bad for the CEO of AIG wasn't on my list of concerns and I can empathize if you didn't care either. 

Today might be my last day with pay for an 'indeterminate period of time' which is bureaucratese for fugifIkno, which is not an acronym but rather a statement of exasperation. 

I'm not liking the feeling in the pit of my stomach today because it's identical to how I felt twenty-two years ago on this, my last day of ever working in Germany at a job I very much loved. Wiedersehen macht nicht immer freude.

It's not just the loss of control over my own life, or any control if I were being honest, though that certainly is part of it. I think for me some of it is anger, if not outright rage, at how history repeats itself and how often it's the same same shirt just a different day.

I have chosen to be angry with the Tea Party and the jackals, worms and gnomes who sup at their table. They would like to pretend after years of NOT offering any constructive idea for universal affordable health care that they are unhappy at the shape of the program slated to begin tomorrow.

Their counter proposal two weeks ago left the 46 million currently without health care, still without health care and their magic phrase, "market solutions," is big money code for devil take the hindmost-as long as it doesn't impact the well-off.

I'm worrying that one American Revolution may not have been enough and if we're living through the beginning of the end or the end of the end. And if you think I'm being melodramatic or overly self-pitying as you wonder why you're fresh out of cake remember: me today, you tomorrow. Count on it.
-bill kenny

If You Never Do

Much is made in poetry and song about the airy delightfulness and wonder of being. If you are of a nature where your spirit needs to soar while contemplating the sheer marvelousness of your own existence, I'd suggest you not look too closely or too often to the left or right, front or back, as we shimmy, shake and shuffle cheek to jowl here on the ant farm with beepers because there's over seven Billion (with a B) of us and while special is as special does, our mileage may vary.

I spent a not inconsequential amount of time with people earlier in the week who operate in the sincere belief that talking about taking an action, perhaps if done loudly enough, might be considered to have been an action. Except, of course, for the actual doing part-and/or LACK of doing part.

For someone with eyes shut, the two look the same. And since looking the same and being the same are now, by this logic, identical, we've created a whole new dimension of reality, except, as it turns out when you build a logic tree for the statements supporting it, none of them exist as truths but only as truisms.

We've lost the delicious duality of meaning in the sound of one hand clapping by trading it for the poorly-examined assumption that one hand washes the other, but always in silence. And silence equals assent.

Thanks to Sara LaMothe for provoking this today, though we've never met nor likely ever shall. She did nothing to directly precipitate any of this and yet. Sing a song of sixpence for your sake and take a bottle full of rye. Four and twenty blackbirds in a cake and bake them all in a pie. They told me you missed school today; so what I suggest is just throw them all away. The Handbags and the gladrags...
-bill kenny

By Tomorrow, Today is Yesterday

We went to the Eastern States Exposition, The Big E as it's called, in West Springfield, Massachusetts, on Wednesday. If there is an East Springfield, I'm thinking we don't go through it or at least haven't gone through it yet.

Of course we haven't been going all that long. Our daughter Michelle and I made the first trip in 2006 as Sigrid was home in Germany visiting her family and I did some quick calculations that suggested I would have one less meal for two people to prepare if I went to the equivalent of a State Fair where there were eighteen point two boxcars of every kind of food stuff imaginable as long as you can imagine it all deep fried.

I had worried that in Sigrid's absence my culinary skills would either poison our daughter or drive her to run away from home and I wasn't comfortable with any line of patter I rehearsed to myself in preparation for the Inquisition that would follow.

The best I came up was to attempt with a straight face to persuade Sigrid that Michelle had been inadvertently left on the runway at the Frankfurt Flughafen when all three (other) members of my family joined me here in the Land of the Round Doorknobs in November 1991.

Then I remembered the hallway pictures of us all having fun in the backyard in Norwich and I reached for The Big E food offerings like a dying man clutches a straw life raft (I think that was a collision of two different figures of speech and was definitely NOT pretty).

We made it then and we go every year since in celebration and because quite frankly who doesn't love deep fried Oreos or a banana on a stick, covered in chocolate with the chocolate covered in bacon. The Big E. Very much not the place to go to if you're on a diet or ever hope to lose any weight. But delicious, and open through tomorrow, just so you know.
-bill kenny

Breaking Up is (Even) Hard(er) to Do

Living as we do in this age of miracles and wonders, why should I be surprised that we've applied so many of our technological innovations in single minded pursuit of making one another unhappy, or more unhappy (as the case may be)?

That we're also very good at it is one of those 'goes to show' moments, I guess. I can dimly remember being single (not that I was ever any good at it and not that any woman whom I may have known during that period of our lives just looked up wistfully and wondered 'what might have been?') and I have no sense of nostalgia or regret.

I'm only good at marriage stuff now because the woman I married is so excellent at it. I was never that 'take a look at my girlfriend' guy in prep school and listening to all the purple prose and other prolix praise of Saturday nights past while changing for PE was more of a torture than a treat.

My social life, probably like yours, was equal parts fumble and mumble and not a time period I regard with any sort of fondness. I never really knew when I was going out with someone on a steady basis and/or when we had broken up. This made for some awkward moments tightly compacted so that each minute felt like a year but in a news item I fell across in the New York Times, there is now, thanks to converging technologies life after "'tis better to have loved, and lost" but at least for some, without he better part.

 In a culture that has break-up and make-up sex, why am I not surprised we're #1 in revenge porn websites? Truth to tell, I don't actually know that we are #1 but suspect we're in the Top Five; I truly believe we have a knack for this kind of thing and when I say "we" I mean "you".

Old lovers used to fade away and become shadows-I can remember doing things like changing how I walked home from school to avoid going past a certain house or a particular hang-out after whatever I had (don't think 'relatiosnhip' was the in-vogue word then) had ended.

Now, I guess I'd just bulldoze the house down and get misty-eyed as people screamed until the emergency rescue folks showed up. As Neil Sedaka a moment as all of this might be-I'm thinking of the formerly most faded and jaded man on the planet and his words of, well not exactly solace or consolation. I've heard retribution can be served slightly warm with perhaps a white wine. The chill happens later.
 -bill kenny

And You Know Who's the 2000 Man

Mr. His Satanic Majesty Himself, he who laid traps for troubadours who get killed before they reach Bombay, Sir Michael Philip "Mick" Jagger, is about to become a great grandfather. Why would I joke about something like that?

Talk about time is on my side, yes it is, I'm trying to figure out where exactly did the time go? I do not have mad math skills but they're good enough I think to offer a wag that Keith Richards is something like 238 years old, or close, right?

Actually, I'm having trouble accepting something that has a lot to do with the head and heart and not so much with numbers. What does Jagger's familial addition make all of us who grew up listening to the band? Yeah, that's what I feared: Old.
-bill kenny

Chelsea Parade Rest

I took advantage of the marvelous weekend weather, aside from that late night Saturday/dawn's early light Sunday squall, to wander around Chelsea Parade, all of it, which, from my biased opinion, sits in the middle of the most important real estate in all of Norwich, as my family and I live but two minutes away.

You can watch the seasons' pass in a parade of their own at Chelsea Parade. Spring training always starts a little earlier than the pros heading to Florida or Arizona start. And the pennant races are still fast and furious as pick-up-team footballers and lacrosse players get in some extra reps as the seasons shift around them.

The only sport not practiced on the expanses of the green triangle bordered by Broadway and Washington is mid-winter skiing and I suspect that's mostly because downhill is out of the question and  cross-country hasn't caught on around here the way is has out west.

When our children were smaller, it was a short bus ride to Buckingham School, since closed and later razed, with many of the kids of the neighborhood. Streets are a lot like tides that way-when our kids were small all the young kids were on our end of the street, and now that all of those children are adults of their own, all the kids on our street live on the far end and we hear but rarely see them.

Most of the same kids who went to Buckingham rolled up the hill to Kelly Middle School-a bit farther away to be sure, but still more or less in the neighborhood and then for high school, it was the walk across Chelsea Parade to the campus of Norwich Free Academy. The school was a portal for the neighborhood kids to the wide world beyond in ways perhaps parents couldn't always be.

I stopped to compare notes with the Civil War soldier who stands an unblinking watch, being as he is, to my knowledge, the last serving member of the Grand Army of the Republic, whose crest decorates the stone border surrounding his statue.

That he's looking at the flag pole, and beyond it, to what we consider to be the heart of our city, Chelsea, is not coincidental, I'm nearly positive. That he's seen things of which he dare not speak, I have no doubt and I think I'm grateful for that silence.

But more eloquent than the silence is the space to his back where Broadway and Washington meet and a small strip of land at the tip of Chelsea Parade where Norwich has traditionally memorialized the selfless sacrifices of those who've served in our armed forces.

I paid especial attention to how the grass has grown over the street once paved in gold which has seen its share of tears through the years as stone remembrances were erected for those who fell during the two World Wars, Vietnam and to honor Prisoners of War and Missing in Action of all of our nation's conflicts.

The landscaping has come along well and the footing poured by Public Works for what many hope will be the final monument on Chelsea Parade is in place and ready for this Saturday evening at six when the Norwich Post 9/11 Memorial to two Norwich residents who died during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Army Specialist Jacob Martir and Army First Lieutenant Keith Heidtman is dedicated.
All we'll need is you.
-bill kenny  

I'm a Sole Man

With the lovely weather of the fall days we're having here in Southern New England (I always think I should throw in a couple of y'all's when I type the word Southern), I've taken to walking after eating my lunch of a green salad.

I have a pretty organized route that I've now altered it so I no longer go past the burger joint as I wander because nothing makes the memory of a salad you just finished eating resemble a recollection of a bowl of grass clippings faster than the scent of grilled Angus beef and the tangy aroma of bacon.

Yesterday on my route across the work compound, I discovered one of those speed measurement signs set up on the main road. You know the kind I mean-they have the posted speed limit sign on the top of the device, and a flashing display with "Your Speed" underneath. As a motorist, I always slow down often in chagrined surprise over how fast I was really going.

But as a pedestrian, Bill Bi-ped, on the sidewalk, I was ecstatic to discover I was hurtling along at better than 14 miles an hour. Say it ain't so! I half-expected to see smoke coming from feet. I can't run anymore after the surgeries and replacement knees and they refuse to run by themselves so I try to keep a steady four mile an hour pace as I walk. I was really stoked reading the display.

Okay I was a little less stoked when I stopped at the intersection but was still clocking at a little over 12 mph. Those New Balance sneakers were worth every penny I paid for 'em except....well, as you've probably guessed, the machine wasn't measuring my speed but rather that of a Ford Escort, teal-colored I'm saddened to say, zooming up behind me.

For an all-too-brief moment, I'd felt like Colonel Steve Austin only to come crashing back to earth as Oscar, Madison, not Goldman. And as much as the pain of disappointment hurt, I knew I couldn't just walk it off.
-bill kenny