Hallelujah, You're Home

My mother was a part of my life for every single day I lived until her recent passing. Today, I and my family drive to the Jersey Shore and with her children, my brothers and sisters, and as many of our (and their) kith and kin as could come will say goodbye, for one final time.

Mom died in early June, less than two weeks short of her 89th birthday. She lived life on her terms and she left life on her terms, and there isn't a day that's gone by since her death that I haven't missed her. I tell myself I've gotten used to that ache of absence but I am lying because I don't know how you get used to that and I'm trying to steel myself because I fully expect to feel it a lot more as today unfolds.

Mom's high school graduation photo (mooched from Adam)

"Oh, I'm in pieces. 
It's tearing me up but I know a heart that's broke is a heart that has loved. 
Hallelujah.
You were an angel in the shape of my mum.
You got to see the person I have become.
Spread your wings and I know that when God took you back
He said, "Hallelujah you're home."
-bill kenny

If It Wasn't Who It Is

A blast from my more recent past....I have the good fortune of rarely remembering my dreams which would be a disappointment to oneirologists everywhere if I were a public figure of any import whose existence mattered to anyone at anytime anywhere. 

I say 'good fortune' because I'm wrestling with one I had recently that I can remember all too well and that disquieted me a great deal. My wife and I were home in her country, though I don't know where and actually don't know how I know that as in the dream we never left an apartment in which we lived with a third person whom I never managed to identify.

In the dream, we had no children-just one another though I have no memory of whether we were young(er) or old(er) than we are now. And everything in the dream was in shades of brown.

I'm not sure in the dream if I realized it was a dream which, I'm assured, in itself means something though what or why I do not know. That I could have a dream guide on my cell phone 24/7, iPhone or Android, is curiously of little solace to me but does speak volumes about the entrepreneurial spirit and greed of code writers here in the early part of what I fear is becoming the last century.

Nothing looked familiar to me causing me to wonder if I'd become Pirate Prentice as I kept looking to the skies for Gravity's Rainbow, somehow feeling better than if I had seen it but never heard the roaring across the skies, I was safe until Tyrone Slothrop returned from an outing. And even then it could be a stairway to the stars.
-bill kenny

Picture Book

The older I grow the more like my dad I become. Neither of us would be thrilled about that, but it is what it is. He used to take slides of every place we ever went but he didn't have a carousel slide projector because "they are such a gimmick." (He was right as he always was; they most certainly were. And they remained so for forty or more years until the Kodak company went bankrupt).

I'm still enjoying the unwind from some days away at Adam and Margaret's house practically in the Atlantic, near Belmar, New Jersey. I hope you enjoy my slides (and some videos as it turns out; thanks, Google!); I know I shall. 

-bill kenny

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(Lawn) Signs and Wonders

As of midnight this morning, we had exactly ninety-one days. You just paused, not really questioning my mad math skills so much as trying to figure out what I could be talking about. Tick, Tock.

We both know the calendar well enough to know it's too far away for that number to be Christmas, but how about the Great Pumpkin rising from a homey pumpkin patch at Halloween? You've never seen that Charlie Brown special? Actually, neither have I but that's not what I'm counting down to. Tick, Tock.

Ninety-one days from today is Election Day. There are a lot of people, friends, and neighbors (with and without loaner ears) from across Norwich offering to invest their time and talents for elected positions ranging from Mayor through City Council and Board of Education to city treasurer. A lot has been accomplished in recent years and there's a lot more yet to be done so we can use all the helping hands we can get.

I know, you're still hoping to get away for a few days for the summer, the kids will be going back to school in three weeks (!), Labor Day will be here and gone before you know it so who even wants to think about municipal elections that don't happen until November right now?

The correct answer to that question should be all of us. Driving back and forth to work every day, I've been watching lawn signs of support sprout and spread slowly for weeks. Always makes me wish I owned stock in the wire frame company the signs fit over. Kidding aside (which is what that was), it's always interesting to me to keep track of whose signs are where and how many.

Right now, using that admittedly very informal and less-than-scientific method, my rough count suggests the popular choice seems to be that ice cream place over by the golf course with one or more of those driveway sealing companies making a challenge.

Still trying to be funny; emphasis on the trying.
I've been registered to vote here when we had multiple candidates running unopposed so I'm grateful for the choices offered and the voices each of them represent for aspirations and inspiration here in The Rose of New England.

I don't want to hear any sighs and mutterings about this election season. We have who knows how many candidate forums and opportunities to sit together with those who are volunteering to do their best for all of us and the city we share. We have the hard part: we have to choose.

I don't care who you vote for as long as you're registered and vote. Actually, I'm lying. I care deeply about for whom you cast your ballot, but it's just as much my business as how I vote is yours. In other words, freedom of choice rules, however each of us chooses because we each get to choose.

And don't think I won't mention the elections between now and November, at what will seem like every opportunity. Voting is how we help ourselves improve and there’s plenty of room for that around here. Now’s the time for us to study and decide. Tick, tock.
-bill kenny

Sands Continue to Rush Through

Welcome to yet another installment of "you saved all of this stuff?? Why on earth would you ever do that!" For times like this when I am on holiday and now you wish you were as well, right? With any luck I still have my hind quarters in the sand and not in the driver's seat of our car heading North. I could be describing that drive, live a mile at a time, so you're welcome.


Heading out this morning I grabbed a piece of scrap paper from the kitchen table and threw it in the rubbish container, and there on the top, obviously from last night and whatever project my wife was working on, were her orange-handled scissors. She has had them a long time. They weren't left-handed scissors but she was fond of them. I had no idea how many products are made that NEVER take into account that not everyone is right-handed. Sinistro, from which we in English derive 'sinister' actually means left in Latin. See, this blog is a public service!

My wife has been complaining in recent months at how the orange-handled scissors were growing more dull by the day. I was thrilled there was finally something in the kitchen duller than I am, but now it's over. When she called me earlier to talk about something else entirely different, I asked her about the scissors and she told she had run out of patience and had discarded them.

I can remember as a child, not a toddler, a grade-schooler, maybe once every fortnight or so, all the Moms in the neighborhood would gather up their knives, scissors and even their pinking shears (those things scare the bejabbers out of me) and when the fellow driving the oldest car/truck I had ever seen, a black ford that looked like Henry himself might have built, showed up and pulled over and opened the back of the truck up to get at his workshop, all the moms would spend the afternoon visiting with one another while the sharpening man (I'm sure he had a title and I'm sure I'd never guess it) whetted the blades, and turned the sharpening stones and everything old became new again.

Shoes were made of leather, and mostly in Ohio and not of plastic all from someplace I cannot pronounce and when the heel or sole wore out, Mom took them to the cobbler who wrote out a ticket and gave her a stub and she came back in a week or so and your school shoes were as good as new, if not better. We had milkmen who delivered milk, real milk not that percentage off stuff that always reminds me of milk of magnesia, at least in color, and don't get me started on the taste. I don't care if 'whole milk clogs your arteries'. I've never seen a calf have a stroke, ever. Come to think of it, the #1 killer of cows is people.

My Mom had an eggman, koo-koo-cachoo, Mr. Ruben, who brought us brown eggs so big I thought, as a kid, they were ostrich eggs, not that I had ever seen an ostrich or one of its eggs. When Mr. Ruben had a heart attack, all the Moms in the neighborhood struggled to get by on supermarket eggs--those little white pullet pellets that looked like pigeon eggs (I had never seen pigeon eggs either. There was no National Geographic TV Channel back then.)

And slowly we grew up and gave away reusing things and fixing things that were broken. Pitch it--we'll get it another one when we're out. Wrong size, wrong color, imperfection in the hemline, or missing a stitch in the inseam? Throw it away. My wife has a sewing machine and I don't think anyone else she knows has any idea of how to use it. In the spirit of total disclosure I admit that my sewing skills consists of leaving the button and the shirt from which it came on my wife's sewing table with a note that says 'please' and the next day, the shirt is fine. I move in mysterious ways my wonders to perform.

These days, which will someday be the good old days for our children and their children, it's all replaceable so don't get too attached to any of it. That red stapler, in the dustbin it goes. The line between John Milton and Milton Waddams just disappears. We've traded a chance for Paradise Lost for an in basket of those TPS reports.
-bill Kenny

Vacation As Far As the Eye Can See

If the weather and the dispositions of Adam and Margaret are holding up well, we (my wife, our daughter and I) are still their guests along the Jersey Shore. When we went last year I forgot everything I'd learned as a child at the shore and burned myself to a crisp so this year, I have stock in Coppertone and oceans of lotions but I'm still hoping for some sun as are both my wife and daughter. The thought of the latter is what leads me to this memory flogger from way back as my daughter and I shared, almost, a very touching moment. 


It was last Saturday afternoon. Michelle, my daughter, and my wife were preparing for Part One of their Thelma and Louise Impersonation Escapade. That it was Part One was a surprise to me as I knew Michelle was home from college for the weekend and my wife had shared that she and Mike were hitting the Mohegan Sun later that evening to enjoy “America” who had a huge pop-rock career in the middle Seventies to early Eighties that stopped being such a huge career with a sudden finality I suspect the remaining two (of the original three) members found ferocious.

I always liked the band (and am inordinately fond of the nation as well, despite ourselves), though I never forgave their assault on my native language (and theirs, too, come to think of it) of their monstrous first hit, “Horse with No Name”. I mean, let’s face it, lines like “In the desert you can remember your name, 'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain.” What is that supposed to mean? As every person who has sought, or will ever seek, election to the Presidency of these United States says, “God Bless America” (even if no one has sneezed).

Anyway, that was Saturday evening’s itinerary and here I was at half past afternoon, minding my own business. Michelle, who had been readying herself to do something with her mother, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door, came down the hall and peering into my face, as if I were in a cave, announced loudly she’d "had it" with the hiding and "here!" with a flourish that would make Brandi Chastain jealous, showed off her two new tattoos, all the while doing that impersonation of her mother, my wife, that cracks all of us up.

I don’t understand tattoos-on men. I’m not sure what to say about them on a woman even less so when the woman happens to be my daughter. I knew that at some point earlier in her life (she has a lot less earlier than I do, but that’s only because I have decades on her) she had musical notes tattooed on her ankle. These new tattoos seemed to continue the musical motif and I decided to NOT ask when or where (or why) she’d gotten them, though I did appreciate learning that one of them, on her back, ‘isn’t finished yet.’

Since we are a species who has figured out a way to walk on the moon and touch the floor of the ocean, but still cannot see the back of our own head or body unassisted, I’m not sure how she knows it’s unfinished. As for why she had to tell me about the tattoos at all much less on Saturday afternoon, I am clueless as well. Perhaps it was National Tell the Grey-Haired and Doddering Fool Parent in Your House Something Disconcerting Day and I just didn’t get the note.

I sat there on the couch while she waited and looked at me while I looked at her and waited while she waited. We were silent, both of us, for a long period of time. I wasn’t, and am still not, sure what I was supposed to say or do. I decided, if I had to choose between her bringing home two tattoos or two newborns, I’d opt for the ink. Ever her father’s daughter, she demanded to know how I’d feel if she came home with one baby and one tattoo. "Welcome to my life, tattoo. We've a long time together, me and you."

I wasn't sure if we were waxing philosophic or negotiating and wasn't sure I could tell the difference (sort of like between finished and unfinished tattoos). I reminded her that we have a fixed menu and no substitutions are allowed, or desired. I suppose this was a parent-child bonding moment though it sure felt a lot more like the Spanish Inquisition. I can't wait for it to become a fond memory, assuming, of course, I can recall it at all in my sunset years. I already have the shades on-let the glow on the horizon begin.
-bill Kenny

Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War

Today's title as I noted when I first kited it a number of years to commemorate this day in world history is a quote from Plato. Since my last original thought died of loneliness a very long time ago, I also offered a thought from Margaret Atwood that's an accurate, concise and brutally candid definition explaining ‘war is what happens when language fails.’

Someone (else) once said war doesn't determine who is right, only who is left.

Seventy-two years ago, today, the United States bombed Hiroshima, Japan, with a weapon so horrible in its power of destruction, that for a long time we, as a species, lacked the words in any language to fully convey the depth of destruction and tragedy it, and its twin, dropped on Nagasaki just days later, had created.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but I suspect no one knows how many lives it costs. A thought worth holding, perhaps, as we consider these two images.

"In some sort of crude sense...the physicists have known sin..."

"...and this is a knowledge they cannot lose." Robert Oppenheimer 

The scale and scope of the damages provided humanity a glimpse into an atomic abyss from which we knew there could be no escape, and we’ve managed for over seven decades to not unsheathe the sword of nuclear annihilation again against one another.

These two images of “modern” Hiroshima should offer us hope that we can, indeed, learn to speak with one another, but more importantly than speak, should compel us to listen.

65th Anniversary Remembrances of Hiroshima Bombing

City of Hiroshima, circa 2015

“We got your message on the radio…It’s never going to fade away.”

-bill kenny