Starting to Settle Accounts

Three weeks from today, the first day of the next year will be drawing to a close. How is that even possible? Two thousand and seventeen was just arriving, filled with challenge/fueled by hope and here we are with the remnants of those hopes tracked across the living room carpet like so much of so what.

This was the year we were to do, we were to talk, we were to live large, and to be. And what happened? We allowed so many others, too many others (who've already given up on their dreams) to creep in as poor players and poison what wells of hope we'd held for ourselves.

We can blame a lot of causes for the politics of anger, though we know the reverse is just as easily as true. For my part, I'm exhausted, physically and emotionally. It's like I'm running through soup and sand, my feet never quite lifting from and clearing the ground, each stride a broken parody of what it once was with my arms pushing through the air I can taste rather than feel. And the harder I try the farther behind I fall. 

We started out standing beside one another on the first day of the then-New Year but ! have spent the year watching you disappear before me, long strides taking you over the horizon and when I get to where you were, you're gone with no trace, no track, and no regret. Sic transit humanitas.

This is the year I've been forced to concede the face in the mirror has continued to age and that the man behind the face hasn't nearly as many springs left as he thought and more on point, has squandered, rather than saved, those moments of meaning he thought would come along again as easily as they did the first time. I've actually felt the dullness of the ache in the pit of my stomach that the shocked realization of regret the next time can be the last time always brings with it as a constant companion.

Like many these past months, I blinked at critical moments and lost sight of the important in the rush of the real as the latter became surreal and unreal before disappearing by the dawn's early light. The year in which I had vowed to sort myself out has nearly run its course and the next one will be over even faster than this one, with less to show for it as the distance already traveled never equals the distance yet to go. 

The sense of adventure is replaced by dread as the days draw down and the year ends. The toast we'll make for much success in the new year assumes both will exist but accepts the implication that neither is promised. "The dog days are over. The dog days are done." But it remains (as always) the 'what's next' that keeps me awake.

-bill kenny

Breathe Deep

Somewhere on the way to here and now, I lost my way. Not as in shuffled off the beaten path and got lost, but defiantly chose to not do as those who came before me had so chosen for generations. Too stiff-necked to this day to acknowledge my failings and weaknesses, I'm often in doubt but never in error. At least in my own mind.

Advent is a season of preparation; for the devout, it is for the coming of the Savior. The annual path to the birth of Christ began last Sunday and I know the calendar and the ritual. But I've never been quite sure what it is people like me are doing or supposed to do as flail about seeking land and trying to keep our heads above water theologically.

I envy those who bundle up and head out for early Mass, with confession beforehand and who can then leave the church fortified for their week ahead. I miss the comfort of the ritual and the sense of shared belonging. I fill up my hollow days with noise to distract me from hearing the approaching roar. 

I've never been clear if I should look to the future with anticipation or fear. However, I do understand I'll find out soon enough and far sooner than planned.

-bill kenny

Here on the Moon Is a Car

Maybe it's a function of age (very little else about me seems to function at all) but I've started to have increasingly vivid and quite fanciful dreams in the course of the last few months that, when I struggle hard enough and remember the dream fragment, always seem to have a large long-ago memory component plus whatever other craziness was going on in and around my life before I closed my eyes. 

This is one of those dreams from the other night, offered more or less without comment because I have no idea what it means or what my subconscious (that's where our dream factories are located right?) is trying to tell me. When I awakened I was still overwhelmed with how real and true to life the dream had been to the reality.

Actually, I'm not all that clear where one stops and the other begins. But here's a postcard from the real part. This was mom's first car (her's was a nicer, and brighter, blue; I don't know how else to explain the color) and didn't have white walls.

Purchased new in (I think) 1968 from the same dealership in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a Chrysler-Plymouth-Dodge operation that had sold my father his 'Navy Blue" (always looked black to me) 1967 Chrysler Newport station wagon that was so large Mr. Zip, just getting started in those days, wanted to give it its own five number code, in retrospect it was hardly a car.

It had a water-cooled engine where the trunk would otherwise be (like the VW bug with whom I suspect Renault hoped to compete) no radio, and a heater with a very complicated set-up of sliders with colored dots that purported to direct air to the windshield and the passenger compartment but based on thousands of rides in the car, I think 'not so much.'

It was equipped with an automatic transmission with push-buttons, very much like this one.

My father's previous car, a Chrysler Newport sedan also had a push-button transmission which my brother, Kelly, to satisfy his intellectual curiosity I believe, managed to successfully simultaneously push ALL the buttons resulting in their falling to the floor on the driver's side of the car around the large brake pedal.  

The Renault transmission had electric brushes (typed like I know what that means; I didn't know then and almost half a century later, I still don't) that required a change of lubricating fluid every twelve thousand (or so) miles. Based on my father's mechanical aptitude (which I inherited), I assume someone at the dealership told him and he listened as well as he ever did about just about everything else.

I was a new driver at the time and Mom's car was the one I got to drive on infrequent occasion. On one of those, the transmission somehow knowing the mileage seized up and the car ground to a halt. Maybe I pushed it or someone came and towed it, I don't recall.

The only place on the East Coast to get the lubricant was some parts place in Englewood Cliffs and my father decided since I "broke" the transmission, I would the one to purchase the lubricant. For reasons I don't remember he also decided Kelly would accompany me on this errand. 

The parts department was filled with old(er) men, wise to the ways of the world, unlike the two of us or at least me. The man behind the counter was awful and mean and would arbitrarily decide to NOT help whoever was at the counter whom he felt crossed him. 

NOT only part of the dream: I can remember him telling the man in front of me "No!" after arguing with him for what felt like an eternity and when I reacted to his shout with a startled look he took to be sympathy for the hapless bastard, he told me "No!" as well.

We couldn't leave without the mechanical goop for Mom's car so I pleaded with him as only a half grown kid of seventeen years and some odd months could do with an angry adult all the while Kelly sat on a plastic hair slowly eating a pack of Chuckles candies one piece at a time that I'd bought for him from a vending machine which probably hadn't been restocked since Truman was President.

After an eternity or two, the counter-man relented and I counted out of the folded bills I'd brought with me, the dollars to buy the lubricant and we were on our way, I'm guessing in my father's double mattress of a car, as I think it was all we had.
 . 
In the dream, Kelly was just finishing the licorice Chuckle after which he picked up the plastic chair he'd been seated on and threw it across and over the counter at the man hitting him and knocking him and sprinted out the door, looking over his left shoulder and yelling 'Now!' so I took off, too. I'm pretty sure, based on his age, THAT was only real in the dream, I hope. 
- bill kenny    
      

Wishing This Were Almost Any Other Day

I wrote this a really long time and cried as hard the day I wrote it as I did the day the event I was writing about happened and that was almost FOUR decades ago. I still do not pretend to understand why Chapman is still alive and I really wish he weren't. That said...

If I need more than a dozen words to explain the importance of John Lennon and the music he helped create, and the other music he made possible, I'm too old and you're too young to be having this conversation. And since, chronologically, I got here first, you'll have to leave. 

I was born the year Dwight David Eisenhower took the oath as President. Rock and roll was either very rhythm and blues oriented (and called 'race music') or was so white it glowed in the dark with melodies from the Brill Building professionals as sung by any fresh face who showed up at the auditions. Little Richard's originals such as Good Golly, Miss Molly were covered and eclipsed by a variety of white artists and never enjoyed the success on pop radio station airwaves they should have, but the UK rockers had no way of knowing that. 

People like Sam Phillips and Sun Records helped change all that with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and (of course) Elvis Presley. The seismic shock Elvis set off echoed halfway across the world where tub thumpers, literally as well as figuratively, who were part of something the British called skiffle, attempted to emulate the American records they were hearing in the coffee bars and teen clubs.

The perspiring and aspiring musicians who spent hours trying to copy every chord change of every R&B song they heard had no idea that in the USA, the music to which they were so devoted had been co-opted and to a large extent castrated by vanilla white safe-as-houses imitators. Their world then was so different from our world now that words fail, which is why (perhaps) so many of us who came of age in The Sixties turned to music in the first place as a replacement for language.

If all you know of John Lennon is what you've read, you cannot imagine the electricity late-night American Top 40 radio had when The Beatles were on. They built a bridge from the UK for every disaffected rocker to cross, and it mattered not if they could sing, Noel Harrison certainly couldn't, as long as they looked the part. 

The Liverpool lads stuck and stayed when so many others had faded away because they had talent and the ear of a generation who sought a voice while they, themselves, searched for the sound they had heard years earlier. They may have never realized they had become the object for which they searched-we, on other hand, never cared and embraced them as the Soundtrack of the World to Be. 

The Beatles 'broke big in America' in the aftermath of the murder of John F. Kennedy and I've never believed that was a coincidence. They were the standard by which all other pop music was measured. It felt, for someone in his teens for all of their public career, that The Beatles had been around forever but when they went dark in 1970, they had been a chart presence for far less than a decade. 

Where there were four, only two are alive today. All of them spent, and continue to spend, their solo careers battling unreal expectations, measured by critics and fans alike against an impossible standard no one could match. 

John Lennon portrait by Temo

With Lennon's murder thirty-seven years ago, the death of the public John overshadowed the personal tragedy his two sons, Julian and Sean,  as well as the pain and grief his wife, Yoko Ono, and his first spouse, Cynthia, felt and must feel every day of their lives, but most especially today. 

It's tempting when revisiting history to forget it can just as easily be written as his story because in this case, the bandmate, the father, and the husband were all walk-ons in the Beatlemania movie Mark David Chapman so abruptly and completely ended with a gun in New York City, thirty-seven years ago. 

For many who never knew the man, except through his music, today is a long day. There's little we can do except enjoy what he gave us while watching the wheels go round and round and wonder what might have been.
-bill kenny

A Memory that Cannot Fade

At a moment so long ago it reads as if that chapter of history should start with 'in another galaxy, far away,' on this date in 1941, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was attacked by the Imperial Armed Forces of the Japanese Empire. 

Their goal, a pre-emptive strike that would eliminate the United States' armed might from the Pacific theater so that Japan's Co-Prosperity Hemisphere ambitions would sweep everything before them, wasn't realized and the USA, awakened from the slumber of self-indulgence and indolence, reinvented its own industrial base and used it as the fulcrum to overwhelm the Axis powers of Japan, Italy, and Germany. 

In less than four years (and uncounted killed, wounded and missing in action on all sides later), the Japanese home islands, as well as massive amounts of Western and Eastern Europe, were in rubble and ruins. The map of the world was to change shape, if not size, for decades afterward as ripples from the pebble in that pond traveled the surface of the globe-altering, if not improving, the definitions of nationhood and redefining the aspirations of people and cultures. 

Some historians have suggested that World War II signaled a new level of engagement and intervention in the world by the United States at a moment when that engagement was most needed; an engagement that continues I would like to hope, appearances too often to the contrary, to this day in many corners of the world whose names may not be familiar but whose threat to our way of life is not new.

Today across these United States  Americans will pause to remember those in the US Military who lost their lives on "A Date Which Will Live in Infamy." Here in Norwich in the David Ruggles Freedom Courtyard at City Hall, the Norwich Area Veterans Council is conducting a remembrance for state residents whose lives were lost in the attack. The remembrance begins at twelve minutes before one this afternoon to mark the moment seventy-six years ago when the attack on Pearl Harbor began.

Casualties on that day included 2,335 military members (2,008 Sailors, 109 Marines, and 218 Soldiers). Two Norwich residents were among those who died that day, Store Keeper First Class Harry Carlson and Seaman First Class Mike Quarto, shipmates aboard the USS Arizona.

While we remember them, and all who died that day, I'd hope we also remember as well all those in uniform everywhere today whose sacrifice and separation from their loved ones is just as real and as profound as those of the "Greatest Generation" who secured our liberties with their lives a lifetime ago. We owe all who serve our truest measure of devotion and gratitude. 

We must resolve, because of their sacrifice, to double and, if necessary re-double, our efforts to maintain the position of the United States as the world's best hope for all seeking a better life for themselves and their families around the world. 

We have lived for too many decades as the Promise of Liberty and Freedom to abandon our dreams and our hopes now.
-bill kenny

One City

If all went according to Hoyle, City Council chambers were filled yesterday evening for the oath-taking and swearing-in of our City Council and other elected officials. I'm writing this before the fact but have attended enough ceremonies to believe it was a happy and exciting occasion, as well it should have been. 

By the dawn’s early light today we'll read news accounts of the pageantry of last night and savor and reflect at least for a moment, I hope, upon the history we have and that we make not just when we have a change of Mayor or City Council, but every day even if some days, like yesterday we do it a little more (self) consciously than the other 364.

Now that all the applause has faded and the best wishes have echoed and disappeared down the hallways in City Hall, it's time for our City Council to begin its real work and there's plenty of it. 

No matter for whom you voted last month we, as a city, now have seven neighbors whose shoulders must be broad enough to carry the (often competing) hopes and expectations so many of us have for the better days we all want for the city which we share.

These same seven will also need to have backs strong enough to carry us in the new direction we say we wish to go but, in reality, have absolutely no appetite for the adventure such exploration would require.

I'd hope that more than a handful of those who witnessed last night's ceremonies will make it a point to attend Council meetings (both the schedule of meetings and agenda is on the city's website) because it can get lonely at those desks in the front of the room.

And once the flow of congratulations has ceased, and not pretending to be able to see the future but knowing the past, I'll wait to see how quickly we go from calling upon our newly elected Council member to calling them out for all manner of failings, sometimes real but far too often imaginary.

It's very easy to criticize decisions none of us will ever need to make, most especially when we know someone else will have to. There's a fine line between constructive and destructive criticism and sometimes we accidentally confuse the latter with the former. And sometimes, it's not so accidental.

   

I've lived here a little longer than a quarter of a century and understand the impatience that so many of us have about so much of where we live. I can see how far we've come but concede that there's a lot more to be done and hope our newly elected leaders will help move us farther along and that all of us across the city will get and stay involved and not just always show up on special occasions.

Our Mayor and City Council can do anything, but they can’t do everything. Only together with each of us can they, and we, succeed.

-bill kenny

Just in the Nick of Time

Tomorrow is the feast of Saint Nicholas or Nikolaustag. That probably means nothing to you but in my house, it's a means of measuring how far we've come and not just the distance traveled. The first time we celebrated this day on this side of the Atlantic, my wife and children had been residents of Das Land der Runde Turgriffe for less than a month. 

Something familiar from home, or what was to become their 'old home' was very important and as Sigrid has set aside some small chocolates for both Patrick and Michelle (and for probably Jena and Kyle as well) for tomorrow, it still is (though I wonder if not more for us than for our now adult children).

I confess to still seeing them as small. I remember hours of hollering "nur Patrick!" and his echo answer of "nur Daddy!" as if it were yesterday. Holding Michelle in one arm as Patrick and I sang "How Much is that Baby in the Mirror" to her reflection every night as part of the going to bed ritual. 

The bedtime story book with a story for every night-a different subject and a different adventure and how the two of them would sit up in their beds as my terrible German rendered any form of narrative nearly unintelligible for the two of them. And then afterward we'd all sing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and it was lights out.

Es war alles sehr gemutlich and so long ago. Coming out of the grocery yesterday, the shopper in front of me was mumbling about the youngsters, definitely NOT from here, playing under the overhang as their mother struggled to get their baby sister out of the car and into a cart.

It's funny when little ones stiffen their arms and legs and refuse to make it easy for an adult to seat them in a shopping cart. Of course, it's only funny when you watch; when you're the adult struggling with the child, the humor is quickly lost.

Some people reach an age when you cannot tell how old they are-maybe I already have. Wouldn't want to try to guess his age but I think he needed glasses. I say that because he saw in me, as I walked past him, a kindred spirit whom he believed would appreciate his caustic characterization of where he imagined these children were from and where he wished they'd return. Except, jeder ist ein auslander, irgendwo. 

My response was to wonder to myself about his attempt to do something anatomically impossible, and not quite as much a suggestion as a directive. I could have been more vocal and gotten the same effect.

-bill kenny