Apropos of Nothing

Some days I fill up some of this space with little more than words flung against the screen as if to prove they, the screen and I all exist. Most days the best I can get is two out of three. And somedays. like this one, even less. At the time I called it:

The Hole's in the Hat, not in the Heart

At the counter of a fast food place yesterday I flashed on a memory of Edna, the lunch lady at The Browning School for Boys.

First a digression: the name says it all. When I went there for part of the late sixties, it was all boys and remains so to this day. If you thought the school was named for Robert Browning, himself a poet but best known for being married to the far more famous Elizabeth Barrett Browning, sorry-no. 

Sandwiched between Park and Madison Avenues on East 62nd Street, I would have already been a fish-out-of-water kid from New Jersey, no money in the family if I weren't also the son of the Lower School Headmaster. Yeah, those were good times-and if anyone from the Alumni Association is reading this today, now you understand why I never respond to any of the notes you send.

Just about the only person, I felt comfortable with would have been Edna who rationed the hot lunches with a zeal that often led me to wonder if part of her salary and benefits package wasn't in being permitted to take home to her family the food she didn't serve to us. Stranger things have happened in my years as a Browning Gentleman, I often ate many of those stranger things.

Edna always wore a hair net, always. On Valentine's Day it was red; on Saint Patrick's Day, it was green. I was always grateful we had no school on the Fourth of July. I'd watch her leave in the afternoon, staring out the rear window of (Mr.) Clair Smith's homeroom, as she walked the block and a half to the subway that took her home. 

So self-absorbed was I as a callow and shallow lad, I had no idea where she, nor, for that matter, where any of our teachers lived and it was only decades later that I realized I never knew. But I can recall the hairnet and understood the reason for it; bought in on it, hook, line and sinker.

So here I am in this fast food joint, trying to have my order taken by a gum-chewer that could have been me fifty years ago. A person who did me a favor showing up for work this morning, and just ask her and she'll tell you, but won't do me another favor by leaving. I realized she and all the other McMinimum Wage plus a Nickel Associates, are wearing visors--not a hair net in the crowd.

I've always loved the late George Carlin's contemptuous characterization of visors as 'half a hat' and in terms of the original purpose of hairnets in places that prepared food, he's right. The visors everyone now wears are part of that uniform the McArmy of One, no matter the franchise, wants us to experience. 

Considering most of these places don't actually make food, but reheat the edible units (or whatever the corporate statement calls them) for consumption, I suppose there is little difference and even less distinction. I do think hairnets would come in handy on Fridays, though fishnets might be better, but I'm a little old school.

-bill kenny

Asimov Called It

This is what we get for electing a C-list celebrity from a fake reality show to the Oval Office.

Another cretin who doesn't grasp the difference between weather and climate. 
Except this one is the Cretin-in-Chief.

Note the account posting in response to the Cretin-in-Chief

Subject to your questions, Pantload45, this concludes the briefing.
We now return you to Fox and Friends, already and always, in progress. 
-bill kenny 

Same Shirt, Different Day

When I re-read this now all I can say is I must have been feeling special, really special. At the time I wrote it I called it: 

The Curtain Fell Down

As we were driving back from grocery shopping, my wife, Sigrid, looking out the passenger window at the grey landscape blending seamlessly into a grey horizon where, somewhere overhead, it met an equally grey sky, offered a word in her native tongue, German, to describe it all, trostlos-hopeless. 

This is the toughest time of year for a lot of us, to include folks like me who stare out the window hoping to catch a glimpse of what's next. A number of years ago someone took me on a short helicopter flyover of some of the woodlands and farmlands in this area of Connecticut in the late fall, early winter, and the view from the top seemed to be of another world at times.

I can recall everywhere we went (and you can see a lot of them from the roadways, but there are many, many more as it turns out), seeing rock walls through the forests and brook beds, intersecting at angles and wondering how odd that must have seemed to the indigenous peoples here when European settlers first arrived. 

In comparison, the European landmass was the smallest of the continents, and maybe that's where the assertiveness (if not out and out aggressiveness of its natives) developed as they went out into the big world and marked their territory not only to use but, at times, to use up. 

I drive through lands demarcated by ancient stone walls every day as I travel through the Real World, and none of the creatures I pass in my travels or travails regard them as immutable boundaries or barriers. They are there and nothing more. I would imagine for a Mohegan or a Pequot, thinking of the tribes in this region of Connecticut, watching an early settler struggle to subjugate the earth to farm crops, engaged in back-breaking labor to maneuver the giant stones they unearthed while tilling, to serve as property markers was too amusing to not smile. 

And it's taken us centuries to learn lessons of harmonious, not rapacious, living within a natural order. Reuse and recycle from plunder and leave and to work very hard to not spend too much time calculating what has been lost from lessons left unlearned for too long. Broken Arrow.
-bill kenny

Four Chaplains Are a Timely and Timeless Reminder

We live in an America in 2019 too often divided into red baseball caps and blue waves.

Where finger-pointing has replaced the helping hand and few think of anyone other than themselves. There was a time we weren’t like this.

On February 3, 1943, at the height of World War II, the SS Dorchester, a converted cargo vessel pressed into duty and refitted as a troop transport ship was torpedoed in the early morning hours as the convoy of which it was a part was sailing from Newfoundland, Canada to a port in Southern Greenland.

The ship with 904 troops and civilian crew aboard sank bow first in about twenty minutes. The severe list as the ship sank prevented the launch of some of her lifeboats and the subsequent overcrowding of the remaining lifeboats caused some of those that were launched to capsize, spilling their reluctant and unfortunate passengers into cold North Atlantic waters whose temperatures were barely above freezing.

Because of the circumstances of the ship’s sudden sinking, no distress signals could be sent delaying the start of any rescue attempts. When help did arrive the following day, many who had survived the sinking were floating in their life jackets, dead from hyperthermia. Only 230 men were rescued. The sinking of Dorchester was the largest loss of life of any American convoy during World War II.

Among those who died onboard the ship were four US army chaplains, who helped frightened soldiers board lifeboats, and gave up their own life jackets when the supply ran out. The four, (Methodist minister, Reverend) George Fox, (Reform Rabbi) Alexander Goode, (Roman Catholic priest, Reverend) John Washington, and (Reformed Church in America minister, Reverend) Clark Poling, then joined arms, offered prayers for the living and the dead and sang hymns as the Dorchester sank.

Their deaths serve as an example of courage for us, the living, especially now.

The Peter Gallan American Legion Post 104, on Merchants Avenue in Taftville will conduct a Four Chaplains ceremony this Sunday afternoon at 2 to both honor their selfless sacrifice and celebrate their lives.

Rabbi Julius Rabinowitz, Rabbi of Beth Jacob Synagogue in Norwich, Reverend Scott Schuett, Pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Lebanon, Father Brian Converse, Pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church in Gales Ferry, and Reverend Sara Ofner-Seals, Pastor of the First Congregational Church of New London, each representing the faith of one of the original chaplains, will deliver a benediction, representing the final moments aboard Dorchester. 

Reverend Schuett is the keynote speaker

The attendance at last year's observance I thought was impressive so come early if you hope to have a seat because it's a small and intimate space. The ceremony is thoughtful and thought-provoking and you'll come away with lessons learned about lives truly lived with grace under pressure in a spirit of caring and generosity for others that I fear sometimes is lost in the tumult of today.

Please join us if you can this Sunday afternoon, if not in Taftville then wherever you are to remember their heroic sacrifice. History is the sum of our collective remembrances and these memorials remain our best hope for preserving our past into the future.

-bill kenny

Pour Me a Double of Atmosphere and Hold the Ice

This new year, 2019, that arrived with the usual hopes and high expectations is already almost a month old or will be later this week. How exactly did that happen, and when? Perhaps the good news is if you've been holding off buying a calendar, you should start to see some great prices on them as the deep discounts kick in. That's an economic stimulus we can all get behind.

All government from federal to municipal works only as hard as we, the people who live in our millions of towns and cities across the country, help it work (somebody at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seemed to have forgotten that for about a month but he's gotten a refresher in civics in recent days). 

Locally, everything from picking up trash as you go for a walk around the block, to testifying at a public hearing on a zoning change or offering yourself as a candidate for an office, each a small step by itself, adds up to a larger way forward. 

I fear we've spent far too many years in this Brave Experiment Called the United States getting much too comfortable referring to others as 'them' so that 'we' will have someone to blame when things go wrong. The danger of finger pointing is three of the fingers point back at yourself. Perhaps if instead of balling out fingers into fist we offer them as a hand up to someone else in need, together we can make where we live better for all of us. 

More facts, less emotion-not quite as catchy as Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers (and you thought I made that up?) but maybe we really do need something with more utility and less futility. "I'll find repose in new ways/Though I haven't slept in two days. 'Cause cold nostalgia chills me to the bone."
-bill kenny

One of America's Great National Pastimes

In six days it will be impossible to watch Super Bowl LIII and NOT see advertising for erectile dysfunction medication, fast-food, beer, beer and more beer, and political positioning, posturing, and pandering of varied and sundry kinds. 

But here's a commercial CBS, the TV network airing the Super Bowl will not let you see. 

God Lord willin' and the creek don't rise.
-bill kenny

No Single Drop of Rain

Today is the seventy-fourth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. which serves as the cornerstone for today's observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

As a child when my mother's mother told stories of "The War" her generation had fought, she rarely mentioned the death camps-perhaps because we were of Irish ancestry and Roman Catholic religion, perhaps for reasons she never had the time or the opportunity to explain. Europe was far away and there's too often a tendency to suggest it's good to let the past remain the past. Not this time.

I'm her age now and the cautionary tale that the Ha-Shoah should have been does not seem to be a lesson we on the planet have fully learned. There is mindless murder every day in every corner of the globe because of the color of skin, the choice of a God, the shape of an eyelid, always some variation of the fear of The Other.

We are NOT much better here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, where our last Presidential campaign and its aftermath generated so many alternative facts (= lies) that many of us could shower for the rest of our lives and still never feel clean as we impersonalized and dehumanized those with whom we are/were in disagreement philosophically and politically, rendering them abstractions and making them easier to hate and then hating them deeply and completely. 

As we keep Slouching towards Bethlehem we've continued our journey along the road to perdition and that, I fear, means we will persist in writing off one another and the damages we do to ourselves as part of the overhead of being on the planet. As if a person's lifetime is worth no more than an arched eyebrow or a shrugged shoulder.

I still haven't purchased or read this book despite vowing to do so but I shall because it's very important, at least to me, that someone bears witness to who we were and how easily the danger and horror of all of that did happen and can happen again. Growing faint in the face of evil is to do nothing and doing nothing cannot be allowed especially when each of us, worldwide, knows that silence is consent and the first chapter in the horror story.

About a minute and a half into this trailer, Keri Lynn (spelling?) explains why she became involved in the Paper Clips Project. I suspect she's long since graduated from high school by now and her place has been taken by other bright and shiny young people who, if we're lucky, will not need to build rafts to save us from the flood of our own hatred but, instead, bridges that allow connections despite our differences.
-bill kenny