The Heart Never Heals

There are many things I forget and many other things I wish I could forget but my Mom's death two years ago today is neither of those things. Every holiday and birthday since her passing I keep waiting for the phone to ring and my mother to ask "Bill? This is Mom..." before, in less than a minute wishing me and mine all the best for whatever the day was. Mom grew up when long distance phone calls were expensive rarities rationed out for special occasions.  I just smiled at that memory until I remembered again, there will never be any more of those calls ever. 

I wrote this the day after she died and called it:

Unbowed, Unbroken

I knew my mother, Joan Marie (Kelly) Kenny, every day of my life. She died yesterday afternoon after being briefly hospitalized for an infection in an artificial heart valve that slowly overwhelmed her body.

Through the miracle of technology, I was able to speak to her on a phone held to her ear while I said goodbye if by goodbye I'm allowed to include sobbing uncontrollably while apologizing for crying and being comforted by the woman who gave birth to me and my brothers and sisters.  

On her wedding day in 1951

Mom died very much as she lived, with quiet determination on her own terms and with her eyes wide open, rarely blinking because she knew losing sight of where the bastards of this planet are, even for a moment, could be catastrophic. There was nothing she would and could not do for her children as I know all too well.   

There was, in the end, too little, I, as her oldest could do for her. Kara, my sister who was with her in the hospital, told me Mom's heart was slowing down and she was sleeping more than she was awake so I was grateful she was awake when I called so she could hear me tell her how much I loved her one last time in this life.

Mom's forever beach chair, bag, and hat

Mom believes in heaven and I have no doubt that after her sometimes hellish almost nine decades here on earth that is where she is. Mitch Albom wrote, "when death takes your mother, it steals that word forever." The only solace I possibly take from that thought is that forever is only as long as my life and no longer.
-bill kenny

Thankfully, Not a Centipede

It can be fun and educational to look back at photos or notes from days past and remember that, at that time, you thought the weight of the world was overwhelming you and yet, here you are in the here and now with what turned out to be, with the benefit of hindsight, nothing more than a variation of First World Problems. At the time I called this:

Attention, Shoppers!

Like many (if not all) married men, I do most of my clothes shopping with my wife. If I didn't, I'd own about eighteen sets of the same style, cut and color trousers, about a dozen shirts of standard color deviation with maybe twice as many again ties to go with the shirts. I'd have two pair of black shoes, one with laces and one without, and the same for brown shoes.

Don't laugh. Look in your closet and then get back to me, Mr. Hyena. It's not just the unrelenting nature of my clothes sense-it's the utter absence of taste. When I'm putting together 'stuff to wear', I shoot the moon. The rule (kind of ) is clean things get worn together and then, by degree not-so-clean things. Don't talk to me about colors and styles that clash or complement. No one speaks fashion at this address.

Because the shoes I've been wearing are bruising my feet, especially my soles and heels (diabetics are always told to check your feet for bruises, blisters, callouses, and corns), Wednesday evening I and my wife went shopping at the department store I like to go to because she likes to go to it. 

I have small feet (I heard the snicker, by the way) which makes shoe-shopping even more fun but as luck would have it the shoe department had a pair of grey shoes, incredibly light, in my size. Technically, it wasn't a pair; it was a shoe, actually the display shoe. There were exactly three boxes with the same style shoe, all had two shoes in each box and none of those was my size.

It had been a long day and I could actually feel the sugar low flowing through me. After a fruitless search for the other shoe, a box with my size on it or any indication that such a pair of shoes even existed, we gave in, got the 'next best thing', gave up and went home. But it bugged me, it really did. 

And so the following day I went to the store the company has in Groton and searched their shelves, reasoning what they have in one store, they'd have in another store. I forgot the Feast of the Assumption is the middle of August and any other day you have one, it's on you but I wasn't prepared to give up. 

I drove all the way to the store my wife and I had been in the previous evening ( that sounds a lot harder than it is; the car did all the driving, I was inside the car. The roads are paved and there was no rain so it was pretty uneventful), walked through the store directly to the shoe department, and found the half a pair of shoe(s). 

Plucking it from the shelf, I strode to the registers where the sales associate was puzzled anyone with two legs and two feet, would be buying one shoe. I explained to her I didn't want to buy a shoe, but rather a pair of shoes and asked her to page someone for assistance.

She thought I meant to send someone to shoes and told me to 'head on back and they'll be right there.' Nope, I smiled, I think not. Instead, I'll stand here at your register not allowing you to process any other customers until the shoe salesperson joins us here and then together, I and they will saunter back to their area of specialization. 

Some of us were not especially popular around register two for a couple of tense minutes, let me tell you, but eventually Edgar emerged, name tag askew, practically tripping over trousers so incredibly too long, I just assumed they were probably his dad's pants. 

Edgar, I think, is destined for retail superstardom, perhaps some day they'll rename the chain of stores after him. Just not today, or technically, not yesterday. I explained to Edgar ('please, call me Ed' he offered, only if you'll call me 'sir', I replied with a smile but he didn't) my inability to understand where the mate from my new favorite shoe in the whole world might be and his eyes lit up when he saw it. Turns out he had it in the back room in 'the box' and went to fetch it. 

It was only after he returned with both my shoe's mate and the box that I asked him what kind of stock system would have you separate a pair of anything, and store half of it out of sight and cognizance of a customer who might wish to buy it. He explained he was working to cut back on pilfering as I'd be surprised how many shoes 'get stolen in a month'. 

He didn't actually tell me the number, so I practiced my surprised look for nothing but did ask him as I walked back to the register to pay for my purchase if he'd worked elsewhere in men's furnishings, like perhaps dress trousers or dress shirts. He wondered why I was so interested and all I could ask was if he'd ever waited on anyone named Richard Kimble. I was going to wave goodbye but forgot which arm to use. 
-bill kenny

Shadows

I went most of yesterday telling myself  I had finally stepped out from under a shadow, benevolent and otherwise (often simultaneously), that I've lived under my entire life, the presence (and absence) of my father. 

Dad passed away thirty-eight years ago yesterday as one of my two brilliant brothers noted so eloquently in a space of his own choosing. This Monday is the third anniversary of Mom's death and I wonder if there's a significance to the timing and spacing of the two that my tiny brain just isn't grasping, and concede I shouldn't be surprised if that were true. 

I wrote what follows a decade ago and, in an attempt to make you feel better about its length, as I recall it was much longer when I was living through it originally. Adam invoked Saint Bruce of Asbury Park in his thoughts from yesterday and I vectored more towards James McMurtry. Both of them know a little about the complicated and complex nature of relationships, I guess. At the time I called it:     

You Can't Unclench Your Teeth

Time creeps up on you and once you're past a memory of an event, it just seems to disappear. I think, in this case, some of the memory loss is due to the Monday holiday law and how it affected when we observed Memorial Day this year because the memories are always tied to the Memorial Day that my father died.

Walking after dinner last night I realized, with a start, twenty-eight years ago I was still in the US Air Force (don't worry, NOT as a pilot or anything even close to important; you know how movies with crowd scenes have 'extras'? I was one of those) and was standing Staff Duty watch at my assignment, the American Forces Network HQ, in those days, before The Wall came tumbling down and peace, love, and harmony ruled our planet in Frankfurt am Main in West Germany.

It had just turned three o'clock in the morning, I had the radio on and Jan Wood (who pulled the ridiculously early shift Milt Fullerton had once worked while stringing for ABC Radio) had just played the sounder and started his cast in the newstank when the telephone rang at the switchboard. At three in the morning, not a lot of good was on the other end I feared and I was right.

It was an operator from the American Red Cross Family Notification Program in Mannheim and she asked for the newsroom as was the routine. Once connected, she would say the code of the day, verifying who she was, and then state the name, rank, and unit of the service member who did not yet know that s/he had a family emergency/death in their family 'back home.' 

Everyone in Europe, it seemed, listened to us. We were so pervasive, I got mail from listeners in Scotland, Norway and in Iceland who would ask about a particular song I had played in the middle of a set of records. I seriously believed you could tune us in on a toaster. We were everyone's soundtrack.

I told the Red Cross lady the newscaster was on the air and offered to take the information myself. When she spelled the last name, I realized it was my last name and when the first names matched, I was able to tell her 'and he's asked to return home for a death in the family' and have her confirm that course of action. She asked me to read back the notification, to assure her I had it and would relay it as was the standard operating procedure. I told her I was the serviceman who had just learned his father had died.

She apologized though I never figured out for what. I waited for Jan to finish his newscast and carried the Red Cross log book back to him. I stood there while he read the one page summary of the conversation, signed the receipt on the bottom and looked up at me. When he did, I nodded slightly, and with my shift now over, I went back to my desk to pull together my thoughts for the trip home. When my boss, Bob Matthes, came in later he was as kind as he could be in helping me depart on emergency leave, get a lift to the Frankfurt Flughafen and flying into JFK in New York.

It's odd how I cannot remember who picked me up if anyone did. I do remember a bus ride somewhere in Jersey to somewhere else in Jersey and eventually walking down a long and still-dark-in-the-early-morning-light-of-day-road on which my parents had built a sprawling house. A house, if not actually at the end of the world, so close was it, you could see the end of the world from the backyard.

My dad and I did not get along, if by 'not get along' you mean loathed one another. For many years, before and after his death, I thought it was because we were so different but I've realized it's more because we're so much alike. I think from the time I could talk I said 'no' to everything he ever wanted of me and for me.

My parents' house was bedlam. Only the three youngest children were still living with my parents; the oldest, my sister Kara, a senior in high school (I think) was just weeks away from graduation, her younger sister, Jill, in one of the middle grades of high school and Adam, looking very solemn and all alone, I guess was in elementary school. I still feel bad about abandoning them for all those years, all those years ago. Sorry doesn't start to cover it and all I can offer is an apology and regret for my cowardice from then until now.

I had escaped and after me, a sister (chronologically actually she went first and not next) and a younger brother had both gone their own ways but, in candor, I had gone the farthest and fastest to another continent and another culture. I had met and married a person whose own family was as damaged in its way as I always thought mine was. Maybe that's why she and I have been at this for (closing in on) thirty-two years this October. But in my father's house, that night and the next day and the next night, I didn't know where the journey would take me.

The funeral director kept calling my mother, 'Mom', for (I'm sure) grief-management reasons. I remember nothing else about him except that he kept doing that until I felt compelled to tell him very quietly mine would the last face in this life he'd ever see if he did not stop. I'm not sure my mother even realized the man was there. 

I traveled in my uniform which was all the clothes I had brought with me. I don't know why I packed only Air Force uniforms. It did make it easy to spot me at the funeral, at the graveside and at the wake where scores of people whom none of the rest of us had ever known, but who knew my father, stopped in to say how sorry they were and how, if there were ever anything they could do, to please call.

None of us ever did, but that's okay because none of you meant a word of it, so we're even except for where we got odd.  I've kept all of those memories tucked away as if in a photo album or shoebox never to be opened until a brief walk around the block on what should have been the Memorial Day weekend. "So you curl your lips around/The taste, the tears, and the hollow sound/That no one owns but you/No one owns but you."
-bill kenny

Dressing Isn't Just for Salad Anymore

From the dark and dusty archives, my failed attempt at sartorial splendor. 
At the time I called it:

Every Girl's Crazy 'Bout a Sharp-Dressed Man

You've seen it. I know I've seen it as well. The trend where people wear pajamas like regular clothes. I never really warmed to that bit some years back where people who were not medical professionals wore scrubs, and I've always been underwhelmed by the Pajama Game trend just because it's goofy. 

Many years ago (before any of us were even born, come to think of it), as a rock and roller working in the vinyl jungle, I interviewed the Boomtown Rats who boasted not only the self-aggrandizing (and relentlessly brilliant) Bob Geldof (known now as Sir Bob to Her Majesty and Saint Bob according to many of the yobes he used to hang out with) but a keyboardist named Johnny Fingers (some of his best-known work is here) whose stage attire was pajamas. For reasons that may say more about all of us and the relations we had, or not, with a variety of controlled substances, no one seemed to notice or care. 

Today, perhaps because all the world's a stage (whether we like it or not; sorry Will), pajamas show up everywhere. Additionally, but I suspect not so coincidentally, the number of celebartists (whose particular art is being famous for being famous) who wear their underclothes on the outside approaches legion. 

That injunction our Moms gave us all those years ago about wearing clean underwear is paying off big-time and I, for one, am very grateful since beauty is in the eye of the beholder and there are certain things I don't really need to ever behold.

In the United Kingdom, yesterday, there was much ado about underthings--ironically, underthings that were under clothes. So unless you're Clark Kent, we all look pretty much the same, when viewed from space. A retail chain, Next, had a complaint about a cartoon print on men's underpants (no part of that sentence fragment makes any sense to me at all) by a customer and decided to literally, eat their own shorts and withdraw from sale all 5,200 pairs of underpants that may, or may not, have had a likeness of Hitler on them. 

The chain is quoted in the story as having gone back to the designer who insists the image is actually that of V. I. Lenin. That explains everything, right? There are about forty questions left unanswered by the story, to include the 'why did you think putting a cartoon likeness of anyone on underpants was integral to the process in the first place?' but in addition to that tip about wearing clean ones, my mom once suggested to me 'don't ask the question if you can't stand the answer.' She was going to suggest 'don't sleep in the subway' but she had to go scrubs shopping with Lenin's Mom. 

-bill kenny

Santayana Would Be Flummoxed

Those who do not learn from history are fated to repeat it is an aphorism attributed to George Santayana whom I have (too) often seen somehow linked to Carlos Santana. 

As someone saddled with a last name some think is the same as the 35th President's (it's not) I can understand the fear of what happens when we fail to remember much less learn from the past. 

Not that the fine folks of the National Enquirer Theme Park aren't suffering from selective amnesia so much as having no idea what tasteful recollection might look like. Hopefully, they have enough land to add further fun-filled attractions like the Children's Crusade, The Rape of Nanking, and, of course, The Final Solution. Talk about making Pigeon Forge, Tennessee a tourist destination...   

Living in 21st Century America where my ignorance is just as valid as your knowledge doesn't bode well for our chances of making it to the 22nd Century. But with any luck, few will remember and even fewer will care.
-bill kenny

Funny the Way It Is

There's an expression I love that goes, 'speak the truth, even if your voice wavers.' In an era of social media where yelling at total strangers while pretending to argue with them is done in ALL CAPS, not only is the truth hard(er) to find it seems to me maybe at times it's harder to listen to as well.

We have a November election for all six seats on the City Council (the Mayor is a four-year term) and for nine on the Board of Education. I can't be the only person in Norwich who tries to elect people in whom I have faith they will do their best for our city, not that I always agree with every position they take on every issue confronting us. 

All I can ask of them, as I think we should all do of one another, is they do the best they can. Have I voted for people in elected office who've disappointed me? Pull up a chair and let me tell you about it. Kidding about the chair. Of course, I have and so have you.    

Have there been elected people whose effort and accomplishments have surprised and delighted me? Yes, as you can tell because my feet are smiling. I'm as guilty as probably you are of losing sight sometimes those we elect are our neighbors, from next door or across the neighborhood who, when the rest of us said, 'well, somebody has to step up and do ....' they said, "I will." 

Teddy Roosevelt's Man in the Arena observation is as true here and now in Norwich, as it was at any time since he first said it. In today's version Old Rough and Ready would update the gender references I'm sure, but you get the idea. 

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”   

Earlier this month as the debate about the Norwich City Budget, our fiscal map for the next year of our collective future was being crafted, generated more heat if not quite so much light, Alderwoman Joanne Philbrick, a neighbor of all of ours who for decades has been involved in making Norwich a place for everyone to come home to was singled out and vociferously criticized for her remarks at a City Council meeting that some, okay, many (myself included), felt were highly critical of our schoolteachers. 

What she said may not have been what she meant and probably isn't what we heard but I don't criticize someone else's beliefs simply because they are not mine. However, the hateful and hurtful comments so many of us voiced in response to her remarks may be a reason why we have so few neighbors volunteering to seek office. Who can blame them?  

It's easy to support freedom of speech when you agree with the speaker but the true test, and one we as a city did not do well this time is when you find the speech disagreeable. We need to remove the coarseness from our civil discourse and extend to one another the same respect we expect and demand from one another.
-bill kenny          

Second Sitting

I haven't had breakfast yet this morning which is why, perhaps, this relic from a decade ago spoke so loudly to me. At the time I called it:

You Are What You Eat

Came across a feature yesterday offered on the internet that made me smile. It's a listing of foods that help you burn excess weight (usually through a process that requires your body to use up more calories processing the food than the food, itself, has in it). 

You've seen lists like this for years and about once a decade or so someone tricks up a new name for it and you have the Blah-Blah Diet with a book for only $29.95 (plus processing and handling) and an infomercial where a lot of folks who look vaguely familiar sit on a couch and tell each other stories about their own amazing weight losses while taking turns staring in wide-eyed incredulity at somebody else's 'true story of weight loss'. 

"Gee Buzz, your colon is so clean you can pass a car through it!" exclaims Mitzi, who looks like one of the people who used to be on Three's Company. Not one of the original cast members, of course (the survivors are out doing supermarket openings), but one of the replacements after the show started into its glide slope of viewership decline and burned up on reentry.

And Buzz who may or may not have been in Encino Man with Pauly Shore (how'd you like to have that on your resume?) tells us all about it. I had a great idea for a drinking game one night watching these infomercials. The group makes up a list of pat phrases you know will be said and every time one of them is uttered, everyone has to quaff a beverage. And the winner is me because I didn't come to your house and do this drinking game stuff. 

Meanwhile, back at the list. They're basically all the same--just a slight variation of what your Mom told you to eat and not to eat. There's never a lot of chocolate eclairs on these lists of fat burning foods and I've often wondered, near-altar boy as I am, why is it that God, who moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, didn't make the stuff that's good for us taste better. 

I know broccoli is a lot better than a hot sausage sandwich for me, but guess which one tastes better? Maybe He could hire the International Flavors and Fragrances (you thought I was goofing on you?) to work on short term solutions to that challenge. Of course, smiting would work just as well. I figure after a while we'd all get tired of attending funerals where the guest of honor had marinara sauce on his cheek (and you could still see where the lightning bolt hit him). 

Because, and this is as true of any list I've ever seen, I don't care how good something is for me. If I don't like the taste, or sight, or smell or sometimes the sound (or the name-I almost ate calamari once. I will NEVER eat octopus), I'm not having anything to do with it.

My favorite example is hot oatmeal. I've tried everything and I still can't bring myself to eat it. I know it's good for me (I don't know why, but never mind) and I can read the side of the box and get the nutritional information (by the way, what is the point of nutritional information on bottled water? It's water for crying out! Spare me.), and I'm sure the flavors are marvelous. 

I almost get there-I boil the water and pour it into the bowl and stir it up without gagging and dip the spoon in and lift it out, next stop, lips and glottis, and no deal. I will not open my mouth, no matter how good oatmeal is for me. And if you want to offer me a swig of a probiotic drink of something to wash it down, you'd better have a Maid of the Mist raincoat on, buddy boy, because you are so going home to put on new clothes. Could be quite a hike-better eat yer Wheaties.

-bill kenny