Zevon Called It

The British are fond of saying, "I'd like to have your nerve in my tooth," to capture the contempt they feel for someone without any self-awareness or irony bemoaning their lot in life from a position of privilege. I once worked with a guy who complained that the charging cable for his iPhone was too short; that's the kind of putz we're talking about. 

Let's move to this past Sunday evening and eavesdrop for just a moment as the Apricot Asshole is on his favorite network being lobbed softball questions that he has trouble getting out of the infield much less clearing the fences. Here's the visual his image-makers decided was perfect for the spoiled brat client they have.

"They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln.
I believe I am treated worse." 

Yeah.
Lincoln was murdered while serving as President, but you're right, baby-cakes; it's a hard, hard road that you travel. I'd offer to feel sorry for the tiny-handed, small-minded, ethically-impaired, grifting bastard but he does such a great job of feeling sorry for himself and hates competition. 

November 3rd can't get here soon enough.
-bill kenny

   

The Cost and the Price

We live a lot of our lives these days at the top of our voices. Each of us seems to have a TV talking head we turn to for the truth, like some kind of oracle who always uses the definite article when the truth is often so ephemeral and illusory that any and all reassurances of its constancy is paradoxically a lie.

On what seems like a frighteningly frequent basis we've watched large turnouts by our countrymen of all persuasions and political ideologies who insist they love their country but seem to hate and fear the rest of us who live here with them. Disagreement among us is not new nor is the violence too often connected with it. 

There were wide-scale draft riots in Northern cities as the War Between the States, perversely often called the Civil War, created larger and larger levies of conscripts and those who could afford a three hundred dollar deferral fee managed to avoid the draft while the sons of the poor and the immigrants were sent to the Killing Floor.

By this time five decades ago, in one form or another, the United States was more than knee-deep in a war in Southeast Asia and the Republic of South Vietnam. On this date, fifty years ago the dissent and opposition to that war across the nation, as a whole generation simultaneously stopped believing in the government became a self-fulfilling prophecy as four students at Kent State University died in acts of panicked violence by soldiers of the Ohio National Guard who had been summoned by the state's governor to protect property and prevent the very violence they visited upon the students. 

Five decades on, there is no right or wrong, just dead and dying. Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 20, Allison B. Krause, 19, William Knox Schroeder, 19, and Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, all never lived to see May 5, 1970. There was a well-known image from that tragedy, a photo taken by a Kent State photojournalism student, John Filo, of a young woman, actually, a fourteen-year-old runaway, Mary Ann Vecchio, screaming over the lifeless body of Jeffrey Miller who had been shot in the mouth. 

The photograph won a Pulitzer Prize and became one of the most enduring images of the anti-Vietnam War movement that continued without surcease for the rest of the decade and into the next. What's often overlooked, because it was practically ignored when it happened ten days after Kent State were the deaths of two black students killed by police at Jackson State University. The two young people who never grew older that day were Philip Lafayette Gibbs, 21, a junior pre-law student, and James Earl Green, who was 17.

As scary as we can be to one another when we talk loudly to the point of screaming, it's when we stop talking, I become even more afraid. And too often, and too abruptly, we've stopped talking in this country.

"Find the cost of freedom, buried in the Ground.

Mother Earth will swallow you, lay your body down.

-bill kenny

Somewhere Buck Is Smiling

I love when art imitates life but even more so when vice versa happens. 

And it is, on the beaches of Florida, a/k/a "God's waiting room."

Turns out the hanging chads were just the curtain going up on the Divine Comedy.
-bill kenny

For My Daughter's Birthday

This is one of my five most favorite days of the year; today is our daughter, Michelle's, birthday. I was all kinds of bubbly about this quite some time ago when I called my rhapsodizing, 

Hoppy Birfday

My wife and I had the tremendous good fortune of being the parents of two amazing children, who are, themselves, actually adults though one of their parents (me) doesn't always see them or think of them that way when, for instance, the hour is late and I know one or the other is out gallivanting or on an excursion. Very frightening things can be delivered over the telephone and I have an active and vivid imagination and what I can scheme and dream up takes my own breath away.

Today is the birthday of our daughter, Michelle. Born in the Kettler Krankenhaus in Offenbach am Main, in (then West) Germany, she spent her first four and half years living with her brother and parents on Ahornstrasse around the corner from the park with the kiosk where she used to charm the owner into giving her a sweet when she ran past as she played.

It was in Offenbach that Michelle first met my mother, seeing her two German grandchildren for the first time and she stayed very close to Sigrid, watching 'Oma America' carefully while speaking in whispers about 'Die Frau' (the woman). 

Michelle gradually warmed up to her American grandma and for many months after my mom flew back to the states from the Frankfurt Flughafen when we'd drive by it on the A3 autobahn, Michelle would peer out the car window hoping to catch a glimpse of Oma America, convinced that since we'd this is where we'd picked up and dropped off my mom, she must be living there.

When, near the end of a very long day sometime later, she, her brother and their mother finally got off the plane in Philadelphia where I met them as they arrived to start their lives in these United States, she stared out the terminal windows at the runways blazing with halogen lights and offered that "Amerika hast sehr viel dunkel night time", her own attempt at Gerglish and to impose some meaning into what had become a very chaotic young life. Beginning again as a small child, but now in a completely different environment where the only thing that hadn't changed was she, Michelle seemed to realize she needed to adapt and overcome and did (and still does every day).

She started with a violin in fourth grade at the (now closed) William Buckingham School and I've long since lost track of all the instruments she has mastered. I know there's a piano, a viola, a guitar, a French Horn, and who knows what else. 

Along the way, I went from being the smartest dad in the whole world to a balding, slow to react, dotard who, very often in a battle of wits with a determined young woman, too late discovers he is unarmed. The more of an adult she becomes, the less she is comfortable being my 'itty-bit', a name I rarely call her now because she frowns when I say it, in much the same way as her brow furrows slightly when I call her 'Mike' as my diminutive for Michelle because my late Uncle Jim called his daughter Michelle, Mike, as well.

Michelle completed her studies as a music major at Eastern Connecticut, captivated her Kyle as she moved along, and is helping us all stay safe and healthy in some perilous times as a member of the Backus Hospital Healthcare Team. 

And while I know the world will be braced for her, I can't help but believe she'll make her mark. And I hope she'll always remember that no matter far apart we are, we will always share the same sky and the same moon and stars. Happy Birthday, Michelle.

"I'm gonna watch you shine.
Gonna watch you grow
Gonna paint a sign.
So you'll always know.
As long as one and one is two.
There could never be a father
Who loved his daughter more than I love you."

-bill kenny

Crying for the Moon

The older I get, the better I was. This is from so long ago I was practically brilliant (at least in my own mind). At the time, a decade ago, I called it: 

The Moon's a Harsh Mistress

Driving in to work yesterday morning, as the mercury hovered not all that much above the freezing point making it dicey for Southern New England farmers to keep their crops growing, I had a long, hard look at what seemed to be just about a full moon.

I have no life, and spend a large part of it at work, driving to or from work or worrying about something connected to work. I don't get up in the middle of the night like my brother Adam because I have a few more miles on the odometer and neither the spirit nor the flesh is willing any longer, but it's still pretty early. 

In the spring and summer months, as the days lengthen, there's a lighter tint to the darkness rolling along Route 12 through Ledyard at a little after five, and yesterday the moon was sitting practically on the roadway on the horizon.

I remember as a kid, in Mrs. Hilge's classroom, 3-B, in St Peter's (sic) School in New Brunswick, NJ, as Sister Mary Immaculata put a radio speaker near the microphone in her office connected to the PA system so we could hear the launch of Alan Shepard. We were on our way to the moon and we would beat those Ruskie bastards (I should admit I don't think I knew the word bastard then; I caught up pretty fast) and plant our flag up there.

I heard years later, in one of those stories moms tell to other adults about their now-grown children which shock the child because they never knew, one of the nuns (would have had to have been Sister Stephen who never liked me anyway) asked me what I was most concerned about for the astronaut and I replied, 'how Mission Control will monitor his heartbeat during lift-off' when, seemingly, the correct answer was 'his immortal soul.' Even then...

Looking at the US effort to put a man on the moon, it's hard to not think, if, for just a moment, we had replaced God with Science (caps are deliberate in case there is a God or Science has truly replaced Him. I'm going to need brownie points from someplace). Who among us didn't want to grow up to be an astronaut? I hated Tang, and I still wanted to be one. The irony of ironies, I HATE flying in all forms. Take-offs and landings terrify me and once we're airborne it's a really boring bus ride at thirty thousand feet.

But dawn patrolling yesterday morning, I was thinking about November when the days are growing darker earlier and staying dark longer when the last of the shuttle flights is slated to liftoff as the age of private space flight begins. I'm very sure I'm VERY angry this is happening and am wondering if perhaps it's part of the reason I'm in a dark place spinning my wheels without gaining traction at the moment.

Rome, a small city in the middle of Italy grew into the Roman Republic and then devolved into the Roman Empire before disappearing beneath the bread and circuses and onslaught of the Vandals and Visigoths. Somewhere at some point in time, we've stopped being the greatest notion to ever become a nation and are now on our way to being another Carjackistan (sorry, Tank McNamara).

My point is Great Nations Do Great Deeds. We, okay not me personally, but my parents and their parents (and ALL of our parents and grandparents before them), fought two world wars, endured a decade of deprivation we now call The Great Depression, retooled and rebuilt not only our own country but our defeated foes across the globe. We/they stared into the maw of mutually assured destruction and the gaping jaws of the Russian bear and he blinked and fell. A lesser nation would have stepped on its enemy's throat while it was down.

A great nation would, and did, help the bear up and help it find its way even while, at times, losing our own and now our children's children will never be able to fully appreciate, much less share, their grandparent's dreams of space flight? How did it happen that we cannot afford to live out loud? 

I wasn't the only kid or boy, come to think of it, in my class with 'the' plan: I'd grow up to be a baseball player and the President (baseball was only a summer job) and an astronaut. It seemed like a pretty full day in the third grade. All these years on, all that remains is my dislike of Tang.

"I fell out of her eyes.
I fell out of her heart.
I fell down on my face.
Yes, I did, and I -- I tripped and I missed my star.
God, I fell and I fell alone, I fell alone.
And the moon's a harsh mistress,
And the sky is made of stone."
-bill kenny

The Past as Prologue

This isn't on my desk calendar for today but I think it should be: the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. I don't think forty-five years down the road, we, as a country, have ever really made our peace with that war, the way we fought it, the way it ended, and most especially with how we treated those lucky enough to come home from it. 

Some have suggested Vietnam demonstrated the danger of trying to conduct a guns AND butter war, that is, we send people off to fight while back on the home front, very little changes. If that's the theory, then I guess it's true, since while we had sappers trying to clear mines from rice paddies in monsoons we also had half a million gather in the mud of Yasgur's Farm. And when all the toking and joking was over, the ages of everybody were practically identical, though I think the guys humping it through weeds were younger, but also older.

I lost a prep school classmate in that war and from what I've been told by long-time residents of Norwich, the city 'lost' twelve young men in the Vietnamese War. When I'm feeling angry and bitter at how survivors were treated, I'm tempted to offer that they weren't lost at all, but that's disrespectful to both their memories and to those who came home wounded in places that will never heal and were left to their own devices as the rest of us raced to forget what we never knew enough about in the first place.

Rex tremendae majestatis. Welcome home.

-bill kenny

Meandering in Mohegan

I don't know how you're fixed for diversions as we continue to strive to flatten the curve in combating COVID-19 in terms of puzzles, books, books on puzzles, puzzles you've created from taking scissors to books....you get the idea. (I was going to claim the previous sentence was sarcasm, but sarcasm has gotten a pretty bad name in recent days). 

Television is fine but also pretty finite after awhile so I try to go for a walk every day, weather permitting, and I use the time to regroup, rather than to decompress, as I don't feel put-upon by the protective measures we're all using because I keep my eye on the prize which, to me, is someday to not have to do any of this anymore. Besides, there are a lot of folks in a lot of different places and spaces smack in the middle of harm's way so that I'm not.

Like you, I've watched the news reports on TV with folks mostly unmasked who do not maintain anything close to the recommended social distance, demanding 'liberation' from their elected leaders' preventative policies and practices which they see as oppressive. 

To my eyes, the protestors seem to be mostly white men (takes one to know one) who are very unhappy that the government is telling them what they can do with their own bodies. I'd be curious to know what women watching them make of that reaction.  

On Saturday, wearing gloves and a mask (but carrying no trick or treat bag) I popped up to Mohegan Park because the day was maybe the nicest we'd had all April, and I wanted to stretch my legs hiking around Spaulding Pond and see how well springtime was progressing even as we were distracted by our health concerns. 

The two playscapes, one near the upper parking lot and the other near the beach, were police-taped off out of an abundance of caution but there were plenty of children with parents and caregivers taking the air and soaking up the sunshine. It's still April and between the weather we've had and for that same abundance of caution reason, the fountain near the flagpole is still wearing its winter protective wrap. 

There were a reasonable number of men and women fishing with a youngster or two holding a rod and reel. Fishing is serious relaxation and as I recall from my own earliest years as a child, both bait and patience are needed in large quantities. You can probably guess which one of those was in short supply. 

Billy Bass ain't got nothing on Tommy Trout

The adult fishermen were practicing excellent social distancing scattered along the pond's banks but judging from the lack of bobbins bobbing it seemed the trout were doing an excellent job of sheltering in place. 

Out just beyond one of the bubblers near the beach at the pond was a skewer of egrets doing their own fishing. Insert your own 'egrets, I've had a few but then again too few to mention' joke here. The egrets seemed to be enjoying their diving as much as their catching and I was enjoying all of it.

I had a pocket full of peanuts for squirrels and (hopefully) chipmunks I'd encounter as I made my circuit around the pond but it wasn't until the third lap, from under the enclosed pavilion that hosts so many summer barbecues, that a solitary chipmunk made an appearance. 

It took a few steps towards me, waited while I fumbled with the bag in my pocket and tossed it a peanut which it grabbed on the first bounce and disappeared underneath the building to pop out again some thirty seconds later with a second chipmunk. I smiled under my mask at this twofer as I realized it's not just us who are in this together.
-bill kenny