Lest We Forget

The New York Yankees host the Toronto (of Dunedin, Florida) Blue Jays this afternoon at 1:05 PM as Major League Baseball begins a full 2021 schedule. 

Baseball and the Yankees in particular, have had their share of tragedy and triumph but on every Opening Day hope springs eternal, and though no team has yet to go 162-0 for a season, today that pursuit of perfection begins again. 

But before you dig into that box of Cracker Jack or take the first sip of that adult sparkling beverage you've promised yourself, please spare a moment and a thought for a solitary last flight.
-bill kenny

Past (Im)perfect

We're fond of history around here, but we're in danger of who we once were preventing us from becoming who we could be.

I've lived here for nearly thirty years (and, yes, I did hear that 'too long' all the way in the back) which, for many people I meet, is no more than an eye blink and I've heard a lot of the 'back in the day' stories about Franklin Square, the sea captains who built houses on Laurel Hill, the Sears and Roebuck store  and those halcyon downtown Thursday nights so hectic that small children clung tightly to a parent's hand lest they find themselves in the street and swept away possibly forever. 

These stories, I like to think of them as parables, always have a sepia tinge to them and a soft-focus in terms of detail. They always bring a smile to the face of the person telling me the tale, which doesn't so much conclude as just stop. Leaving us in the here and now and present-day where not one of those storytellers seems to know what happened, how, or why to Norwich.

In their reckoning, people woke up and suddenly downtown was a ghost town-the stores were all gone and so, too, were the people who shopped in them. We seem to forget that adapt and overcome is as true for cities as it is for individuals and the alternative is never pleasant.

I bring this up because we're days away from the next installment of back-in-the-day nostalgia starting mere moments after the City Manager unveils his proposed municipal budget at Monday night's City Council meeting. 

Almost two decades ago we modified our charter and redesigned and reconfigured our City Council and as one of the folks who helped make that happen, I'm still proud of what we did and for what I believe all that change has helped lead us to. 

The goal was, and is, progress, not perfection, and when I walk the same streets that were dead and dusted thirty years ago, I encounter plenty of people who, like me, weren’t born here but have chosen to be here now and who are getting on with their lives.

We didn't live in Norwich in the 1960s (or whatever decade you're most fond of) and at the risk of upsetting those unhappy with where we are, most of us don’t mourn or miss it. Because we didn’t live it then doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be mindful of and respect Norwich’s history but it's 2021 and time to stop using a memory of what we think we once were as an excuse to keep us from becoming who we need to be. 

The City Council and Manager are working to invest our finite tax dollars to provide the best opportunity for each of us and if they're doing it right there's going to be some stress and some strain as we grow up and into what we need for the Norwich we keep telling one another we want to build.

The first step towards that next Norwich starts Monday night at 7:30, when, as a city, we'll continue to make history. What kind, as always, is up to us. 
-bill kenny

The Wheel Turns Slowly, but Still Turns

One of the most pronounced feelings of relief I have experienced in my whole life was early last Friday afternoon in a Wesleyan University parking lot near the sports complex on the far side of the campus in Middletown. Connecticut. 

My wife and I received the second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination. A rolled up (in my case) left sleeve a quick pinch and Specialist 4 in the Connecticut National Guard who've been making this process work as seamlessly as it has handed me my vaccination card and a metal button so I could tell the world. 

On that very same day, 69,486 new cases across our country were reported and 1,000 people died. I suspect nearly every person had someone they loved and who loved them, plans not yet fulfilled and dreams still waiting to take wing. And now, for too many for so long, no salvation because indolence and ignorance ruled the day at a time when attention and action were needed. 

Life is a limited-time offer.
Make the most of what you're given because it won't pass this way again.
-bill kenny

The Time Has Come for Changes

As a nation, we celebrate rugged individualism and take any and every manifestation of weakness as an admission or harbinger of failure. We tell ourselves we need to sink or swim on our merits and while Jesus died for someone's sins, it most certainly wasn't me, Lord. 

We are again at the intersection of an absence of effective and sufficient mental health care and a surfeit of guns of all kinds, calibers, and descriptions. The inevitable conclusion when the two collide always seems to surprise us. 

2017.

2018. 

2019.

2020 *
(*Pandemic shortened hunting season, apparently)

2021.

Tell me I'm wrong, but bring receipts: when the gun violence is perpetrated by a Muslim, we are told to hate the religion; when a perpetrator is a person of color, we are directed to blame the race but when the shooter is white, we're told he had a bad day.

Fuck Thoughts and Prayers; we'd be better off with Tots & Pears. 

For those clamoring to 'fix the problem!' Don't you get it? WE are the problem.
-bill kenny

Revisiting Palm Sunday, Revisited

I like the world in which I live to make sense, for there to be an order and purpose for everything and a reason no matter the season and then I stumble across today, Palm Sunday, and thrash about creating a lot of churn with the keyboard but little clarity in the cranium.

These are some thoughts I had on it from a number of years ago and despite strenuous exertions, little to nothing has changed I'm saddened to report. At the time I called it: 

Palm Sunday Revisited

Raised in the faith of my fathers, I know that today, Palm Sunday, begins the most important week in the Christian calendar-even if you lost your faith along the way to here and now as I have done. 

What follows is as close to contemplation as I may have gotten in recent years (or decades). It may not make sense to you; that wasn’t my intent. I needed to hold the world still for one moment so that it made sense to me-your mileage may vary in ways neither of us can contemplate.

Karl Glogauer was the wrong man at the right time.

The protagonist in Michael Moorcock's novel who travels from the future to the time of Christ, Glogauer, instead, meets a profoundly retarded child of Mary who is, in Moorcock's account, most definitely NOT the Son of God. 

Glogauer then assumes the personae of Jesus of Nazareth, based on his recollection and knowledge of the accounts in the Gospels of the New Testament, culminating in his crucifixion to fulfill those accounts which shaped history to the moment in the future in which he journeyed into the past to complete the story.

Perhaps the most simultaneously unsettling and reassuring aspect of Behold the Man is not the death of someone else in place of the Son of God but its emphasis and reaffirmation of the importance of the belief that He lived at all. 

For you today for whom this is an Ecce Homo experience, my sincere congratulations is tinged with more than just a little jealousy and envy.

Not everyone has the comfort of your beliefs and the reassurance of your faith. Some may not wish to have it while others who once did are forced to realize again the distance traveled from then to now which involved a bridge of faith that, once abandoned, has been destroyed and which can very possibly never be rebuilt.

As even Mark reported, help for one's unbelief is not easily achieved, and perhaps the realization that such assistance can only be given and never earned is part of why pride becomes the greater of the sins especially for those with so little reason to be proud. 

Perhaps it's the shadow of doubt that creates the chink of vulnerability in an armor of faith that condemns a wanderer to know the path but refuses to walk it again.

Sometimes it's the belief, and sometimes, the believer.

-bill kenny  

Bloom Where You're Planted, Orlando

I went for a quick walk at mid-morning yesterday before Sigrid and I headed to Middletown for Phase Two of the Pfizer Fauci Ouchy. The skies threatened rain but they threaten a lot of things this time of year, often simultaneously but it held off during my wandering.

I cheated because I didn't do a long walk but hiked down Washington Avenue, hanging the left on Lafayette Street across from the William W. Backus Hospital, striding past the Yantic Cemetery and remembering again how disquieting I found that view from my hospital window on the various occasions I've volunteered there to be an orange Jell-O tester.  

I then made another left onto Sachem Street and crossed again at the intersection on Washington Street to walk around the perimeter of Chelsea Parade and then back to my house. The warmth of the weather we've had combined with the rain I'm thinking has caused a lot of the shrubs and bushes I pass to transform from nearly-shapeless sticks to budding and blooming bushes. 

The reddish hue on the buds and the small young green leaves that unfold from them within days is a good look for them and makes me feel better as well. I passed a house on Williams Street at the intersection with Washington (where it splits into 'and Broadway') and its hedges have green leaves that really pop on a misty morning like we had yesterday. Steps later and farther down the street, seemingly to my eyes the same hedges in front of a different house still appear morose and lifeless.

They'll catch up soon enough I hope with their arboreal competitors up the street because nature runs on its schedule and not ours. I appreciate the timely reminder.
-bill kenny 

Jean-Paul Sartre to the Courtesy Desk

One of our local supermarkets, feeling the competitive pressure no doubt of an Arkansas retail chain in a business where profit margins often disappear, has gone to a form of shopping I find fascinating. 

You've probably have had it for a while but here in the woods of Southeastern Connecticut where men are men and sheep are nervous (I offered that as a slogan to the tourism board and was turned down cold. Humor-it's in the ear of the beholder, I guess), we have a bar-coded rewards card we sweep across a reader/scanner that releases for our use a handheld device that's tied to our card. 

You wander the aisles, grabbing stuff you want, scanning it, and putting it in bags. When you're done shopping, you head to a checkout and scan one final bar code that tells your handheld sidekick you're past tense, and which transfers your order to the register with the total amount in the display. You pay and out the door you go.

I feel so brave new worldish every time I do it, assuming I can get it to work at all. I don't have performance anxiety, but I can be a little slow in getting the master scanner to release into my care one of the handheld devices and as other shoppers start to pile up behind me, I have to do my best Coolhand Luke impersonation to compensate for the failure to communicate.

This whole process is a bit like Tom Sawyer getting people to paint his fence for him. It's not that the groceries cost less if we do all the heavy lifting, they don't. But this system isn't designed to make our lives easier though we're told it saves us time (and to some degree that's true); it saves the grocer money on salaries and benefits for employees whose number is now reduced.

Once upon a time in grocery stores of a bygone era, there were actual employees who took the items a colleague was ringing up, placed them in bags (eggs and loaves of bread on the bottom, canned goods, and automotive supplies on top of them) and placed those bags in your shopping cart and, if asked, would help you get that cart to your mode of transportation and then back to your abode where the unloading and putting away were your job.

Here in the new now, we've still got cashiers, baggers, courtesy desk employees, the whole kit, and caboodle, though in fewer numbers, who watch as we wander the store with what seem to be Star Trek weapons at the ready. All we need are the communicators over our left breast pockets. And pointy ears, I suppose (check aisle four behind the breath fresheners).

The only part still lacking, but it's probably coming soon enough, are announcements over the store PA system that the Metamucil truck has arrived at loading dock two and twenty-of-those-of-us-formerly-known-as-customers-but-now-called-morons, are needed to unload it, and to stock the shelves in aisle eleven. Don't laugh-that day is dawning. We'll end up playing rock, paper, scissors to decide who's unloading the home pregnancy tests (they go at the header in aisle twelve beside the KY jelly display).

Yesterday, underscoring the perfect beast isn't quite yet where the Grocer in Charge would like it, I grabbed and scanned (in one motion; I've gotten quite proficient at this) a jar of lightly salted (with sea salt, no less) dry-roasted peanuts but, instead of a little peep and a small green light, I got an electronic squonk and a near zen message in the device display: "The item you have scanned does not exist within your order." Oh, really? Hell is, indeed, other people, JP. Will that be paper or plastic?

-bill kenny