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Author: Anne Cassidy

Fairy Tales

Fairy Tales

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We leave for the airport in two hours. The list of to-dos has been whittled down to the final item: “taxi to Dulles.” Traveling to Lisbon will be a three-stage process, involving an overnight flight to London, a layover, and an afternoon flight to Portugal. 

Whenever I embark upon a holiday like this, I think back to my first European trip. I had saved and planned for months, had dreamed of it all my life. In the back of my mind was the possibility that maybe Europe, which I first learned about in fairy tales, was a fairy tale itself. Maybe it didn’t exist!

I can still remember standing with my friends in Luxembourg, mind addled by sleeplessness, ogling the castle and marveling that what I had hoped I would find was actually there. It was the beginning of two enchanted months in France, Belgium, England, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. 

But not Portugal or Spain. I’ll be seeing those countries … soon.  

Wild Thing

Wild Thing

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An early walk this morning, into a day just dawning. I leave my earphones out for a while to take in the bird calls, a steady ripple of sound punctuated by the brisk staccato of the woodpecker’s drill. 

Walking before 7, something I seldom do these days, is such a gift. It gives us the day before it’s lost its creases and its curls, while it’s still fresh and still.

Sometimes I see a fox skulking home after a long night of hunting. Other times a young deer, hiding in the grass. 

In early morning, the day is still a wild thing. It does not yet belong to us — if it ever does. 

Trodden Paths

Trodden Paths

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For more weeks than I care to admit, I’ve been reading Jose Saramago’s Journey to Portugal. Saramago makes it clear that he is not a tourist; indeed, Portugal is his native land. But he is a traveller, and there is scarcely a hamlet that he doesn’t cover in this tome. 

I picked it up because we are going to Portugal this summer (in a couple of days, in fact), and I thought the words of a Nobel Prize winner might be good ones to take along. 

The ones that strike my fancy now, though, apply not just to Portugal but to any journey. He uses them to describe the Roman ruins in the city of Evora. 

The paths trodden by men are only complicated at first sight. When we look more closely, we can see traces of earlier feet, analogies, contradictions that have been resolved or may be resolved at some future date, places where suddenly languages are spoken in common and become universal.

 “Traces of earlier feet…” — that’s an image I won’t forget. 

May Chauvinist

May Chauvinist

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I know I’m a May (as opposed  to male) chauvinist, but really, what’s not to like about this month?

The climbing rose is blooming its heart out. The Big Heat is just getting warmed up (though it’s early this year, will be 95 here today). And the air is scented with honeysuckle flower.

Schools are letting out, vacations are beginning, days are long and languid. 

I’m grateful to be embarking upon another trip around the sun today. I just snuck into May … but I’m glad I did. 

Memorial Day x 2

Memorial Day x 2

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Today, Memorial Day falls on Memorial Day — May 30, that is. Perhaps it is doubly Memorial Day, then, Memorial Day x 2. 

I looked for photos of Washington, D.C., to celebrate the occasion and came up with these from a nighttime visit to the monuments with work colleagues in October of 2018. 

Notice how the emblems of our democracy shine out as darkness surrounds them. Perhaps a fitting metaphor for this day, this year. 

Basement Time

Basement Time

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I spent some time in the basement today, following the advice of my phone, which was blasting a shrill tone and notifying me of a tornado warning in my neighborhood. 

The skies have been unsettled, and the warm humid air made me think there was some cause for concern, so I scampered downstairs and used the elliptical until the warning passed and I could come upstairs again.

Though my experience of tornados has been limited (some close calls plus a terrifying derecho),  I generally hop to it when a windstorm is said to be in the neighborhood. 

My basement is not a paradise, but it is, well, below ground. 

The Spider Web

The Spider Web

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One of my final projects for class last semester required making an object. It could be a collage or a photograph or a batch of banana bread, but it had to be something tangible that represented a lesson we had learned or a question we had asked. I crocheted the spider web you see above. Here, in part, is how I explained my choice:

Delicate yet strong, filmy yet adhesive, the filaments of a spider web are both a prism and a killing field. They bend light, make rainbows, reveal themselves from some angles and not others. Humans find them beautiful; insects find them deadly.

In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino chose the spider web to portray one of his most memorable metropolises: Octavia, a city stretched across a void, made of “ropes and chains and catwalks.” Its inhabitants “know the net will only last so long.” The spider web seemed an apt metaphor for this class; it represents all the impermanent structures we build to make meaning, knowing, even as we construct them, that they are doomed to fall.

I talked about how the class readings were “knotty but precious,” and how the entire project was “deconstructionist” in nature since I frequently found myself ripping out stitches. I ended by mentioning that the word “crochet” comes from the French croche, to hook. I interpreted this “hook” not as a spear but as a net, a way to catch an idea, examine it, then let it go — not pin it down. I’d like to do more of that.

On Midwives and Texas

On Midwives and Texas

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In my mind now are snippets of the music played in “Call the Midwife.” Not just the opening tune, but the crescendo that signals a baby is about to be born, the whimsical notes that accompany Fred the handyman, and the ecclesiastical chords that sound whenever the nuns gather to pray.

All of this suggests that I watch a little too much “Call the Midwife” — and on that point I plead guilty — but there’s a reason why I do. And it’s worth mentioning on this day we’re all grieving the tragic loss of life in Texas.

“Call the Midwife” takes place in the East End of London in the 1960s. Watching it whisks me into a completely different world from the one I inhabit. It’s a world of poverty, to be sure, but also a world of community. It is not a world without violence but it’s a world where police are armed only with billy clubs and the only children who die are rare ones who, despite the best efforts of the midwives and doctors, do not survive a difficult birth. 

I started re-watching the show a few weeks ago when I was feeling under the weather because it never fails to buoy me up. And you can bet I watched an episode last night to calm myself down. The show distracted me from the thoughts swirling around in my mind so I could fall asleep. But now it’s morning and the thoughts are back:

When will we do something about the gun violence in this country? Whatever it is, it won’t be enough. But it will be a start. And without it … well, I just don’t know what will become of us.

Resilience

Resilience

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In her new book Sanctuary, Emily Rapp Black explores the concept of resilience. As part of this task, she talks with the editor of a book called Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust.

Black learns that resilience is not an item on a to-do list. It is a part of us, as long as we have the agency to express it.

The children whose diaries are featured in this book found that agency through keeping their diaries. “The journal writers made it clear that writing was the path to maintaining any agency at all, which in this context was life,” Black writes. “To do creative work was to be — and feel — alive.”

The children who kept these diaries were exposed to unimaginable horrors. Yet they found the will to live through scribbling words on a page. I take great hope from that.

Music and Writing

Music and Writing

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There was a time in my life when writing and music were neck and neck. I loved to write and loved to play piano, and, for a brief and shining time, I loved being a member of a youth orchestra, even though it meant learning to harrumph my way through the string bass parts of Brahms’ First Symphony, the Leonore Overture and other pieces I can still remember even though I played them decades ago.

In the end it came down to this: I could make a living as a writer but not as a musician, and wanting a roof over my head and clothes on my back I made what I think was the wiser choice. But music was always out there, a grand passion, and lately, with the new piano, a more fully engaged one.

What has occurred to me recently is how well the two go together. How music takes over when words fail. How words crystallize the feelings that music engenders, how in my re-engineered life, music and writing can work together. They can and, I hope, they do.