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Author: Anne Cassidy

Homework

Homework

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In the continuing saga of my return to grad school, I’m finding at least one part of the experience nice and easy: part of my homework this week involves watching an old movie. 

It’s the 1943 rendition of “Jane Eyre,” the version of this oft-filmed classic that Jean Rhys, author of the Jane Eyre prequel Wide Sargasso Sea, would have known. I’m watching the film before reading Part One of the book, which we will discuss at the next class.

Compared with hacking my way through Postmodernism, New Historicism and various other critical theories, viewing a film seems … positively dreamy.

Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine. Homework: bring it on!

(Seeing as today is April 1, I must add this disclaimer: no fooling!)

New Trail in Town

New Trail in Town

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My walking discoveries continue. Late last week I took off again through the nature center, its trails soft with beaten dirt and crushed leaves. I was looking for another way to reach the bridge I hadn’t known was there … and found it!

But instead of turning right again I turned left, and found myself once again on a path I’d never trod. This is a trail I’ve walked past hundreds of times but somehow never taken. 

I marveled at the tall trees, at the winsome gait of the baseball-capped woman I saw along the way, at the family of five who passed me going the other direction. The tallest of the three children had just found a huge stick, more like a small tree trunk, and he seemed determined to bash everything in sight with it. 

When I had walked a while along this new route, I began to understand where I was, knew I could take a tunnel passage underneath the road. It’s amazing what you can see when you take the “new” trail in town.

Raft of Hope

Raft of Hope

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When I wrote yesterday’s post I hadn’t yet realized that I’d missed the biggest Oscar news to happen in years. Bigger than when Moonlight’s Best Picture award was momentarily and mistakenly given to LaLa Land in 2017. 

When Will Smith slapped Chris Rock to defend his wife against one of Rock’s jokes, he ignited a storm of controversy that hasn’t let up yet.

What I thought not just after watching clips of that episode but often throughout the three-and-a-half-hour show is how the Oscars —and the world, too — have changed in the last couple of decades, how things have grown darker, starker and meaner. 

At times like these I remind myself of what art can do when it’s at its best: how it salves wounds, promotes understanding, draws us together.  What Ralph Ellison wrote of the novel can sometimes be applied to other arts: “[It] could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic idea.”

A raft of hope! … I’ll cling to that. 

CODA

CODA

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Before last week the word coda primarily had a musical meaning for me. It was the part of a piece I looked forward to most: the ending. And not just because I might want a piece of music to end—perish the thought!—but because I enjoy the big bombastic finish. 

But last Wednesday, I looked up the Oscar Best Picture nominees to see which ones I’d missed that I might still be able to see … and there was CODA. I read a review. I watched the trailer. I was hooked. I even signed up for Apple TV in order to watch it (and I have notes to myself all over the place reminding me to cancel Apple TV before my trial period runs out). 

It was worth the effort: I finally had a pony in this race. I was pulling for CODA to win last night, enough that I crept downstairs and turned the TV back on not once, not twice but three times after trying in vain to fall asleep before the winner was announced. 

There will be talk this morning about how this was Apple TV’s movie, how Apple beat Netflix to become the first streaming service to boast an Oscar Best Picture. There will be analyses of how business models are changing. All of this is worth talking about. But in the end, it’s all about the story, whether we’re listening to it around an ancient campfire, watching it in a modern multiplex or streaming it alone on our home computer. CODA has a story that lifts us up — and that’s what we need most right now. 

Stealth Gratitude

Stealth Gratitude

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I’ve known people who keep a gratitude journal, and I admire them for it. Appreciating what we have is an art improved by practice, and noting the specifics for which we feel thankful — not the generalities but each particular stroke of good fortune — is one way to do it.

But I enjoy being ambushed by gratitude: opening the shutters on a cold spring morning and being shocked by the light that pours inside. Running an errand and being enraptured by a sunset that sets the sky on fire. Eating warmed-up baked ziti and marveling at how good it still tastes.

Gratitude can be coaxed and analyzed and marshaled like a foot soldier. But I prefer the stealth variety, the kind that surprises me with joy. 

Annunciation

Annunciation

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In class this week, the professor said a scene from the novel we’re reading was an annunciation. I pictured a medieval painting, the rich oil pigments darkened from the smoke of candles burning. I pictured the painting hanging on the wall of a great cathedral,  cold stone and buttresses, echoes of chant and plainsong.

Today is the feast of the annunciation, the day when the Virgin Mary learned she was bearing the son of God via a message from the angel Gabriel. 

I see a painting again, Gabriel in rich reds, his white wings shining. I see Mary’s head inclined toward the light, gold halo above her head. 

Annunciation: an announcement, a message, a few words that can change your life. 

(The Annunciation depicted in a 15th century tapestry. Photo courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.)

A Diller, A Dollar

A Diller, A Dollar

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When my children were young, I used to read them this Mother Goose rhyme:

 “A diller, a dollar, a 10 o’clock scholar. What makes you come so soon? You used to come at 10 o’clock, and now you come at noon.”

I feel like this blog is becoming the 10 o’clock scholar — if I hurry, that is. If I don’t, it will be the 11 o’clock scholar. 

The non 9-to-5 world, of which I have recently become a member, is good for leisurely mornings. Which is not to say I don’t have plenty of to-dos. It’s just that they can less hurriedly be to-done.

(These ducks don’t seem to be in much of a hurry either.)

The Place To Be

The Place To Be

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I’ve visited Washington, D.C.’s cherry blossoms a couple dozen times through the years, but this is the first time I’ve seen them through the lens of a good camera.

Though I am a novice photographer, I’m an expert blossom-navigator. I can slip through crowds, skip over puddles and keep moving through the inevitable hordes of tourists.

Yesterday the Tidal Basin gave back with picture-perfect weather, peak-bloom blossoms, and the picnickers, strollers and flower-lovers that made this the place to be in the DMV.

They’re Calling

They’re Calling

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The cherry trees are calling … and I’d like to answer them in person. It’s been three years since they were open for business — a funny way to describe them but true since the trees that encircle the Tidal Basin can be (and were) cordoned off.

It’s different when you have a perishable to-do in mind, something that won’t stay put if you wait too long. The cherry trees are a perfect example. They’re in peak bloom now, but all it will take is a hard rain or a brisk breeze and they will be but a shadow of their current selves. And even without those, there’s only so long they will last.

Unlike other things I mean to do then, visiting the cherry blossoms has an all-too-real expiration date. 

So I’m looking at my schedule and hurrying up my homework … and with any luck I’ll visit soon.

Connections

Connections

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In my continuing quest to  explore the untrod paths of my immediate environs I found myself  the other day not exactly lost “in a dark wood,” but flummoxed on a bright, leafless hillside. 

In short, I was stymied by a creek that seemed much deeper and fast-flowing than I remembered it being the last time I was there. Since the last time I was there was several years ago, this was understandable. But it didn’t help me across. 

For that I had to circle back to the shoulder-less two-lane road I’d crossed to get there. I trotted quickly along the side of the road facing the traffic, stepped over the guard rail, and made it to the other side of the creek before the next car sped by. 

I enjoyed the rest of the stroll alongside the creek, sauntering, thinking, except, I’ll admit, for a vague unease about getting back. I needn’t have bothered because I discovered on the way home a more direct passage to the trail by staying in my neighborhood’s common land until it reaches the stream valley park. There was even a little homemade bridge to guide me. 

I’m not sure, but I think there’s a lesson in here somewhere …