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Author: Anne Cassidy

Spacious Mind

Spacious Mind

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A happy mind is a spacious mind, intoned the voice that I have come to associate with calm. It’s the voice of the Headspace application (its founder, as a matter of fact), and it has been my guide on this several-month journey I’ve been taking recently, dipping my toe into the shallowest end of the deep waters of meditation.

Any progress I’ve made has been courtesy of my place of employ, which has sponsored Headspace meditation sessions every workday since mid-March, most of which I’ve attended.

Some days I’m a hopeless case and can barely follow the instructions. But other days I can feel myself in another place, one where thoughts flit into my mind and just as easily float out again; one where following the breath, flowing with the breath, is becoming a little more second nature.

Today, when I heard this line that a happy mind is a spacious mind, a mind that has room for other people, other ideas, I’ll admit I broke the first rule of meditation. I didn’t let that thought move through and out. I savored it a bit, I pondered the implications.

Equating happiness with spaciousness, yes, it works — though you could just as easily equate it with coziness and smallness and manageability. But in this case I imagined the clear sky that you reach when you soar above the clouds. The spaciousness of the heavens, of the mind unencumbered.

Drippy Walk

Drippy Walk

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A drippy walk last week had me dodging raindrops. When I left my parked car I thought the sun would burn the clouds away, but the farther I walked the less certain I was of that. 

Still, it was a grand way to spend an early summer afternoon, making my way along moss-slicked paths, inhaling the rain-spun air, exploring an unfamiliar corner of the neighborhood.
My shoes and shirt were growing soggier by the minute but I couldn’t bear to turn around. The canopy was catching the worst of the weather, and the moisture seemed to accentuate everything — the leaves were greener, the air was fresher — and I was walking through it, gladly.
Virtual Shower

Virtual Shower

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Today, we make one more notch on the digital belt, as we hold a virtual baby shower for Claire. With two expectant mothers in the family, we thought it best to forgo a real party.

By now most of us have been to Zoom happy hours, Zoom meetings, Zoom family reunions and all other manner of screened gatherings. We have grown accustomed to the squares on a screen.

So today, there will be more of that. There will be virtual games and present-opening. But the gifts, the decorations — and most of all, the love and good wishes — will be most emphatically real.

Dizzy Doggie

Dizzy Doggie

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A dizzy doggie is a sad sight to behold, and we’re beholding it now since Copper came down with something called vestibular disease. It affects the part of a dog’s brain and ear that regulates balance, and is a condition known to affect old dogs.

This time yesterday we thought our dear pet was not long for this world. He couldn’t eat or stand, was sick to his stomach. I thought he must have had a stroke and was preparing myself (not well, either) for the worst.

But a trip to the vet informed us that he would most likely recover and just needed to be kept quiet until this thing goes away. Of course, we left with medications because this after all is a modern, state-of-art veterinary practice. But time is the great healer here — as it so often is.


(Copper is looking ahead to better days.)

When Worlds Collide

When Worlds Collide

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Working outside means that my worlds collide. 

I sit in the office chair retrieved on Tuesday, a shiny, heavy object with padding everywhere a body needs it — but yesterday I pulled it out onto the deck in full view of the wood bees and the red-shouldered hawk family next door and the knockout rose bush, just planted on the side of the yard. 
In the way that white noise makes one concentrate, the sights and sounds of the outdoors do the same for me. And to concentrate while also seated in comfort is … divine.
So let the worlds collide. I’m fine with it! 
Reading Double

Reading Double

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What’s a reader to do when she becomes totally engrossed in an Audible book while already reading a page-turner the old-fashioned way? There’s only one answer to that: spend all non-work hours reading or listening.

Beyond that, though, there are some considerations. One can “read” an Audible book while walking or dusting or chopping vegetables, but one cannot read an Audible book before bed. I’ve tried that before, have fallen asleep to a mellifluous voice carrying me sweetly from novel to dreamland only to find myself hopelessly lost and frantically rewinding (using that five-seconds-back key) in the clear light of day.
With eyes on paper, though, the worst that can happen is that you lose your bookmark in the bedcovers. But that, and one’s place in the story, is easily found the next morning. 
So there develops the two-channeled reading mind, which thrills to American Dirt in the evening and revels in The Heart’s Invisible Furies in the morning. And why should it not? After all, it’s the same mind that holds recipes and birthdays, addresses and passwords. It can juggle more than one movie or television show in an evening, so why not two books in a day?
 I say this now, of course, but I’m only a few days into reading double. We’ll see later how it all turns out. 
One Last Look

One Last Look

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Not only is my office still in lockdown, with employees required to work from home, but we’ll soon move to a new building. By early fall, we’ll  have the option of returning to the office, but it won’t be this office. Which is why I went down to Crystal City this morning to pack up my chair, standing desk, notebooks and files — and bring them home.

It was a big job that my becoming sentimental made even bigger. I couldn’t stop thinking of all the colleagues who once peopled this place. Though I still work with them, we are now squares on a screen or voices on the phone. There is no more banter in the kitchen, no more planking in the hall.

I’ll admit that working at home is wonderful, but I miss the camaraderie and the stimulation. I miss the life I used to have. Which is why I spent some time today running around with my phone taking pictures of the place.  Here’s where we held potlucks. There’s where we started planning the speech it would take me a month to write.

It may sound silly, it took time I didn’t have. But I spent the better part of four years in this place. Surely it’s worth one last look.

Re-reading Camus

Re-reading Camus

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Once we went into lockdown in March, the battered old copy I have of Albert Camus’s The Plague was much on my mind. Part of me wanted to re-read it. I’d always liked the book, ever since I read it in college and taught it in high school. I thought it was profound — and that was before we were in a worldwide pandemic. But another part of me wondered, why do I want to read a book about a plague when I’m living through one?

The glutton-for-punishment part of me won out. I re-read the book — and am glad I did, even though cracking the volume open and turning pages guaranteed its destruction. When I began reading, my copy was hanging together not by a thread but by some errant glue that had not yet dried and flaked away. After I finished, the book was essentially a sheaf of loose-leaf pages. But that was okay; killing a book by reading it seems an outcome that an existentialist like Camus would have appreciated.
But beyond the mechanics of reading — the gentle way I had to handle the paperback, as if holding the hand of a dying victim — there was the content, which was both comforting and illuminating. Yes, we are suffering from a devastating coronavirus. But it’s at least not the bubonic plague. There are no buboes to lance, no dying rats to herald the crisis. 
There were passages that could have been written yesterday, so clearly did they plumb the human heart in a time of mass contagion and illness. “There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars take people equally by surprise,” Camus wrote, at the beginning of the novel. And, toward the end, he said this: “Whereas plague by its impartial ministrations should have promoted equality among our townsfolk, it now had the opposite effect and … exacerbated the sense of injustice.” 
And then, there is this passage at the end, which I noted a few months ago and will always give me shivers: “He [Dr. Rieux] knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedroom cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”
A Repost for Father’s Day

A Repost for Father’s Day

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For today, a repost from 2011, when Dad and I spent Father’s Day touring his old neighborhood, which he liked to call the “culturally deprived North Side.” Reading it now makes me miss him even more.

Sometimes the old brain is too full to process what it has stored. Today is one of those days. A high school reunion, the wedding of a dear friend’s son and now Father’s Day have all run together this weekend to create a mass of memories, thoughts and impressions. Should I write about dancing last night with people I haven’t seen in decades? Or the tears that surprised me as I watched Jean’s son kiss his bride?

A second ago I showed my dad photos of his father that my cousin had posted on Facebook. The kitchen of my Dad’s boyhood home on Idlewild Court — a home we’re about to see on a sentimental journey through the streets of Dad’s past — came alive again in one of those pictures.

The multiple layers of meaning in that event — layers of nostalgia, wonder and mystery — are about as close to depicting this weekend as I can muster.

Victory Lap

Victory Lap

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Copper is an old doggie now who has twice torn his ACL. He gets around fine most of the time but is stiff after long sleeps and odd twists. Consequently, he has developed a reticence for going up or down the eight wooden deck stairs that provide access to the back yard with all of its canine potty potential. 

This, of course, has become an issue for the humans in Copper’s life, who have been known to lure him down the steps with treats, bouncing balls and plain old cajoling.

Most mornings, Copper makes it up and back without encouragement, prompted by urgency, I suppose. But lately he’s taken to celebrating this once-routine accomplishment by bursting through the back door and running around the house. 
I know that we humans must avoid the tendency to anthropomorphize our pet’s behaviors, but it’s hard not to see this as a victory lap.  Once again, Copper has prevailed over stiff joints and old age. He’s made it down and back up again. He has triumphed. And surely this is worth a little celebration.