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Author: Anne Cassidy

Round Number

Round Number

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Yesterday morning I hit a round number: 2,300. That’s the number of posts I’ve published since starting this blog more than seven and a half years ago. That’s a lotta posts!

What have I been blathering about with all these words, all these zeroes and ones? Walking and writing. Cities and suburbs. Work and leisure. Summer and fall. Observations and exhortations. Mostly, just noticing. There is some merit in that, I’ve decided.

And there’s gratitude (that word again) that the challenge of putting these observations into words hasn’t lost its luster over months and years.

Truth is, I love words. And when words add up to numbers, I like them, too.

Two Kinds of Gratitude

Two Kinds of Gratitude

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I don’t keep a gratitude journal — but I do keep a journal into which I occasionally pen thankful thoughts. And in the process of doing this I’ve noticed that there are at least two kinds of gratitude — forced and spontaneous.

Forced gratitude is what I summon when I’m walking to Metro on a cold, gray morning, wondering why I’m still slogging into an office, or on a leaden afternoon when the words aren’t flowing and it’s so late in the day that they never will. This is when I make the mental list: family, friends, health, income, productive work, words and music.

Spontaneous gratitude is what I feel when Copper is running at me with a Day-glo yellow ball in his mouth, all eagerness and joy. Or when I’m hanging out with the girls, individually or together, or even just talking with them on the phone. Spontaneous gratitude comes on walks or in quiet mornings like this one: clocks ticking (two of them), a cup of hot tea, an hour before I have to leave.

While it’s tempting to praise the latter gratitude over the former, in truth we need both kinds. One is our steady companion, the other a funny visitor, an outlier relative who once rode a motorcycle across the West. While you hope he’ll stop by often, you know he never will.

Pedestrian

Pedestrian

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While each terrorism event evokes shock, horror and the sickening realization that it’s happened again, each has its own particular stamp of sadness. Yesterday’s was familiarity — I’ve walked that path often — and the pedestrianism of it all.

While terror has struck crowds of pedestrians before, they’ve never been at places I know so well. This happened on a late autumn afternoon, the perfect time to hop on a bike or stroll a walkway with a splendid view of the harbor and the Hudson. If last month’s incident was an assault on the concert-goer (an all too familiar theme), yesterday’s was an attack on walking itself, on the pedestrian.

Not just pedestrians but the pedestrian: “lacking inspiration or excitement, dull.” And of course that’s the point, isn’t it? To make even the most quotidian of tasks an opportunity for mayhem. The retort is pedestrian, too. We will keep riding, keep walking, keep being ourselves.  It’s pedestrian, but what else can we do?

Self and Silliness

Self and Silliness

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Halloween has snuck up on me this year. Being out of town for a few days, being busy … But here we are on the day, little ghosts and goblins getting geared up for their big nights on the town.

I’m thinking about some of the girls’ best childhood costumes, which were made by their grandmother: a colorful clown, cuddly lion, tusked elephant and a seal made out of some sort of naugahyde fabric that I can’t even imagine cutting, let alone sewing.

Then came the in-between years, when make-up replaced masks. One year Suzanne went as some sort of a sprite or spirit with greenish skin and lots of eye shadow.

On Halloween we can pretend to be something we are not. But that was often the case when raising young children. I might be called on to cackle like a witch or moo like a cow at any time. The line between self and silliness was thin to nonexistent.

Now I’m myself all the time. As the girls would say … borrrrring.

Houston Delivers

Houston Delivers

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To riff for a moment on a city defined by a sentence amplified by a movie— “Houston, we have a problem” — let me just say Houston had far fewer problems than I expected to see.

While there was evidence of Hurricane Harvey — a boarded-up motel and piles of refuse in neighborhoods (the latter viewed by other wedding-goers, not me) — the city, on the whole, glittered and gleamed.

From the Johnson Space Center to the funky soul food breakfast joint my sister-in-law found to a host of museums on everything from medicine to bicycles — Houston delivered.

The best part was walking through the parks, past fountains and waving pink grasses and through the studied stillness of the Japanese garden. Dogs and families, girls in ballgowns for their quinceaneras, even a tightrope-walker — everyone out to savor the cool breeze and sparkling low-humidity day.

Observe the Moon

Observe the Moon

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On a tour of the Johnson Space Center yesterday I learned that tonight is International Observe the Moon Night, a date set aside each year to look at and learn about Earth’s satellite. I didn’t even know there was such an event, but I consider myself lucky that I learned about it where I did.

Home of moon rocks and interplanetary dust, of an intact Saturn rocket housed in a building as impossibly long as it is impossibly tall, the Johnson Space Center is also where the Orion spacecraft is coming to life. Orion is built for interplanetary travel — and will someday take humans to Mars.

Also on the Space Center campus is the historic mission control center: the place where nine Gemini and all the Apollo missions were monitored, where scientists scrambled to bring Apollo 13 astronauts back to Earth, where cheers erupted when the words came crackling through the monitors: “The Eagle has landed.”

It was the moon they saw, the same moon we can see tonight. Only for the first time in history, a human footprint was outlined in its dust.

Catching the 43

Catching the 43

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Sometimes I just miss it, but other times, like yesterday, I look at my watch, think there’s no way I can get there in time, but somehow, with much huffing and puffing, I arrive at the line of people that means the bus hasn’t yet come. Moments later, the ART 43 bus pulls up to the Crystal City stop.

The Arlington bus system is a marvel. It runs on time, is comfortable and pleasant, and the drivers aren’t surly. (I have a low bar for drivers.) Compare this with Metro — dark, crowded, subject to delays for door jamming, arcing, you name it.

The ART 43 runs from Crystal City to Courthouse and back with only one stop in between — Rosslyn. It’s 10 minutes of efficient transportation.  No wonder I’m glad when I catch the 43.

Walking and Living

Walking and Living

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As if yesterday’s post wasn’t enough of a paean to walking … here’s this, which I noticed in a day-old copy of the newspaper: “Regular walking may increase longevity, even if you walk less than the recommended amount.”

I hope I walk more than the recommended amount — but even if I didn’t these words would be heartening. The new study analyzed information from nearly 140,000 adults ages 60 and up, people who were followed for 13 years. Even those who didn’t walk the recommended two and a half hours a week still lived longer than the ones who didn’t walk at all.

Apparently, though many studies look at exercise and longevity, not that many specifically examine walking. So although this seems like a no-brainer … it isn’t. And there’s more: Those who walk from two and a half to five hours a week were 20 percent less likely to die of any cause and 30 percent less likely to die of a respiratory ailment. Which raises a question: Could those who walk 10 or more hours a week become … immortal?

I’m getting a bit carried away here, but one thing is certain. Walking doesn’t just clear the mind and inspire the spirit … it actually keeps us going longer. I can live with that!

Pep Walk

Pep Walk

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I love the pep talk, whether getting or giving. Those first minutes and hours afterward, lifted on a thin layer of inspiration that I know won’t last but feels permanent at the time, a high born of words and gestures, of understandings suddenly grasped.

But when there’s no one around for a pep talk, a pep walk will do.

A pep walk begins in desolation. The article you’re writing has no focus, the words are cliches. The work load is too heavy, no one can juggle this many projects. The child you raised is having troubles; she’s an adult now but when she hurts, you do too.

The reasons are legion, but the remedy is the same. Lace up the shoes, grab the earbuds, step outside. It’s a whole new world out there. Other people and their problems. Maybe the problems get all jumbled together and cancel each other out. Or maybe it’s just the act of walking, one foot then the other. Forward motion, with all that that implies.

All I know is, the pep walk works. It bolsters spirits, reveals solutions. It inspires.

To the Morning

To the Morning

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Thinking this morning of morning’s power, and of one of my favorite songs, which is about the morning. It’s by Dan Fogelberg, and was the opening song on Chicago’s WFMT when I lived there way back when, often the first sound I heard every day. Here’s how it goes:

Watching the sun
Watching it come
Watching it come up over the rooftops
Cloudy and warm
Maybe a storm
You can never quite tell
From the morning
And it’s going to be a day
There is really no way to say no
To the morning
Yes it’s going to be a day
There is really nothing left to
Say but
Come on morning
Waiting for mail
Maybe a tale
From an old friend
Or even a lover
Sometimes there’s none
But we have fun
Thinking of all who might
Have written
And maybe there are seasons
And maybe they change
And maybe to love is not so strange.