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Author: Anne Cassidy

Paean to Portability

Paean to Portability

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Let us pause for a moment to praise portability. Here I sit in my kitchen rocking chair, laptop on lap (actually, laptop on lap desk on lap), able to sway back and forth to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, now blaring from the radio, monitor soup simmering on the stove … and also write this post.

This is nothing new. I’ve drug this trusty machine all over the world. But given that I came of age first on typewriters and later on desktop computers, the fact that I’m able to hop around the globe or the house, creating a workspace wherever I sit, is nothing short of amazing. 

What does portability provide? Ease and freedom. Today I’m appreciating them both.

(Sometimes the laptop is almost lost amidst the clutter that surrounds it.)

Happy VaLENTine’s Day

Happy VaLENTine’s Day

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When Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day collide, you have an interesting day indeed. Ashes or chocolates? Fasting or feasting? Eternal rest or eternal love?

As a three-year-old I know would say, “What the heck?” 

But there are answers to these questions, a solution to this dilemma. 

Lent is part of Valentine’s. Not the other way around. 

Happy Birthday, Rhapsody

Happy Birthday, Rhapsody

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Yesterday, after the errands were run and the groceries put away, I sat down at the piano, pulled out the ancient sheet music and played the opening run. For the next 30 minutes, I bungled my way through one of the most important and beautiful pieces of American music ever written, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

A hundred years ago to the day, on a snowy February 12, 1924, Gershwin played the piece at Aeolian Hall in New York City in a concert billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music.” Paul Whiteman had commissioned Gershwin to write the piece, and Gershwin had done it in just a few weeks, roughing out the original idea on a train trip from New York to Boston. “I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness,” Gershwin said.

He had created a masterpiece. Though no one knows exactly how the piece sounded that day (it wasn’t recorded and Gershwin improvised parts of it), a recording made a few months later is thought to be a close replica. The piece was an immediate success, with multiple recordings, and Paul Whiteman made the Rhapsody the theme song for his radio show. Gershwin had created an anthem for the Jazz Age. 

Later versions of the Rhapsody give it a more lush orchestral sound, but the original performance brought out the jazzy brightness of the piece in all its syncopated glory. Even hopscotching through the music as I was last night, cherry-picking the easier sections, I felt its magic in my bones. 

(Thanks to Wikipedia and The Syncopated Times for info and art, and to Hot Jazz Saturday Night for the inspiration.) 

Welcome Clouds

Welcome Clouds

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I never thought I’d say this but around here the occasional cloudy day comes as a gift: dark, sodden and lacking in expectations. 

I’ve never faulted the climate of northern Virginia. It’s hot in the summer and mild in the winter. Almost too mild these days, turning what was once distinctly four seasons into three-and-a-half. Springs and falls are long and lovely. 

But the steady drumbeat of sunshine can be too much. And this from a sun worshipper. A sunny day comes with its own set of expectations: errands to run, writing to complete before afternoon rays stream through the office windows right into my eyes. 

When do we stay inside and clean the closet? When do we wander lonely as a cloud? Those are questions I ask myself often … but not today. 

Desk Envy

Desk Envy

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I really can’t complain. I may not have the desk of my dreams, but it’s not bad. An apple-green table of a desk, only slightly dented and worn (a lopsided heart carved into the middle, a few splotches of salmon-pink paint in one corner, souvenirs of the girls who once used it).

True, it does not overlook the Atlantic Ocean, or the Front Range of the Rockies, or the harbor in Oban, Scotland. But it does have a lovely view of the backyard, the main street of the neighborhood and a corner of the woods beyond. 

My perfectly-fine desk doesn’t keep me from having desk envy, though. And last night I experienced a full dose of it while watching the movie “Something’s Gotta Give.” It wasn’t my first viewing of this film, but it was the first time I had desk envy watching it. 

Instead of focusing on the budding romance of Erica the playwright, I zeroed in on her writing space. The broad expanse of the (mahogany?) desk, the perfectly placed lamp. The windows! Oh, my gosh, the windows! And the door, open to sea breezes.

I keep telling myself it’s just a movie set. But still…

Catching up on Taylor Swift

Catching up on Taylor Swift

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I’ve just spent more time than I meant to reading about Taylor Swift. I’m not exactly at the vanguard of popular culture, but the juggernaut that is Taylor + Travis, especially as we race toward Super Bowl Sunday, seemed like something I should know just a little bit about. 

This led me to watch a few music videos, do a little googling (there’s a Taylor Swift class at Harvard and, of course, she was Time‘s Person of the Year for 2023) and feel just a little more a part of the cultural zeitgeist. 

I’m still mostly in the dark about the superstar and her super-athlete boyfriend, but I’m curious enough that I may tune in on Sunday, if not for the football then for the celebrity dish.

(Photo: Patrick Smith/Getty)

Up and Out

Up and Out

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Like many people these days I don’t need to leave my house to ply my trade. I can do it quite comfortably from my in-home office. The temptation, then, is to stay inside far too much, especially in the mornings, when I do most of my writing, and especially in winter, when it’s cold. 

But lately, I’ve been trundling out to a 9 a.m. Wednesday yoga class, climbing into a frigid car, battling rush-hour traffic (that again?!) and reaching class barely in time for sun salutations.

I love my small class — and the people in it. And I’ve come to realize that I also love getting up and out “early” one day of the week. Early is relative, of course. I used to leave the house before 7 every day. 

(A photo from the old days of “up and out.”)

Fourteen!

Fourteen!

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A Walker in the Suburbs turns 14 today! If it was growing up in England in the last century, it would be free to leave school forever and get a job. 

I learned this fact while reading a Washington Post article “Centenarians Tell Us What Matters Most.”  It strikes me this morning that the article’s subheads do a good job of explaining why I started A Walker in the Suburbs in 2010 and continue it still. 

Don’t neglect your education. Think positive. Keep reading. Keep moving. Do what you love. 

What started as an experiment during a snowstorm almost a decade and a half ago has become an essential part of my writing life. It keeps me learning and reading. It encourages positivity and perspective. And it certainly keeps me moving. 

Most of all, though, it gives me the chance to do what I love. But that’s just half the equation. The other half is what happens in the minds and hearts of the people reading it. I hope A Walker in the Suburbs brings you a bit of pleasure, too. 

(An old snapshot of the girls. I bet one of them was 14 in this photo.)

At Our Fingertips

At Our Fingertips

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This morning I’ve found myself reading about the wedding of a woman I do not know, will never meet but who provided a link to a story about her nuptials on her travel blog, which I’ve been sampling. 

I have good friends, people I’ve known for years, whose wedding pictures I’ve never glimpsed and probably never will.  But I could describe in detail the gold lace gown that Caroline wore on her special day in 2016.  Such is life in the digital age. 

In fact, there’s a chance that you are, even as we speak, reading a post by someone you don’t know, writing about someone she doesn’t know. 

For some of us, the world at our fingertips is much more real than the one outside our door. 

Laundry Day

Laundry Day

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“Perhaps the job most loathed by Victorian womanhood was doing the laundry,” Ruth Goodman writes in How to be a Victorian, which I mentioned a few days ago. 

As I sort through my own darks and lights, I can’t help but think about how differently my laundry day will proceed from that of the Victorian woman’s. Hers would have started on Saturday, when the soaking began. 

More than 36 hours later she’d begin hauling and heating the water to eke out suds from the harsh soaps of the day, then stirring and agitating the clothes in a tub with a dolly stick (a plunger-like item) to remove the dirt. If she was lucky and had a wringer, she’d remove water from the clothes that way; otherwise, she’d wring them by hand. This would repeat through a couple of rinses, of course. In between she would have to carry large tubs of water in and out of what was most likely a cramped, dark kitchen. Only then could she hang the clothes up to dry. 

Laundry took up so much space and water-heating capabilities that the family would have a cold supper on laundry day, relying on leftovers from what was usually a larger meal on Sunday. 

Goodman says that her own historical laundry experiences lead her to see the automatic washing machine as “one of the great bulwarks of women’s liberation, an invention that can sit alongside contraception and the vote in the direct impact it has had on changing women’s lives.”