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Author: Anne Cassidy

Back to Vienna

Back to Vienna

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A brief lull for Orange Line riders in Metro’s Safe Track program (I can’t believe we’re all calling it that! what a triumph of marketing?) allows me to come and go through Vienna. I was almost going to say “my beloved Vienna.”

Maybe that’s a bit too strong, but such is the lure of the familiar and comfortable that I almost thought of it that way this morning. There is the familiar parking garage, open and above-ground unlike the one at Wiehle-Reston. There is the bridge over 66, the newspaper hawkers, the buses roaring to their bays.

I got to take the morning drive along Vale and Hunter Mill Roads, the road muggy and shaggy with summer, the turns a delight.

It was only a commute, but it felt like a homecoming.

Toddlin’ Town

Toddlin’ Town

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Chicago, goes the song, is a “toddlin’ town.” And when I was there last weekend, those words kept buzzing through my brain. I can remember Frank Sinatra singing them. I can remember my dad singing them.

Dad loved Chicago, would come up twice a year to the Merchandise Mart, where he’d peddle new rattan furniture lines. He stayed in the Palmer House, and in between clients would slip out to browse in bargain basement record bins. He came back to Lexington with a whiff of the faraway, bringing tales of this windy city on a lake so big you couldn’t see the other side.

“Bet your bottom dollar, you’ll lose your blues in Chicago … the town that Billy Sunday could not shut down. … On State Street, that great street, I’ve just got to say, they do things they don’t do on Broadway. …  I had the time, the time of my life. I saw a man who danced with his wife, in Chicago, Chicago my home town.”

Those lyrics are from memory mind you. Brought to the fore by a whirlwind weekend in a place I used to call home.

Chicago River Tour

Chicago River Tour

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I didn’t think much about the Chicago River when I lived here decades ago. I paid attention to it on St. Patrick’s Day, when it was dyed kelly green, but otherwise it was more of an embarrassment than anything else.

This began to change around the time I left. There was a clean-up-the-river campaign. There were new buildings by premier architects. And there was the river walk, built to rival San Antonio’s — which it certainly does.

There were so many facts in yesterday’s architectural river tour that I can only remember a fraction of them. We saw the tallest building designed by a woman and learned of a building that could not support its marble facade and was refaced with granite.

We saw the Merchandise Mart, Navy Pier and Sears (now Willis) Tower.  We marveled at the reflective glass that gave us a picture of the buildings behind us.

Most of all, we (or at least I) caught our breath at the beauty of it all, at the majesty of the great city spread out before us, all glittering water and glass.

Bunting!

Bunting!

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A walk through the streets of Hinsdale, a leafy suburb west of Chicago, found me with a camera in hand snapping photos of gardens and porches — and bunting. It’s such a festive and old-fashioned way to celebrate the Fourth.

It’s not something I see as much of around home, perhaps because it doesn’t lend itself to center-hall colonials or perhaps because proximity to the seat of government has worn our patriotism thin!

Whatever the case, I’ve enjoyed the festoons and the graceful draping of the red, white and blue. And though bunting is in shorter supply today in the city, there are still legions of flags flying, and there will, I’m sure, be ample seasonal excitement here in Chicago. It is, after all, the day for it.

But I have a hunch that when the dust settles it’s the bunting I’ll remember most — the small, personal celebrations of hearth and home.

Urban Adventure

Urban Adventure

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It’s been a while since I’ve been in Chicago. I won’t say how long! But I’ll be there in a few hours, trying to jump some old place memory cells from when I lived here many years ago.

The city has changed a lot since then. Places that one didn’t go into are quite hip now.

And luckily Chicago is forgiving. If you can figure out where the lake is, you can figure out which way to go.

So here goes. An urban adventure.

(small photo from Wikipedia)

Chicago Bound

Chicago Bound

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Minutiae is the enemy of creativity. Combine minutiae with work deadlines, house and yard chores, event planning and the to-dos of daily living, and you have a perfect storm of — well, I was looking for the antonym of “creativity” and what Thesaurus.com has come up with is … reality!

So yes, a perfect storm of reality, or let’s just say reality on steroids.

But today’s plan is to walk to National Airport (20 minutes on foot), board a big bird and fly to Chicago for a family wedding.

Working now in the shadow of this airport I often think about the people in those big birds as they zoom off to their destinations. They, too, are prisoners of minutiae, prisoners of reality. But as I stare from my office building at the airborne jets, I imagine all passengers are sipping drinks with little umbrellas bound for fun-filled Caribbean vacations.

It’s an innocent fantasy. A creative fantasy. The opposite of reality. But whatever it is, today I’ll be part of it.

Before a Storm

Before a Storm

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Yesterday Copper and I stepped out before a storm. He’s become an anxious little guy these days, clamoring for company when he senses bad weather. But I thought we could make it out and back before the rain fell.

Once on the leash he pranced and pulled. As usual I made sure he had no contact with passersby. And as usual he seemed oblivious to my presence.

But once we reached Fox Mill Road and turned back for the walk home, the air had taken on that super-charged feel it has when lightning is present. The sky was dark and clouds piled up in the west. I began to wonder if we could make it home in time.

We picked up our pace, I encouraged Copper with lots of “good boys” and “let’s get home” — and eventually (in what seemed like an eternity) we made it home.

I’d like to say we dashed in just before the big drops hit the pavement. But that wasn’t the way it worked. The storm blew over. Our mad dash was for naught.

The Accidental Calligrapher

The Accidental Calligrapher

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For the last couple of evenings I’ve been learning how to write. Yeah, I know. I’m supposed to be a writer already. But I have been learning to write, to form letters slowly and carefully, and it’s been alternately painful and exhilarating.

Through a series of events too long and complicated to explain I’ve been trying my hand at  calligraphy. At first I used a regular gel pen. Not good! Next an inexpensive ink-cartridge calligraphy pen I picked up at an office supply store. Better.

I’m not about to take up a new hobby, but I’ve been amazed at what a meditative process it is, especially for someone who makes a living from words. That I’m being forced to think about every stroke, every ascender and descender, the width and height and heft of each letter — is, in a strange sort of way, liberating.

It’s bringing me back to first principles. To the letters that form the words that carry the thoughts. It’s a cleansing of the mental palate, a reminder of how excruciating and precious each letter can be.

(Art: Modern Western Calligraphy, Denis Brown, 2006, courtesy Wikipedia)

Touch-Up

Touch-Up

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In the last couple of weeks I’ve been scraping, sanding and painting the deck furniture. It’s not fun, but it can take on a Zen-like rhythm after a while. Especially the painting. Brush in hand, heat building on a June morning, air buzzing with insect sounds, a lone frog in the background.

I wield the brush as lightly as possible in rubber-gloved hand. The first coat is thick, too thick. The second coat is semi-gloss — ah, much smoother — and shinier, too.

And it was the semi-gloss that I used yesterday to do the touch-ups. Which is, I have to say, my favorite part of the endeavor: inspecting, looking at the whole, spotting the little places that can be improved, and … improving them.

Maybe it’s satisfying because it’s a chance so seldom afforded us in life — this ability to go back and tweak ever-so-slightly the choices we made — just enough to make a difference.

Park Within a Park

Park Within a Park

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The Washington and Old Dominion Trail (W&OD) is a walker’s delight, a long skinny ribbon of asphalt through the D.C. ‘burbs. Its dimensions tell the tale: 45 miles long and 100 feet across!

“Share the trail” is the motto and the practice, and of course it is a good one. But the best way I’ve found to share the trail is to get off of it. My surface of choice is not the paved path but the horse trail that runs along beside it.

With a surface of cinders or dirt it’s easier on the joints. And it puts you even closer to the vegetation, to the sights and smells that are so vivid in high summer.

Most importantly it’s away from zooming cyclists, whose “passing on the left” grow a little old after the forty-fifth iteration.

Sometimes the horse trail runs right alongside the paved path and other times it meanders higher or lower. When there’s a bridge over a highway it doesn’t always take it.

The horse trail, in other words, has a mind of its own. It’s a placid alternative, a park within a park.