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Author: Anne Cassidy

See Something; Say Something

See Something; Say Something

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Yesterday I didn’t take my usual walk around the Capitol. And it’s a good thing I didn’t. A man brandished a gun at the Capitol Visitors Center and was shot by police. A bystander was reportedly hit as well, and the whole complex was put on lock down.

I wonder if I’ll take that walk again. Will I vary the route? Go another direction entirely? 

A crazy world is a limited world. It’s a world of fences and walls and bollards; of keeping things at a distance. It’s a world of “see something, say something,” a message I hear repeated on the Metro approximately once every four minutes.

Most of all, it’s a world of suspicion and distrust and fear. It’s not an especially pleasant world — but it’s the only one we have right now.

Early Rising

Early Rising

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The story is the same, but each year has its revelation. This year’s was something I’ve noticed before but not with as much intensity:

On the first day of the week,
Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning,
while it was still dark, 
and saw the stone removed from the stone.

 “Early in the morning.” “While it was still dark.” Of course!  She was up in the wee hours tending to those who needed her. It’s how most women I know make everything work, by getting a head start on the day.

I no longer juggle a job with young children, but I’m always trying to balance competing duties, to find time not just for the work for which I’m paid but the work for which I’m not. Time for family and friends; for shopping, cooking and cleaning; for emails and phone calls; for connection and solitude.

The early morning hours are my ally in this quest. They are the great elastic clause. They are when I catch up with others — and with myself.  

Lightness of Spring

Lightness of Spring

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Walked out of the office into a perfect early spring afternoon. Jackets slung over shoulders. Tourists everywhere. A long weekend beckoning.

I was exhausted at my desk but quickly readjusted outside. There was a destination, a goal: the Tidal Basin, the cherry blossoms.

It was crowded, as usual. Picnickers, strollers, photographers, all with separate purposes but one mission — to celebrate spring. I thought then as I often do how the walker can take heart from the people she passes — some just coming alive to the world, others happy just to be in it.

I had forgotten the lightness one could have — not just in the air but in the heart.

Pipe and Drape

Pipe and Drape

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We are all aflutter because Vice President Joe Biden is speaking here in a few hours. Preparations have been underway since late last week, and after a sneak peak at the venue upstairs I can say … what a transformation.

The primary agent of change is what is described in events planning lingo as “pipe and drape.” Tall velvet panels — in a lovely, rich, presidential blue — hang all along the room and route. They both soften and ennoble the place.

Instead of being crammed with students sharing outlines, discussing torts, sipping coffee, the room is now filled with black chairs in neat rows. In the back, camera crews are setting up shop. Every department — events, facilities, audio visual, communications, public safety — is doing its part to make sure the speech goes off without a hitch.

We have become a stage set, an empty theater waiting for its star.

What to Wear

What to Wear

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These are the crazy first days of spring, capricious and erratic. The thermometer appears to be broken, so profoundly do its readings vary from morning till night. All we can do is hang on.

That — and figure out what to wear. Should we dress for morning or for afternoon? Or more precisely, should we be comfortable at 6 a.m. and sticky at 4? Or the other way around?

For me, it’s the former every time.  I’ll wear a turtleneck even though it’s going up to 70. But when I walk out the door and feel the first cold blast of 30-something-degree air, I’ll pull the sweater up to my chin and luxuriate in its warmth.

Building Stuff

Building Stuff

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I work in a law school. Every day I use words to build articles, web stories, press releases and emails. The work I do is achieved with a click, a flick of the wrist.

Meanwhile, a block away, guys are roofing a major highway. For more than a year they’ve been moving utility lines and driving pillars into the ground. Now they’re using a giant crane to hoist huge  steel beams. Eventually, they will entunnel this stretch of I-395 and build a small neighborhood on top of it.

And I — I will continue building towers of words, the sometime dwelling place of ideas but often just ephemeral constructs that vanish the moment they’re sent.

Reading the World

Reading the World

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For the last decade or so I’ve been writing down in the back pages of my journal the author and title of each book I read. This makes, if not for a perfect list (scattered as it is among a bunch of well-worn black books), at least a start at a disjointed one. A year or so ago I began to annotate the list, jot down a detail or two that would help me identify the book without googling the darn thing.

Which is all to say that reading is one of my pillars, one of the things I need to do in order to feel, well, right about the world. And the book I’m reading now offers an explanation for why reading is so important.

In The World Between Two Covers, author Ann Morgan writes of books’ “transformative” effect, in particular the chemistry between reader and writer, how the reader completes and embellishes the words on the page.

“As co-architects of a book’s imaginary universe,” she writes, “we do not merely register the events of a story: we create and feel them too. They are ours even as they are the author’s, and without us they would not exist exactly as they are.”

What else could explain the thoughts exploding in my head when I read Middlemarch or  The Great Gatsby or another favorite? What else could explain the wonder and the addiction?

The World Between Two Covers describes Morgan’s year of reading books from all 195 U.N. recognized countries. But the title also gets at the miracle of reading itself. From one minds, many; and from many minds, one.

Empty Trail

Empty Trail

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Yesterday I walked on the Washington and Old Dominion trail, a long ribbon of asphalt that runs from the inner suburbs to the foothills of the Blue Ridge. It was a fine spring afternoon, trees bursting pink and white, birds flitting from branch to post.

Bikers zoomed by. “Passing on the left.” So many of them that I moved to the narrow gravel shoulder. “Share the trail,” the signs said. This felt less like sharing and more like abandoning. I walked quickly — and not just for exercise. It was scary out there.

Two weeks ago I moseyed along the same stretch of path. It was still winter and I had the trail to myself. Yesterday I longed to be back in that gray afternoon, warming myself up on an empty trail.

Way Back When

Way Back When

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The message went out last night after 9, and by early this morning the replies were pouring in. Would we, the members of Henry Clay High School, class of 19__ (that’s the only part of my graduating class year I’m revealing), like to meet at a classmate’s farm some late September Saturday?

It’s a five-year rather than a 10-year mark for us. But we’ve lost a couple of people since last time and, as the organizer said, “We’re not getting any younger, folks. And there’s something important about being with people we knew way back when.”

There is. Surprisingly so.

What I mostly felt in high school was how much I wanted to get out of it. But the memories now are clearer than most: The way the light came in through the tall windows of Baldy Gelb’s math classroom. (He was Coach Gelb — which may have accounted for the prime real estate.) Or the day Mrs. Ahrens’ student teacher suggested we start keeping a journal. (I’ve never stopped.)

In other words, these were years that mattered. And people who matter still.

Erin Go Bragh!

Erin Go Bragh!

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Our Irish name came from Dad, but our Irish identity came from Mom. She was proud to say she had as much Irish blood in her veins as someone from the old sod. And as a matter of fact, she did — she hailed from three generations of inbred Irish stock.

Long before everyone wore green to celebrate the day, Mom would pin a ittle velour shamrock on my school uniform (which was, conveniently, a green plaid). I was the only one of my friends who wore such a thing. (And this in a school of Bryants and Welches.)

But it got the point across: We were Irish — we were passionate people, impractical people, people with heart. We loved a good tune, though not so much a good pint. We loved the green hills and  fields of Ireland; we liked to think we embodied its soul.

Later on, I would learn that had we some of the less attractive traits of the island nation: a certain clannishness and suspicion. We would live through a punishing family feud.

But still, on St. Patrick’s Day, and especially on this one — the first without Mom — I raise my glass to the spirit of the place we came from. Erin go Bragh!