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Author: Anne Cassidy

Finding Time

Finding Time

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Walking is often a way for me to handle hard times by absorbing myself in activity, observation and rumination. Everything from real trials to an ordinary bad day can be smoothed and put in perspective by stretching the legs — and the imagination.

But what if time constraints take that walking time away? That’s what’s been happening recently. And, as is so often the case, the walking time is waning at the very time I need it most.

There’s only one thing to do, and that’s to pound the pavement as if my life depends upon it. Because, in a very real way, it does.

R.I.P., Robert E. Simon

R.I.P., Robert E. Simon

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Robert E. Simon, the founder of Reston, Virginia, died yesterday at the age of 101. Simon was a big thinker — and the big plan he had for the parcel of hunt-country land in western Fairfax County was that people should be able to live, work, shop and play all in the same place.

What held his vision together were the Reston Trails, lovely paved paths that wind their way from village cluster to village cluster, passing lakes and wetlands, woods and meadows.

The Reston Trails are my stomping ground. I’ve walked them for more than a quarter century now, walked them in all weathers and moods. I’ve pushed my babies in strollers on them and, later, watched my kids bicycle ahead of me on them, still wobbly but proud to be training-wheel-free. Now I walk them in this new phase of life, my children living their own lives away from home.

While I’ve used the paths to muse and find some quiet time, the point of Reston was actually just the opposite. “Community,” Simon is quoted as saying in an obituary in today’s Washington Post. “That word is the whole discussion. … I think having facilities
readily available for people of all kinds, from little kids to the
elderly — that’s the most important thing of all.”

(Lake Anne Plaza, Reston’s original village and the home of Robert E. Simon.) 

Ponds and Flow

Ponds and Flow

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Yesterday’s walk took me past a couple of ponds. One of them sports a new fountain, a spray of water that gives the old farm pond an aura of glamour and glitz.

But the explanation is far more humble. It’s to aerate the lagoon, to make it healthy, to remove the green slime that fouls the waters of the murky pond next door.

Airflow is not only healthy for humans; it’s good for water, too. So even though I preferred the pond in its still state, I’m glad to see it’s looking clear and scum-free.

Bubbles matter. Flow matters. For ponds and for people, too.

Mozart’s Jupiter

Mozart’s Jupiter

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Just back from a run with Mozart in my ears. Last movement of his last (41st, Jupiter) symphony. What a piece of music this is! Listen closely and you can hear the Romantic period bursting right through the Classical form, mowing down the guard rails with its energy and passion.

Bold, contrapuntal, complex — the sound comes from so many different directions that it feels like the inside of my head will explode, that my earphones must be smoking as I jog along sedate suburban lanes.

But they’re not, of course, and I try to maintain a poker face, offering no clue to the musical miracle taking place between my ears,  to the near dissonance at minutes 5:40 and 8:40, to what some describe as a “cosmic” coda.

Instead, I exert every effort not to air-conduct as Mozart carries me surely from the first clean melody all the way to the exuberant and triumphant finale. Every time I listen I’m enlarged, calmed, emboldened, amazed.

Spun-Gold September

Spun-Gold September

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How quickly we embrace perfection and come to expect it. I’m talking about this week’s weather. Cool nights for open-window sleeping. Light-sweater mornings.  Days that start with enough coolness to refresh but that warm up nicely by noontime.

These days give us stability, they give us versatility (we can wear skirts or trousers, shorts or jeans), they give us perfect temperatures for walking, sleeping and waking.

The funny thing is how quickly we get used to them — or at least I do. Oh yes, another day in paradise.

So I’m trying to appreciate every spun-gold September day.  Even if I’m stuck inside for all of them.

Urban Obstacle Course

Urban Obstacle Course

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My one-mile walk to Metro in the afternoon is a study in pedestrian behavior. I became interested in this when I lived in New York, where a rush-hour stroll down Fifth Avenue can be an exercise in start-and-stop frustration.

There are fewer people on D.C. streets but sidewalks can be narrower and walkers slower. So at 5:30 p.m. I must still employ some of the skills I learned in New York: looking for openings in a crowd, gauging the approach of the walker ahead of me, looking down at crucial moments so as not to engage in one of those awkward dances where no one knows whether to go left or right.

If everything works according to plan, I can make it from my office to Metro Center in the same time it would take on the subway.  This produces a lot of satisfaction, some welcome weariness and a renewed appreciation of pedestrian flow.

It’s an urban obstacle course, completed for the day.

Alarmed Dreams

Alarmed Dreams

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Lately I’ve been sparing myself one of life’s annoyances — I’ve not been setting the alarm. This is because I wake early anyway and must be at the office late. But this morning I was back to the familiar insistent beeping. An early dental appointment requires the utmost punctuality.

One difference between non-alarmed and alarmed wake-ups is that dreams seem closer to the surface with the latter. This morning’s was, ironically, that I had missed the very dental appointment I woke up early for. There was no real reason supplied, just inertia, lack of interest — which, if you’re going to miss a dental appointment is an excellent reason to do so — but my subconscious was not buying it.

So here I am, still groggy, needing to leave in half an hour. Because if I don’t, my dream will come true. And not in a good way.

Cicadas in the City

Cicadas in the City

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Out the door and down New Jersey Avenue. The familiar arching trees shade the hotel and taxi stand. The Capitol lies ahead; its scaffolding gleams in the noonday sun.

I run for every light, avoid the waits, move as much as possible. It’s the pace that does it, I think — a steady cadence does much to loosen the joints and free up the mind. But scenery helps also, and yesterday’s was perfect. Blue skies, cicadas still singing, all the bustle of early September.

For many years I mourned New York City. Washington, D.C., could never measure up in quirkiness or energy or street life. But in the last several years I’ve mellowed to D.C. I appreciate the cicadas, for instance, and the tall trees that shelter them. Their crescendo is the sound of hot southern cities, a sound that says slow down. No one heeds it, of course, but at least it’s there, mixed in with car horns and sirens.

High Season

High Season

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This is the high season for trail walking. Chilly mornings give way to warm, dry afternoons. The air has a freshness to it, which energizes and motivates. It pushes us up and out, makes us move even when we don’t much feel like it.

I feel like trail-walking this morning but new responsibilities have me in the office today. If I’m lucky I’ll pound some pavement at lunchtime, and that will energize and motivate in a different way.

But for now I’ll dream of a clearing in the forest, a hard-packed path winding out from it, oaks and maples and hickories arching over browning ferns and reddening blackgum. The trail won’t yet be covered but there will be enough leaves to provide a crunch when I walk. A soundtrack for the stroll.

Time, Place and Prairie

Time, Place and Prairie

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Last weekend at the National Book Festival, author Marilynne Robinson said some things about time and place that I’m still thinking about.

On time: She sets her books 40 to 50 years in the past, she says, because she likes to write about a period when people had less access to each other, more privacy; when they couldn’t always be reached. “I think it made people think differently,” she said. “I like people who think long thoughts.”

On space: A native of the East, the Berkshires, Robinson had to learn to read the landscape of the Midwest. “I find the prairie very beautiful,” she said. But there was was not an automatic affinity. “I wanted my soul to love the landscape.”

In time, she said, it did.

Time for place. And a place that grants time.