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Author: Anne Cassidy

Laughing in the Face of Winter

Laughing in the Face of Winter

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The best story I have about the weekend’s bitter cold weather happened as I was walking into the grocery store Sunday morning. I had dropped by after church to pick up bagels but was sorry I did. The parking lot was a sheet of ice, and the snow melt being tossed onto it by a earnest employee was being blown right back into the guy’s face.

Snow and ice bring out the little old lady in me. Instead of darting from one errand to another, which is my wont, I do a mincing two-step. My theory is simple: I would like to keep darting from one errand to another. I would like to avoid breaking my leg or wrist.

I was aware there were people behind me but I didn’t recognize them until I was walking in the door. It was the older woman and her son (son-in-law?) who had sat in the pew in front of me at church.

The woman seemed a bit remote during the service, but when a frigid gust struck her, she shouted “whoa” and then exploded with the most authentic, daring laugh. The temperature was in the single digits and she wore no hat or gloves; the 30-mile-per-hour wind was picking up the edges of her brown cape and tossing them around. But she treated the dangerous cold as a petty nuisance, a slightly unruly child. She laughed in the face of winter. She’s my new role model.

The Company of Writers (Again)

The Company of Writers (Again)

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I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. The company of writers is unlike the company of other folks.

Others may take issue with this, of course, may say it’s the company of actors or stamp-collectors or plumbers that does it for them. And they would be right. It’s the company of those with whom you feel an affinity. Or, to put it another way, writers are my people!

Take last night’s bunch. We talked of safety in university laboratories, the manufacturing of steel, a murder in Centropolis, Kansas, in 1905. One of us read poetry aloud, from a memoir penned in verse. Another passed around a coffee table book on the Chesapeake that was back in print after 20 years. Still another talked about her plan to bring computers to African kids.

I don’t mean to brag here, but writers have many interests. They ask good questions. They are curious. They are also endangered, now that book publishing is in free fall and newspapers and magazines are fading away. So we also traded frustrations, gripes, gallows humor.  But somehow the upshot of it all was overwhelmingly positive.

It was a cold, blustery night. I had worked 12 hours. I should have been exhausted.

I wasn’t.

The Science of Walking

The Science of Walking

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When I’m sluggish or stuck, when the ideas in my head have congealed into a hopeless mess, I take to the trail. Thoughts arrive as gifts, flowing from the rhythm of the stride and from the scenery I pass at the pace of footfall. When the brain stalls, the feet step in.

Seems like magic — and maybe it is. But it’s neuroscience, too.

Evidence is mounting that exercise is good for the brain, that it may even stave off Alzheimer’s. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, exercise not only triggers the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus but it also acts as “a kind of brain fertilizer, helping the brain to grow.”

The scientist Frederick Gage, says the Journal, has suggested that “new cells arise from long walks because, in an evolutionary sense, our bodies associate the exertion with moving from an existing territory, which had perhaps become depleted of food or too dangerous, to a new, unexplored territory whose details must be learned. In anticipation the brain releases new cells and growth factors, which create a more plastic state and make possible new neural connections.”

My exercised brain tells me he might be onto something.

Of Lions and Lambs

Of Lions and Lambs

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The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down
with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
and a little child shall lead them. 
Isaiah 11:6

 The program has been on my computer for a while, but I’m only just starting to learn it. InCopy works in tandem with the InDesign program. It protects design files while allowing editors to make changes directly in them.

While I don’t plan to do away with paper proofs, learning to make changes myself frees up the designers and guarantees more accuracy.  It means I won’t hesitate to remove the dash I just added in the last round of page proofs because I decided the comma was better after all.  It gives me a little more control.

More to the point, it brings words people and image people closer together. The lion may lie down with the lamb — which is how I thought the Bible verse read until about ten minutes ago, when I looked it up.

 

A Grisly Discovery

A Grisly Discovery

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I woke up this morning to the news that human bones had been found alongside a trail in my neighborhood. A walker noticed the bones on Sunday, called police, and yesterday the remains were tested and found to be human. That’s all we know for now.

I walk those trails all the time. We all do. Copper sniffs seemingly every tree and bush. Apparently he missed a spot.

The police have asked anyone with information to call. Here’s what I’d like to say: This is our safe, snug little corner of the world. Please let there be some logical and non-scary explanation for this. Please let our woods remain the quiet sanctuary they have always been. Please don’t let this happen here.

Double Feature

Double Feature

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When I was a kid you saw two movies for the price of one. Yesterday I two movies for the price of two — thanks to some felicitous timing at a gem of a small theater.

This place has smallish screens and no stadium seating — but four of the eight nominated feature films were playing there plus some selected shorts (which attract the die-hard fans).

What joy to find a good seat (on the right hand side two seats in), to snuggle down so my head was resting on the back, to stuff my windbreaker behind me for extra comfort — and then to enter the two fantasy worlds created on screen.

I left the movies as I always do, slightly stretched, slightly dazed, open to possibilities. A double feature is a short vacation.


(Photo: Courtesy Cinema Arts Theater)

Five Years Old

Five Years Old

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If it was a child it would be getting ready for kindergarten, grasping one of those fat pencils with a chubby fist.

If it was a dog it would finally be settling down, chewing fewer slippers, ruining fewer rugs.

If it was a house it would be settling into its foundation, growing into its lot, needing a fresh coat of paint on the trim.

But it is instead a blog, a body of work, an electronic oeuvre — and I’m not sure what it’s ready for, other than continuing.

I began A Walker in the Suburbs on February 7, 2010. Happy Birthday, blog!

Stayin’ Alive

Stayin’ Alive

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My soundtrack this morning is courtesy of our parakeets, Sid and Dominique, who chatter and chirp and sing. They are cheerful little creatures, supplying much entertainment. I could spend hours just watching them climb and preen and jump from one perch to the other.

The birds outside are just as busy. They flit and feed and hop along the deck railing. Right now a red-headed woodpecker is chipping away at the suet block. It’s vital protein for these chilly mornings. After he flies away, I spot a cardinal in the back of the yard, bending the forsythia branch with his tiny weight.

I turn my gaze back to the page. This is my work. Not as direct as the bird’s daily toil. But just the same — it’s what I do to stay alive.

(Photo: Claire Capehart)

Remembering Snowmaggedon

Remembering Snowmaggedon

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Five years ago today the first flakes flew in a storm called Snowmaggedon, which dumped close to three feet of snow here before it was done.  It was, next to a couple of rough Chicago winters, the most snow I had ever seen. It closed schools and offices and slowed life to a pioneer pace. It spurned removal; some neighborhoods weren’t plowed for a week.

Though grocery shelves were empty and some folks were climbing the walls by the time it was over, it was for me — and for many — the pause button I’d been waiting for.

There were long lazy hours for reading and writing, for making soup and baking rolls. Time for walking down the middle of a busy road because it was impassable for cars.  Time to start this blog.

It was, in short, the world upside down and white. Will it happen again? Not this year, from the looks of it. But the groundhog predicts six more weeks of winter. We can always hope.

Full Moon

Full Moon

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Perhaps we’re in the midst of a celestial spitting contest. Or maybe it’s compensation for a long, cold winter. (I know, I can’t complain about winter; I missed three weeks of it!)

But whatever it is we are enjoying not only glorious sunrises but also spectacular moon rises.

While some people spied last night’s orb orange on the horizon, I didn’t see it until I left the grocery store. It was big and white by then, surreal, disorienting. So outsize I mistook it at first for an earthbound thing, a construction light. But no, it was our dear old moon.

My last full moon was in Toura, Benin, on the edge of the Sahel, where it lit the village paths and huts. A moon there is a practical asset, a streetlight, a directional. The moon here is just another heavenly face. Good for the soul, which is good enough for me.