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Author: Anne Cassidy

Sleep Week

Sleep Week

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It is with no irony — only earnest good intentions — that the National Sleep Foundation has set aside this week, March 2-9, as National Sleep Awareness Week.

The irony, for me, comes from the fact that this coming Sunday we “spring forward” into daylight savings time, losing a crucial nighttime hour. It’s a lost hour I notice mightily, since I live on the edge of sleep stability.

But no, the professionals say, this is exactly when you should be doubling down on best bedtime practices — sticking to a sleep-wake routine, exercising daily, avoiding naps, creating a cool, dark, comfortable sleep environment.

What happens when you do all these things and still wake up at 4 a.m.? It’s hard to find much on the National Sleep Foundation website about that. But I have some ideas.

Reading, writing — even blogging, perhaps?  There are worse things.

Season of Growth

Season of Growth

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Lent is late this year. Like spring, it is taking its time. But today is Ash Wednesday, so the 40 days have begun, the ecclesiastical season that prepares us for Easter with prayer, fasting and contemplation.

Somewhere along the way — it’s been a few years ago now — I learned that “Lent” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word “lencten,” meaning spring. The days are lengthening. It’s harder to appreciate this when Ash Wednesday falls on February 13, as it did last year.

But this year it arrives on March 5. It’s light outside as I type these words. And I decide to approach the season with less dread and more optimism. A bit more like Advent. As a moving toward rather than a dredging down. As a season of growth rather than self-denial.

Best Picture

Best Picture

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Academy members look not as much for “feel-good” movies, critic Ann Hornaday wrote in a recent Washington Post article — but for “feel-deeply” movies. These are the films that become “Best Picture.”

Not always, but sometimes. This year, yes.

I had seen almost all  the nominated films by the time I made my way to “12 Years.” I’d hesitated at first, heard it was hard to watch — and it was. But when the film ended and I walked, half-dazed, out of the theater that cold gray Saturday, I felt emptied and re-filled. It was the kind of movie experience you have once or twice a year, if you’re lucky.

It was a reminder that nothing beats superb acting and straight story-telling, building to a powerful conclusion. It was a true catharsis – for the main character and for the movie-goers who took the journey with him.

(Taken last year at one of the great old theaters.)

Tap Happy

Tap Happy

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Years ago, when I lived in Manhattan, I drug some friends to 34th Street, where a record number of tappers were dancing along the pot-holed streets in front of Macy’s. I remember wanting to join in.

It’s taken several decades, but yesterday my feet were two among 80 others with metal-plated shoes flapping, slapping, digging, brushing,
scuffing, shuffling — tapping away. The sound alone altered reality.

Add to that the hopping and twirling, the sheer exhilaration of moving the body through choreographed steps in unison — and fortissimo — and, well, it’s impossible not to be happy when tapping.

It’s been almost six months since I started taking dance lessons. Life hasn’t been especially easy since then. But tapping has been.

(Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and the late Shirley Temple in the famous stairway tap-dancing scene from “The Little Colonel.” Photo: Cinewiki.)

Trudging On

Trudging On

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March has never been one of my favorite months. But this year I approach it with a fair amount of gratitude. Gratitude and wariness.

I’m grateful we’re in a month of longer days and shorter nights. Glad to see the spring birds crowd the feeder. Encouraged by the warm sun on my face, by the halfhearted witch hazel and the tentative green shoots of the daffodil.

I’m wary, too, though. March is fickle. March is proud. March likes to keep you guessing. And indeed, we frolic this weekend under threat of a winter storm Sunday night into Monday. Predictions are we’ll see our coldest temps of the winter on Tuesday morning. That’s Tuesday, March 4.

What’s a walker to do?

Pull on the coat, the gloves, the ear-warmers; find the sunniest music possible — and trudge into the wind.

Seven!

Seven!

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A quick glimpse back at older posts today to make sure I hadn’t written another called “Seven.” And  I haven’t. “Seven Times Seven.” “Mornings at Seven.” But not just “Seven.” So here we go.

Seven is not the time, though close; it’s 7:40 this instant. Seven is not the number of days or weeks or months until something important happens.

Seven is the temperature outside. Seven, which divides evenly into 28, which is today’s date. February 28. Almost March. And it’s seven.

I will say no more.

Flight

Flight

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I’ve flown more in the last year than I have in the previous three combined. I’m not jetting off to exotic locales, but riding regional jets to places like Charlotte and Chicago en route to Lexington.

While the experience is still impressive — the roar of engines, the compression of space and time, the glide through clouds — there is, as any frequent flier knows, much to dislike about modern air travel. The last trip to Kentucky brought several of these to the fore: the crowding, the delays, the crazy and demeaning check-in process. Sometimes you have to remove your shoes and sometimes you don’t. Why is that?

All this is to say that the other day, as I watched a jet stream in the sky, I was ready to start rhapsodizing about the freedom of flight, being above the clouds, the amazement of it all. Then I remembered Monday evening in Chicago — a couple hundred people waiting on a single flight attendant. Or the delay a few weeks ago in Lexington when the airport ran out of de-icing fluid.

Suddenly, I was back in 11 B, knees knocking up against the seat in front of me, stomach churning, certain we would never, ever reach O’Hare Airport.

Next time I glimpse a plane in flight, I’ll imagine the people inside, legs cramped, palms sweating, heads aching. It may seem they’ve “slipped the surly bonds of earth” … but they haven’t.

The Top Button

The Top Button

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Slogging through snow on my way to work this morning, burrowing my chin deeper into my soft, warm and utterly indispensable purple-and-blue patterned wool scarf, I paused for a moment to appreciate an essential item — the top button of my winter coat.

It’s a wool coat, aubergine, medium-lined, not the uber-heavy long black number I wore in New York. This is the coat of a suburban commuter, exposed to the elements in moderate doses. It’s a coat that’s been pushed to its outer limits this year.

And nowhere has it been pushed more than its big, top, purple button. This is the lynchpin, what keeps me going, what ensures that the scarf is up tight around the neck, what anchors the ample  collar that can be turned up to keep the cold breezes at bay.

Since I like a lot of scarf between my neck and the elements, the button is pushed to its limits. Every time I fasten it, I think, it’s bound to give way soon and — horror of horrors — I’ll actually have to do some sewing.

But so far, it holds. I cinch my belt tighter, zip up my boots, trudge to Metro — and remind myself that spring is right around the corner.

The Playlist

The Playlist

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I remember when the girls made them. Or when their friends
did and gave them as gifts. I’d find them all over the house, compact discs of
indeterminate vintage, with titles like “Pump Up” or “Race Day” written in
marker ink.
 I came late to the playlist, the homemade CD; came late to
the careful choice of music, to plotting it out in my mind before putting it
together. To walking with it, seeing how it flows, then tinkering some more and
burning it to a disc.
But once I did, I began to see the value of it. The playlist
reveals both the giver and the recipient; it shares what can’t be touched or
seen but must be felt. It is the gift of music, of course, but more than that.
It is music personalized. 
You don’t give a playlist to just anyone — just as you don’t knit a sweater for a stranger. There is an implied intimacy there, an understanding of interest, an appreciation of taste.
I came late to the playlist, to seeing it as an act of love.
But that’s what it is.
A Dusting of Snow

A Dusting of Snow

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A dusting of snow. That’s something we’ve heard this winter — because along with the foot-plus of the white stuff “Snochi” brought us — and the two inches or six inches or (add your total here) we received in December, January and February, we’ve also had our fair share of dustings.

It’s hard not to think of confectioner’s sugar in these instances, sifting it onto a pound cake or sheet cake or, as I’ve done once or twice when ambitious, stenciling a design of powdered sugar.

The snow-dusted yard is still itself. The tufted grass, the untended garden, the fallen log, the bare patches — these are not obliterated as with heavier snow fall. They are highlighted, accentuated.

But they are also beautified. In all their imperfections.