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Author: Anne Cassidy

For Beethoven: One Day Late

For Beethoven: One Day Late

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His birthday was yesterday but I’m thinking about him today. Remembering the Beethoven extravaganza on the radio: the measured cadences of the Seventh Symphony’s second movement (the one popularized in the film “The King’s Speech”), the off-stage trumpet of the Leonore Overture No. 3, the slow movement of the Third Piano Concerto. 

Years ago, on a shoestring student trip to Europe, I drug my friend Nancy into at least a half-dozen decrepit Viennese apartment buildings, each one of them places the composer was believed to have  lived. They were not pretty or in a nice part of town. They were often up a flight or two of poorly lit stairs. They made clear that Beethoven’s personal life was unsettled and on the edge.

But yesterday these places were the furthest thing from my mind. What remains of Beethoven, of course, is the music — timeless, placeless, soaring above it all.

Light from Inside

Light from Inside

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A gray morning. I turn on the tree lights early. I sit and work beside the fir.

At first it distracts me, so many ornaments have stories. And even the shape of the tree this year — a widened base, giving it a solid, grounded feel — draws my gaze.

But I strengthen my resolve. I will myself to see it only from the corner of an eye.  To work beside it, to let its presence spur and not derail the day.

Less than a week until solstice; the light must come from inside.

Wreathed Whimsy

Wreathed Whimsy

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Some people put wreaths on their car; they deck the wheels instead of the halls. There was a time in my life — the “Carpool Years” — when that would have made sense.

For the most part, it makes sense to wreathe a stationary object — a door, a window, a lamppost.

The other day on my way to work I noticed a tall, dead tree with an equally dead branch all decked out with a, well, dead wreath.  Dead only in the sense that it was fashioned of clipped boughs. It was still fresh and green. And it made me smile at 7 a.m.

Here on our street a neighbor has wreathed her mailbox. At night it glows.

Wreathed whimsy — ’tis the season.

The Transcriptionist

The Transcriptionist

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My work these days calls for lots of interviewing — which in turn entails plenty of transcribing. While I’ve adapted to many new technologies, my taping equipment is decidedly non-digital.  I transcribe interviews as I always have, slowly and labor intensively, with many hits of “pause” and “rewind.”

This gives me time to ruminate on the human voice, on the pitch and timbre of it, and mostly on the pace of it.

Some reflective souls, bless their hearts, speak so slowly that my typing can keep up with them. Those conversations are a cinch to get down on paper.  Other subjects — I call them fast-talkers — are fun to interview but a nightmare to transcribe. They chatter, they enthuse, they barely pause. An hour with them takes four or five hours to capture.

Best of all are the conversations that seem opaque in real time but in transcription reveal a deeper, richer undertone. Makes me wish for a more all-encompassing rewind button — a replay for life, I guess you’d say. What would I choose to listen to again?

Needlework

Needlework

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The other day I sat in on a preview of a Supreme Court oral argument, a job perk as unique as the program it represents. I’m bound by confidentiality to say nothing of what I heard — but that’s not what I want to write about anyway.

I want to write about needlework. I want to write about the woman who sat beside me for two hours, and as complex legal arguments flew across the room — a room designed to look exactly
like the real Supreme Court, right down to the color of the drapes, the
style of the clock and the pattern of the carpet — her fingers flew, too.

She was knitting a sweater of warm burgundy wool, cable stitch. And every time my eyes would glaze over with strategies and counter-strategies, I would glance down at her hands, the surety of every knit and perl. I watched the sweater as it grew. Work of the hands, not of the head.

It was precious time for the petitioner, taking his strategies out for a test drive just days before facing the black-robed justices themselves. But it was precious time for the knitter, too, for the sweater that advanced several rows that morning — and for the person who will be wearing it soon.

White World Shining

White World Shining

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Yesterday’s walk took me past evergreens with fondant-icing snow caps and bent
trees aching with ice but still lovely in their brokenness. In the sky was a
wan half moon with V’s of blackbirds flying.
Nature consoles even as it wounds. The forest so deep and
white, the trees glimmering in the sun that appeared late enough in the day that I had already resigned myself to snow, fog and cloud cover.
But shine it did, and I had no choice but to pause in my shoveling and writing and editing and  telephoning  — pause to see the white world shining.
Snow on Ice

Snow on Ice

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Yesterday morning we woke to a frozen world, each bough and twig coated and gleaming. By 1 p.m. it was 33 degrees, and I could slide to the corner, where the pavement was wet but not icy. I could run the main road, could see how many trees were damaged during the storm.

Ice is beautiful but dangerous. How much would we pay for such beauty? Not another red oak, that’s for sure — but some bent bamboo stalks, I would gladly trade those to walk through such a strange, glittering, dripping world.

A new day now and fresh snow is falling. We have several inches on the ground and, more to the point, a heavy layer on every branch, bough and twig. It’s no longer a hard, bright, frozen world,  it’s a soft, white, feathery one.

But I know the ice that lurks beneath.

Running with Children

Running with Children

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The flakes started flying before the race started. That would be the 5K Run with Santa — the first race I’ve run in, well, let’s just say it’s been a few years!

A little over three miles — doable, even for a walker in the suburbs. But my already conservative pace was slowed even further by the slick spots on the road. Luckily, my running buddy was Claire, whose last race was the Marine Corps Marathon but who matched her cadence to her timid mama’s.

Timid was putting it mildly. I worried the whole time about wiping out, ending the race on crutches or worse. One middle-aged woman went down within the first few minutes. “Don’t worry, Mom,” Claire said. “She just ran into a cone.”

The last few tenths of a mile, though, the pavement was wet, not snowy, and Claire and I kicked it in and dashed (sort of) to the finish line.

Children do many things for their parents (as parents do for their children). They care for us, make us laugh and introduce us to the future. Yesterday I was thinking how they make us face our fears. We will do things for them we don’t do for anyone else. And in that sense, they keep us young — they keep us, quite literally, in the running. 

Pearl Harbor Day

Pearl Harbor Day

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Today is the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but for people much younger than I am, it’s simply December 7. September 11, 2001, pretty much took care of what time and attrition hadn’t already.

This is not altogether a bad thing. How many days of infamy should one year hold?

But because my father is a World War II veteran, and because I shared his pain recently when a nurse at the VA Hospital had no idea what “D Day” meant, I feel some sadness as Pearl Harbor Day vanishes from the collective memory.

At least this shouldn’t happen until everyone directly affected by it is gone. That’s not the way it is, I know, especially as our national attention span grows shorter by the day. But that’s the way it ought to be.

Virtual Recall

Virtual Recall

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I’ve now read half a dozen or so books on my Kindle and the verdict (for me, at least) is in. While my book recall is poor enough with ink-on-paper tomes, it is almost nonexistent with the electronic product.

Night before last, at my book group’s annual book-picking, my friend Gwen proposed The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Oh, that’s lovely, I said. And it was. I remember that much.

“What’s it about?” Marianne asked.

I pondered, I reached way back into the dim recesses of memory (nine months?) and … came up with nothing. Only that it was lovely and I enjoyed it.

Luckily, my book group friends totally understood. They have also experienced “Kindle Brain.” In fact, just a few minutes later, someone would propose a book we already read — and it would take us half an hour to notice it.

Thank God it was a book I’d read in hard copy. Had it been electronic I would be re-reading it now.