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Author: Anne Cassidy

College Tour

College Tour

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It’s been four years since we did this the last time.

Four years since we sat in a darkened auditorium and listened to an admissions director discuss interdisciplinary learning.

Four years since we were last told how to submit a FAFSA.

Four years (or almost that; we did one brief tour this spring and another this summer) since we sauntered through a college campus following a student ambassador who has mastered the art of  walking backward.

Four years, which seems like no time at all — except that a wispy 13-year-old has become a willowy 17-year-old. And we are embarking on our last few college tours.

Now we’re the ones who understand the difference between early decision and early action. We’re the application veterans, with the battle scars to prove it.

But there’s one thing we haven’t mastered yet — and that is saying goodbye. 

Half Marathon

Half Marathon

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The rain started early this morning, right when Claire was beginning her first half marathon. The sprinkles turned to drops and the temperature hovered in the upper 40s. Runners passed us wearing only shorts and singlets, their flesh reddened by cold. Some ran in jackets, others in spandex tights.

We found a viewing spot at Mile 11, right before a hill, and listened as one enthusiastic spectator cheered the racers with “You’re waaaay past half way.” 

“I heard you before,” some of them said, smiling and laughing and ever so slightly picking up their pace.

Finally, we saw Claire, Number 658. Though she’s only been running for a few months, she was in fine form, bouncing along as if the rain and the run weren’t fazing her. We cheered, she gave us a quick hug and ran off to tackle the last two miles.

Funny thing, she said later — the spot we picked to stand was right where she needed us most. 

One State

One State

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As I drive east today I’ll be thinking how if I were making this trek 221 years ago I would not be traveling through three states, but through one. Kentucky was part of Virginia until 1792.

Now these states are separate. But once they were part of the same large region that stretched from the ocean to the “first west.” One were their hills and valleys, one their rivers and streams. The mountain range that divides them was shared.

Yesterday I drove the back roads of the Bluegrass, hopping out of the car often to stick my camera between gate bars, snap photographs and, sometimes, just to sigh.

Once these two places, these two important places, these two poles of my heart — once they were one.

Old School

Old School

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I live nowhere near the scenes of my childhood, haven’t grown into middle age in the land of my youth and young adulthood, so returning there can make me dizzy.

Yesterday we stopped at Magee’s Bakery for cheese danish and sat across from my old high school, now defanged, serving as a county education building. I found the windows of my algebra 2 classroom, remembered Baldy Gelb, football coach and math teacher, could almost see the chalk dust motes floating in the air.

It was a long time ago, of course, but looking at that brick building (how can it sit there so placidly? what happened to all the adolescent angst?),  I felt that I could have reached out and opened the door to that classroom, found my seat and struggled with a quadratic equation. 

After the Rain

After the Rain

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I could tell the difference before I reached the first dip in the road. A day earlier I had misjudged, found myself trudging through rain, my socks damp, my hair wet. But yesterday, I stepped into a drenched clean world.

On my way, an empty mail truck. An early lunch for the carrier? We on his leeward side were still waiting, but those whose letters had arrived were slowly shuffling to their mailboxes, sweaters pulled tight, suspicious glances at the sky.

In the new section of the neighborhood a worker swept the wet street in front of a construction site. He seemed only to be moving mud, but he greeted me cheerily.

Down at the corner the cars zoomed by, as they always do, and the dying sycamore dropped its leaves. The rain came too late for that poor tree. And the big white house that was abandoned for so long, it still looked abandoned, even though someone seems to be living in the place. So a good soaking doesn’t solve everything, but it did put a spring in my step.

On the way home, I waved at the cars I passed. People do that here.

Moonset

Moonset

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On my drive west Saturday I followed the moon as it slid slowly toward the horizon. It was a beacon for the early hours of my trip, the ones I struggle with most because it’s dark and I’m tired and the steaming mug of tea has cooled and there are hours to go before I enter the Bluegrass state.

But the moon was dramatic in its slantwise trip, thanks to its full state and to the banks of clouds that colored in its wake. It seemed even larger as it reached the horizon. Big and glorious and sun-like in its setting. A full moon can mimic the sun much better than a half or a crescent.

I realized, though, as I admired the moonset, how sun-centric I am, how I compare the satellite unfairly with the star.  The moon has its own motions and missions and poetry.

I missed the moonset’s final moments, because by then I was driving south through the Shenandoah Valley and the western sky was hidden from view.  But it was there when I needed it most.

(A partial-moon moonset viewed from our house.)

The Concert

The Concert

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The tickets were a gift, generous and unbidden, and so the concert was, too. It had been a while since I sat in a hall while music poured over me, and I had forgotten how exciting it can be. Even the preliminaries: A rush to find parking in the limpid early evening, a parade of evening-dressed concertgoers entering the hall, taking a seat quickly before the lights dimmed.

The featured performer was Itzhak Perlman, and Lexington audiences are not used to having him around. The applause was loud and sustained — even before he began to play. But then — ahh — he did, and there was that familiar, charged concert stillness, and the violin singing out over it, taking us along.

 Perlman hunched over this violin, seemingly at one with it, and when he finished the opening section of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, he used the fingers of his right hand, slightly cupped, to gesture “come here, come here,” to the first violin section, asking them for more, for a swell of sound to answer his lone voice. And they responded, this student orchestra that was most definitely not the New York or Vienna Philharmonic but which, last night, must have felt, just for a moment, like it was.

When the last notes sounded, the audience jumped to its feet.

30 Days

30 Days

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And so we come to the end of September. Evenings are chilly; birds are still. The equinox has come and gone. Warmth is no longer something to be feared but something to be coaxed and welcomed. We start at brisk and work our way to warm. Only at the end of a golden, blue-sky afternoon are we there: a perfect, spun-gold, fall day.

Thirty days hath September.

Is there no way to wrangle a few more?

Vote of Confidence

Vote of Confidence

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It’s no secret that the printed book is under siege, that newspapers and magazines are ceasing publication or becoming online only, that information delivery is being revolutionized before our (increasingly blurry) eyes. Any doubts the Kindle may have left behind, the iPad is dispelling.

Which made reading the following all the more delightful: “The book is like the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be bettered,” according to author Umberto Eco in a new book about the book called (appropriately and straightforwardly) This is Not the End of the Book.

The book, which was reviewed today by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, is essentially a conversation between Eco and French screenwriter and bibliophile Jean-Claude Carriere. The Internet gives us “gross information, with almost no sense of order or hierarchy,” Carriere says. “As soon as you click on the next page you forget what you’ve just read,” Eco says.

And I thought it was just me. I flipped through Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending the other day and could summon almost no memory of reading it, despite the fact that I definitely did read it earlier this year — though, it must be noted, on a Kindle.

I’ve written about this before, and probably will again (and again and again). But reading this review (and, I hope soon, the book itself) made me feel less alone in my Luddite ways. Maybe the codex isn’t really in danger. Maybe the book really will survive. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Slow Start

Slow Start

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Sometimes the day starts slow and and will not move faster. Time to enjoy the many small steps that take me down a city block, the rising sun that reddens office windows, the man who walks ahead of me, a picture of the bureaucrat, black pants, blue long-sleeved shirt, the closure of a lanyard peaking out from his back collar.

On a slow day I savor details I might otherwise miss. The freedom of the lone cyclist pedaling one of the new red bikes you can rent and ride. The swagger of a young woman who has mastered the art of scarf wearing. The caffeinated chatter of a couple leaving Starbucks. The quiet diligence of the man hosing the sidewalk in front of the building next to mine.

The pavement smells fresh after this cleaning.

It’s a new day.

What I did not see on my walk this morning.