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Author: Anne Cassidy

House Dress

House Dress

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The house dress was a shapeless garment worn by grandmothers and great aunts. Simple cotton frocks in floral prints, they were what women wore when they didn’t plan on going out, when the chores of the day kept them inside, when they would never consider wearing pants.

I heard a radio report the other day on the evolution of the modern home that included this numbing statistic: In the 1920s, the average woman spent about five hours a day in the kitchen. A house dress must have been comfortable attire for scouring the oven, baking bread or running clothes through a wringer. Shapeless and liberating. No girdle required.

No woman I know wears a house dress now, unless you count some modern iterations that have little in common with their frumpy forebears. But I haven’t been home five minutes when I run upstairs, slip out of my blazer and trousers and pull on my sweatpants and sweatshirt. Comfortable and shapeless, perfect for cooking, cleaning or doing nothing, they are my house dress.

The Confession App

The Confession App

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I’d thought about another post for today, but then my eyes fell on this headline:
“‘Bless me, Father’
Going to confession? There’s an app for that.”

Apparently there is an new iPhone application that allows for a customizable examination of conscience. Don’t remember your sins? Can’t recall the Third Commandment? No problem. Just whip out your cell phone and it will walk you through the process.

It works like this: You enter your name, age, sex, vocation and date of last confession (I imagine that one is key) and the program takes it from there. The program provides three versions of the Act of Contrition, the prayer you say after receiving the sacrament, including one in Latin. (Venn diagram assignment: Map iPhone users with those who say their prayers in Latin. Hmmm.)

The device also acts as a digital notebook where you can jot down sins as you remember them. Of course, privacy is guaranteed. “Once you go to confession, all that information is wiped out,” said one of the designers.

I think back to my first confession at age seven: my head swimming, clammy palms, the close smell of the confessional, the ominous sliding sound that meant the grate was open and my confession could begin, so nervous I could barely eke out the words, “Bless me father, for I have sinned.”

Perhaps I was born a few decades too soon.

Perpetual Student

Perpetual Student

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Last night I went to a high school “electives fair” and chatted with teachers about psychology, marketing, journalism and more. Celia had visited the fair earlier and emerged with her own favorites (philosophy!). The number of offerings and the sophistication of the classes is further proof that high school is not what it used to be.

My high school electives included orchestra and a semester of typing (the latter a most essential, useful class). I had to wait to college to study philosophy, psychology and journalism. Who’s to say which is the better model.

All I know is that wandering around the cafeteria, picking up class descriptions and reading syllabuses made me want to go back to school — not high school, but college. Nothing jump-starts a brain better than a reading list and a looming final.

A Dream in Winter

A Dream in Winter

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Winter here has been less dramatic than in other parts of the country, but it has still bludgeoned and humbled us. Now in our third month of below-average temperatures, we turn up our collars, we pull on our gloves, we take our own warm bodies, all that we have, onto ice-slicked sidewalks, along frost-heaved roads. We push ourselves through the teens, the twenties, if we’re lucky the thirties.

I know this sounds wimpy to you denizens of the north, to residents of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas — but I want out of winter.

The thing is, persistent cold steels the soul, locks it up tight till springtime. Every year I try to play along. I walk through it and I read and write through it. I cook through it. I work through it. Most of all, though, I dream through it — dream of a sunny deck, the smell of highly chlorinated water on a summer day, a hammock beneath the trees as green leaves wag overhead.

A Classic Dilemma

A Classic Dilemma

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Last weekend I decided to do something special for my blog on its first anniversary, a little facelift, so to speak. Blogspot has new templates so I experimented with some of those on Saturday. I fiddled with background pictures, fonts and shadows; with line rules of varying widths and thicknesses; with navigation bars in everything from chartreuse to puce. Then I became impatient, pushed some buttons I shouldn’t have — and in an instant the old familiar design was gone.

I will admit that a tiny moment of panic ensued. I didn’t want my blog to have an ugly green bar across the top. I wanted those clean spare lines, the thin rules around the title, the subtlety, the white space. I wanted my old blog back.

It took the better part of two hours to return to the “classic” template (Blogspot doesn’t make it easy for you), and once I did I had to re-install all the little extras I’d had there before — using HTML code no less. But I made most of the changes. So the blog that looks almost the same as it used to is actually not the same at all. It is new born.

And I add to the list of benefits A Walker in the Suburbs has brought me yet one more: to be less timid of technology. I’m still a Luddite, just not as much of one.

A Walker Turns One

A Walker Turns One

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It was Super Bowl Sunday 2010, which means very little to me but which anchors this blog’s beginnings in my memory. We were going out later to watch the game, something we usually don’t do but which good friends and neighbors had invited us for earlier in the weekend. Outside was two feet of snow; inside, the smell of yeast. I’d been baking rolls, big yeasty rolls, and we were taking them to our neighbors. There would be no work or school the next day; in fact, there would be no work or school the rest of the week. But I didn’t know that then.

What I did know was that I’d wanted to start a blog and now I was doing it. Tom helped me with the technology part and the words flowed onto the screen. (For the first post, click here: http://walkerinthesuburbs.blogspot.com/2010/02/walker-begins.html.)

Had I known then that a year later I would have 315 posts under my belt I would have been surprised and pleased. Not so much by the daily writing — that was already a habit — but by the fact that I could eke out something I felt comfortable sharing with others. And also by the photography part — snapping pictures for the blog has been a fringe benefit I didn’t foresee.

What gladdens me the most is how the blog has rejuvenated my writing life. In the last few years many essay markets have dried up, and freelance writing, while never an easy path, has become a darned near impossible one. As any suburban walker knows, when one road is blocked you must find another. This blog has helped me find my voice again.

As A Walker ambles forward I want to notice more, question myself less and never be afraid to explore the winding, circuitous path — the detour. Because often it’s the road I should have taken all along. Thanks for visiting this blog. Happy Reading!

Eyes Bigger Than Stomach

Eyes Bigger Than Stomach

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It’s a gray, rainy day, perfect for endless cups of tea and a good book (or books). I have a pile of tomes beside me now: a memoir, a biography, a book of poetry and a novel. I keep checking books out of the library even though I already have a pile of unread volumes at home. And not just one library, either — I borrow from several.

All of this has brought to mind something my parents said to us when we were kids. Whenever we went out to eat, especially to cafeterias (those monuments to overeating that I still sometimes hanker for), the rule was you could take as much as you wanted from the line but you had to eat it all. Groans of “I can’t eat another bite” were met with the adage, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.”

I stare at my pile of books. I’d like to inhale them, to have an immediate transfusion of their knowledge and inspiration into my starving brain. At the same time I don’t want to forgo the pleasure of savoring each page. I am sated but unbowed. My eyes are bigger than my stomach.

Analytics

Analytics

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A Walker in the Suburbs was about a month old when a well meaning friend asked,”So how many people visit each day?” It was a good question and I didn’t have the slightest idea how to answer it.

But I would soon find out.

This was before Google provided its own viewer statistics right on the blog, so I signed up with something called StatCounter, a very humane outfit out of Ireland that displays stats on page loads and “uniques” (as we cognoscenti call them!) and will break down results into days, weeks or “fortnights” (that and the fact that it’s an Irish company instantly endeared them to me).

So I would check StatCounter in the evening to see how each post was doing. And then I started glancing at StatCounter once or twice during the day, too. It reminded me of the months after my book came out, when I visited Amazon.com daily (hourly?) to see where Parents Who Think Too Much was ranked. That became an obsession too, for a while.

As you might imagine, all this checking and re-checking did little for my creative fervor. In fact, it was completely counterproductive. I began Walker to shake loose the shackles of editorial judgment — and here I was imposing something even worse on myself, a minute-by-minute tally of the ether.

I don’t check StatCounter or Google Analytics anymore. I write, submit and forget (or try to!). I hope someone is reading my posts, I hope many people are, but with billions of blogs in the world, I have no illusions.

Solar Power

Solar Power

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Yesterday at lunchtime I took a 20 minute walk to clear my head. The rain had stopped, the sun had come out, birds were singing. I felt a bit guilty, thinking about friends and family shivering in the ice and snow elsewhere, but those feelings didn’t last long. It felt good to be walking, not sliding. And the air had a freshness to it that was born of quick thawing and the faint scent of soil. The warmth drew people from their office buildings.

It reminded me of our trip to Vienna last spring when cold rainy mornings would give way to warm afternoons. The minute the sun appeared the Viennese would be eating ice cream cones. The two events were so simultaneous that advance planning seemed to be involved. How else could the ice-cream eaters have stood in line, bought their cones and already been enjoying them the minute the weather changed?

I never figured this out. But on my sun-splashed walk yesterday I decided it was further proof of human adaptability and the powerful influence of our nearest star.

Winter Sunrise

Winter Sunrise

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Some of these cold mornings the sun seems reluctant to rise. It is faraway and wan. But other days it reddens the horizon. It is the only color in a monochromatic winter landscape. Those are the days when I’m glad to have a camera.