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Author: Anne Cassidy

February 1

February 1

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Ice, snow, freezing rain, bone-chilling cold — any one or several of these have kept Mom from celebrating birthdays with her family. “Can you imagine a worse day for a birthday?” she has always said. Maybe not, but neither can I imagine her with any other. The day and the person have become one. Which means that February 1 is a day of wisdom for me, a day of buoyant conversation. An incomparable and splendid day.

As the first day of the month, February 1 is a natural leader — and this is another way the day and the woman mirror each other, since Mom has founded two magazines and now, at an age when many people dwell only on what they cannot do, she is starting a museum.

One year when I was a high school English teacher with summers off, Mom and I traveled through Europe and the British Isles together. We took separate flights and Mom arrived ahead of me. She found her way into London, booked us into a quirky B&B and by the time I walked into Victoria Station was standing right where we said we’d meet, under the clock. I’ll never forget that glimpse of Mom; she was younger than I am now and looked so eager and hopeful, so completely herself. It was as if I had seen her as a young woman, before marriage and motherhood and grown-up cares. Though I’m a middle-aged woman with grown-up cares of my own now, I have never outgrown our closeness. I never will. Happy Birthday, Mom.

Comic Relief

Comic Relief

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My brother Phillip and I were talking about the mood-altering power of a good laugh when something I said reminded him of a scene in the movie “This is Spinal Tap.” He popped the movie into his DVD player. We watched, chuckling so hard we almost doubled over. I think of the medicinal power of “Seinfeld” episodes (we all have our favorites, the Soup Nazi, the marble rye) and of the long-ago experiment of Norman Cousins, who kept cancer at bay by making himself laugh long and loud.

This photo makes me laugh whenever I look at it. There’s a street in Lexington, Kentucky, called “The Lane.” It’s a very exclusive enclave, the sort of place that sniffs at actually needing a street name. Until recently the city went along with it; the street sign simply said “The Lane.” But the new signs require some sort of designation to be printed in small type beneath the name. And that means that The Lane, that once la-de-da thoroughfare, is now a street called “The.”

Every time I see this picture I have to laugh. Comic relief on a cold, gray morning.

A Book, A Namesake

A Book, A Namesake

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In a few days this blog will be a year old, so the other day I picked up my copy of A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin. The name of my blog was a conscious tip of the hat to this title, but I hadn’t read the book in a while and I had forgotten that it begins with Kazin’s walk through the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he grew up. “Every time I go to Brownsville it is as if I had never been away,” he says in the first line,echoing a feeling so many of us have when we return to our hometowns. He admits that he has not moved far from home. “Actually I did not go very far; it was enough that I could leave Brownsville.”

As he walks through his old neighborhood, he recounts the sour smells, the shapeless old women sitting on stoops, the “dry rattle of old newspaper,” the end of the line. Brownsville is a place to leave, and even though it’s no more than an hour from Manhattan, it seemed like the middle of nowhere to the young Kazin. He describes the tiring subway ride back home after a day in the city. “When I was a child I thought we lived at the end of the world.” He knows every station, “Grand Army Plaza, with its great empty caverns smoky with dust and chewing gum wrappers,” Hoyt, with its windows of ladies’ clothes, then “Saratoga, Rockaway, then home.” Kazin is lucky in that his new life and his old one lie so close together — they are miles yet worlds apart.

Re-reading A Walker in the City surprised and encouraged me. Writing about place, in particular those places we call home and those we call hometowns, is something I plan to do more of in this blog. Kazin has set my mind to spinning.

A Pot of Soup

A Pot of Soup

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A few days ago I chopped two onions, peeled three potatoes, assembled a soup bone and stew beef, canned tomatoes, celery, carrots, beans and corn. I set about making vegetable soup the way I learned to as a girl. It takes the better part of a day to do this — but it’s not concentrated time, of course, just whenever you can edge it into whatever else you’re doing. When you’re done, your refrigerator may look a bit like ours above, empty and used up.

I boiled the meat and the bone first, skimmed the broth, then added vegetables according to texture and flavor — onions and celery for seasoning, potatoes, then tomatoes, carrots and so on. It takes a couple hours before it’s bubbling on the stove and the vegetables begin to soften and blend into each other. To become less themselves and one with the soup.

Because I started making the soup in the evening I knew we wouldn’t eat it till the next day. And more importantly, I knew that the soup wouldn’t be at its best until we’d cooled and reheated it several times. There must be a chemical or gastronomical explanation for this but I don’t know what it is. I do know that vegetable soup is at its best about three days after you make it. And in fact, soup is one of those slow foods, and making it harkens back to an earlier time when things worth doing took time and patience.

Thundersnow!

Thundersnow!

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It came in with a whoosh and a bang and a crackle of light. At 2 p.m. it was raining, at 3 it was glopping (gobs of slush falling from the sky) and at 4 the snow was falling sideways at two inches an hour.

Through the quick-darkening afternoon and evening we heard claps of thunder, saw lightning flash. By midnight it was over. The west-facing flanks of trees were smeared with white, as if from a wayward paintbrush. Our bamboo was bent with the weight of the heavy snow. Today it is quiet, no plows, no cars. Just the whiteness of a spent world. Until yesterday we’d had a cold, dry winter. The thundersnow made up for it.

Consolation

Consolation

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The house is so still without our little bird, so quiet and ordinary. It lacks the ambient sounds of a parakeet in motion. I don’t turn on the radio as much as I used to, because it reminds me of him, too, and so the quiet is compounded.

Into this void has come the winter fire, which lights the hearth, opens clogged sinuses and fills the house with smoke. (We need our chimney cleaned, I think.) What it also does, I’ve noticed recently, is provide some much needed noise.

The fire roars and crackles. It provides some of the background sound I’ve been missing so much since Hermes died. It doesn’t replace him, of course, not in the least, but it is a slight consolation.

Sitting beside a fire is like keeping company with a wild animal; there is a hint of danger in the sudden shifting of wood, the burning log that falls from the grate. Outside the temperature falls, the wind sighs. Inside, our hearth is bright — rhe consolation of a winter fire.

Winter Stream

Winter Stream

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The winter stream is a study in contrasts. In some places a layer of ice like the skin on just boiled milk stretches from bank to bank, puckered and wrinkled and vaguely flesh-like. The current pulses beneath that thin shell, and water pushes out a few feet downstream where the creek is not yet frozen. The flicker of life as the stream erupts there reminds me of the play of tiny insects on the summer surface.

In other places a ripple of white ice has formed and it bobs beside logs and patches of leaves. The flowing water rushes past it like a dark, living thing, like a large, furtive fish. The creek is shallow at this point but the banks are steep. If you look down you can see in the winter current a hint of the riotousness of spring.

Single Digits

Single Digits

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Snow has been scarce this winter, but frigid air has been plentiful. Many days it’s been served up with a stiff northwest breeze. I’ve kept walking along the frost-hard trails and through the grit that accumulates along the side of the roads. I’ve done it for my sanity, to thumb my nose at the season — and to soak up whatever mood-altering sunlight I can.

It was 7 degrees this morning when I woke up. Seven! Seven makes a lovely time, age or chapter. But not temperature.

These chilly days remind me of my years in Chicago. Seven degrees above zero was balmy in that city. One day I learned after I’d already left for work that the school where I taught was closed for the day. It was 21 degrees below zero (actual temperature, not wind chill). I’d grown so accustomed to the cold that I hadn’t wondered why everyone was running, not walking, down the street.

It was winter that drove me from that city. Winters can do that, you know.

Looking Out Windows

Looking Out Windows

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I often walk to music — radio music, that is. I have an iPod but it’s old and barely holds its charge a half an hour. Besides, I haven’t loaded much music on it. In fact, I never really made the switch from LP to CD. Much of my favorite music is on vinyl. So for years I’ve contented myself with whatever our classical station serves up. This is probably just laziness on my part, or perhaps a willingness to be surprised, to take what fate hands me, aurally speaking.

I was thinking of this in terms of what I wrote about yesterday, the “Big Sort.” Not only are we segregating ourselves into homogeneous clubs, churches and communities but we are also reading custom-tailored news and listening to carefully selected music.

The world is big, complex, confusing. We need the comfort of sameness and exclusion. But trying a new activity, listening to unfamiliar tunes or chancing upon an article in the hard copy of a newspaper gives a necessary eclecticism to our lives. It means we’re looking out windows instead of into mirrors.

Sorting Ourselves Out

Sorting Ourselves Out

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In The Big Sort author Bill Bishop writes about our tendency to live in evermore like-minded communities, worship in evermore homogeneous churches and vote in evermore polarized elections. The subtitle of his book is “Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.” People who associate with people just like themselves tend to become more extreme and lose their ability to compromise. The middle disappears. What you have left is a lot of people on the fringes, shouting at each other.

Demographic data show that people who live in the far suburbs or exurbs tend to be conservative, while people who live in cities tend to be liberal. As a walker in the suburbs, I pay attention to the cars in the driveways and the bumper stickers plastered on them. And I know that, while northern Virginia has trended Democratic in recent elections, our neighbors are a congenial mixture of political types. Gun-toting NRA folks happily loan their snow-blowers to environmentalists who only own shovels.

One of the things that slows or stops the Big Sort is devotion to place. When we don’t vote with our feet, when we stay where we’ve landed — or (even rarer these days) where we’re born — we deny the Big Sort the demographic movement it requires. Census data released earlier this month shows that the share of Americans who made a long-distance move dropped to a record low of 1.4 percent. It’s the lowest level since the government began recording this statistic in 1948.

Maybe there’s hope for us after all.