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Author: Anne Cassidy

The Checklist

The Checklist

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I’m reading (actually, racing to finish, because it’s a library book) The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. I discovered Gawande’s writing through one of those Best Essays volumes and have continued to read and enjoy his books.

This one is about how checklists save lives. He tells one riveting story about an operation gone wrong (his own error) and how a checklist ensured there was a large supply of blood on hand to transfuse the patient. One of the items on the checklist was for the surgical team to introduce themselves before the operation began. As a result, Gawande says,”We came into the room as strangers. But when the knife hit the skin, we were a team.” It was teamwork and cool, methodical action that saved the patient’s life.

Two days before our departure, I’m making my own checklists. Passport. Check. International Driver’s Permit. Check. I’ve always been a list-maker–and I’ve often faulted myself for it, thinking it the sign of a limited imagination. But reading this book has made me feel better about my habit. If lists save lives, think of what they can do for vacations.

Cool Shade

Cool Shade

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It’s chilly outside this morning, but one thing about the day makes me think about the sticky summer weather to come. It is shade, the deep green depths of it, the way it cools and soothes. I grew up in a shadeless subdivision, playing in meadows and along creek banks for hours each day under a full and merciless sun. The two trees in our front yard were saplings I was dying to climb. By the time they were large enough, we’d outgrown the house and moved away. Maybe it’s this early shade deprivation that explains my attraction for cool, dappled glades; for fern and hollow; for the quiet, naturally air-conditioned woods. Each spring we extol the return of flower and leaf. Shouldn’t we also celebrate the return of shade?

A Mom, Running

A Mom, Running

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Death, when it doesn’t devastate, makes us more keenly aware of life — that we are still here, walking on this earth; that our gift to the departed is to keep on living. So today I went for a walk and found myself filled with gratitude. For my own mom on this Mother’s Day, for the closeness we’ve always had, for her intelligence and care and optimism, for her quoting Shakespeare to us when we were little kids, for her sheer being. For my own three daughters, who I love beyond measure and who gladden my heart daily in ways small and large. For my husband, who even in his own sadness went out and bought me flowers and sweets and a large bottle of Dubonnet to celebrate the day. For my father, sister and brothers, and for all of Tom’s family, who I’m thinking about so much today.

I saw several solo moms out walking this morning, and we smiled and greeted each other. I wondered when I saw them if they were doing what I was, escaping for a solitary stroll not to avoid chaos at home but to savor the richness of their lives. For it is only when we step aside for a moment, only when time or circumstance pulls us out of the fray, that we realize what we have. And as I contemplated the bounty of my life, I felt lifted off my feet with joy. And I realized that without knowing it I had broken into a trot. I had become, for a few moments, a runner in the suburbs.

Mary Ann Gardner 1928 – 2010

Mary Ann Gardner 1928 – 2010

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Blogs come in many shapes and sizes. Some are intensely personal; others are not. I haven’t decided exactly how personal I want mine to be. But I can’t not write about what has been happening this week, how as we’ve been counting down the days to our trip, Tom’s Aunt Mary Ann, who raised him and his sisters since they were young children, was in ever more frail and failing health. Yesterday, as Tom went through the airport security line on his way to see her, his brother and sister called. Aunt Mary Ann had passed away peacefully. Tom turned around and came home.

His family is scattered: Portland, Spokane, Missoula, Chicago, New York, D.C. The service will be in Indianapolis in early June. So we are in limbo: grieving and packing. Still going away (she would have wanted us to, Tom says), but with heavy hearts.

So this post is for Aunt Mary Ann (pictured above with some of her grandchildren last summer), a woman who didn’t know how to quit, who even in her late 70s strode three paces ahead of her walking companions. Who came into our house like a whirlwind every time she visited and immediately began scrubbing and baking and sewing. She was a brave and determined person who lost her husband, Uncle Bud, much too early but who carved out a life for herself after he died as docent and grandmother and frequent flier. She raised seven good people in a house as full of fun and chaos as any I’ve ever experienced. Though she spent the last year and a half in Montana, she was a Hoosier through and through. She will make that final trip home soon.

Morning’s at Seven

Morning’s at Seven

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An early morning walk: crows, robins, jays, a red-winged black bird. At one point a plump bunny hopped through the dewy meadow grass. The air was thin and clean. It made me think of a Robert Browning poem I used to read the girls:

The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled;

The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in his heaven —
All’s right with the world!

Hallstatt!

Hallstatt!

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We leave a week from today. Time for some inspiration. So into this world of deadlines and errands, broken computers and broken glasses, appointments and schedules and list after list after list, there comes a breathing space, a long sigh. This is Hallstatt, a village in Austria’s Salzkammergut, an area of mountains and lakes east of Salzburg. Is it possible that we will see such a place? Is it possible that such a place even exists?

The Feather

The Feather

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I saw it on the street when I was walking the other day: a single feather. Dark, elegant, alone. From a crow, perhaps. At home we have feathers all over the house from our sweet parakeet, Hermes. But his are electric blue, or sometimes darker pinfeathers or fluffy white downy bits that float in the air like dust motes. We humans molt dead skin and fingernail parings. How much more lovely the gifts birds leave behind.

Writing Places

Writing Places

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“I’d say that it is good to have a quiet place to work, and it is also good not to work there, but somewhere else — whether at one end of the dining room table, or sitting in an armchair by the fireplace or even away from all the usual writing spots entirely.”

I just finished reading Reeve Lindbergh’s memoir Forward From Here, in which she writes about writing places — and many other things. Reeve can look out her back door and see her mother’s writing house, moved from Connecticut after Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s death in 2001. But Reeve doesn’t usually write in her mother’s writing house.

I know what she means. For years I wrote in an office. We always had a dedicated room in our house where I could work. First it was an upstairs bedroom, and then, when the girls got older and each had their own room, it was a converted dining room downstairs. Now that I have a laptop I wander all over the house and yard. In fact, I do some of my best writing on Metro (provided I have a conductor who knows how to operate the brakes — not always a given with that outfit).

It helps to have a writing spot (because you’re telling yourself that your writing is important enough to make space for it), but if writing is like breathing, then it figures you should be able to do it most anywhere.

Walker’s Block

Walker’s Block

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When a writer can’t write, she has writer’s block. When a walker can’t walk, does she have walker’s block? Or what if the walker only has time for a quick walk, a walk around the block, but she doesn’t have a block to walk around?

Such is the case here in the suburbs. Because most people don’t want to live on cut-through streets, we have plenty of cul-de-sacs but precious few connectors. Instead of walking around the block, with the pleasant circularity that entails, we walk up one side of the road and down another.

To get around this linearity, I’ve come up with loop walks. I cross West Ox, a busy, four-lane road at the west end of our neighborhood, down a slight hill, left into Franklin Farm, through a meadow, along a paved path in a small woods and eventually back to West Ox and into Folkstone again. It isn’t a block, but it is a walk. A walker’s block.

Devil May Care

Devil May Care

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It’s the first Saturday in May, a day to drink mint juleps, sing “My Old Kentucky Home” and watch the horses run. Strong storms are predicted for Churchill Downs, which means that Devil May Care, a filly whose owner my parents met last weekend, will have to run well in the mud to win the 136th Kentucky Derby. I hope she does, because of the faint connection, because she’s a girl and because I like her name. (This is the, ahem, highly scientific method by which I usually choose a horse.)

Devil May Care makes me think about going for broke. It’s the rakish tilt of a fedora, a whiff of cigarette smoke, the swirl of bourbon in a highball glass. In a world of highly regulated outcomes, chance draws us like a magnet. Who wants to know how every race will end? Who doesn’t long for surprise? When the track is muddy, it’s more likely that you’ll see a most improbable horse, a long shot, perhaps a filly, streaking along the rail or swinging wide on the outside. The cheers will be deafening, the mud will be flying and a horse, a horse whose name we don’t yet know, will be running her heart out, racing for the finish line.