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Author: Anne Cassidy

First Celebrity?

First Celebrity?

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“It’s the Kardashian effect,” he said. “Famous for being famous.” These aren’t words I’m used to hearing from my professor, so he has my attention. And the person to whom he was applying this descriptor was unusual, too. It was … Galileo Galilei.

Yes, the 17th-century man of science may well have been the first science celebrity. This is not just because we still remember him, because we also remember Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe and many others.

Galileo was a science celebrity because he had a knack for witty repartee and a rapier wit. Guests knew when he was at a dinner party. His words had weight. Too much so at times. His celebrity status may have done him in.

The Catholic church censured Galileo for believing in the Copernican view of the universe — that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around. But mostly he was censured for being so upfront about it, or at least that’s what I think now. The paper I’m writing is due next month. I may change my mind.

(Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition by Cristiano Banti, 1857. Courtesy Wikipedia.)

Real Time

Real Time

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Here’s our latest snow in real time, a white world I want to stare at all day. It won’t last long. Temperatures will rise, rain will fall. Knowing this snow won’t last for weeks makes it more precious. I’m winter-weary, yes, but not so soured on the season that I can’t be revived.

It must be the Catholic school kid in me, but I like to feel I “deserve” each season when it comes, that I’ve fully experienced the season that’s come before. This year, there will be no problem enjoying every speck of spring, because we’ve certainly endured the brunt of winter.

This is a heavy snow; shrubs and trees are coated. The only creatures stirring are the birds at our feeder. Fox and squirrels have yet to make tracks. All the better to enjoy the tableaux, the pristine expanse, the snow in real time.

All the Fixin’s

All the Fixin’s

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This is not a post about the side dishes that accompany a main course. About a crunchy salad or cornbread hot from the oven. No, this post is about all the fixing happening in my life, a seemingly endless list of to-dos, but two items yesterday worth noting.

My 24-year-old car is back in the shop, another shop this time, with a mechanic who fixed this problem (an errant air bag) long ago and we hope can fix it again.

And yesterday, I dropped off my ancient iPhone for a battery replacement. “Are you sure you don’t want to upgrade?” I was asked, several times. I was sure. And now my phone (still usable in most other ways) no longer erratically drops from 90 percent to 8 percent charge.

We live in a disposable age, not a fix-it culture. Collars are no longer turned, shoes no longer mended. Making do is a vanishing art. I’m keeping my hand in it a little while longer.

With Words

With Words

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I’m still thinking about the 15-year run of this blog, of how moments add up to years. Isn’t that what life is all about, too? Trying to hold on to the little things when time wants to steamroll them into a seamless routine?

Writing here — and in my journal, the habit from which this practice grew — is my way of hanging on. As ways go, it’s an old-fashioned one, even though it uses relatively newfangled technology. Most days my phone wants to show me “moments” and there are apps for remembering everything from birthdays to baby feed times.

I’d rather choose my own moments and record them in the way that comes most naturally to me — with words.

Fifteen Years

Fifteen Years

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Today A Walker in the Suburbs turns 15, its first birthday on the new site. This checks a box I’ve meant to check for years, moving the blog to an address that is completely its own. It’s the evolution of a project that began when I started this blog during Snowmaggedon, a massive snowstorm that shut down ordinary life and gave me the time I needed to bring this concept to life.

Since then, I’ve written plenty about walking in the suburbs, which you might expect, but I’ve also covered music, light, books, travel, writing and the joys of having little people in the house again.

If you have a few minutes, explore some of the 4,544 posts on this site and leave a comment on one (a feature newly added in the blog’s redesign). But most of all, just enjoy the breathing space. And thank you, as always, for reading.

Multiple Choice

Multiple Choice

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When I browsed through electives last fall, looking for a spring semester class, my eyes glossed over an important detail about the one I chose. Progress would be assessed by discussion, papers, and tests.

Yes … tests. Another class I took a couple years ago advertised a final exam, but that turned out to be a paper with a shorter due date. Maybe these tests would be the same.

It was a dangerous assumption. This was a test, full stop: multiple choice, multiple answer, true and false. Forty-five questions, 45 minutes. It covered Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics, no slouch subjects.

I can’t remember the last time I took a multiple-choice test. I must have been an undergraduate in college, but even then I was assessed mostly by essay exam. I’d forgotten how much a person who thinks too much can deliberate on a single question, even when she’s studied for hours.

When the appointed time arrived I tried to still the butterflies in my stomach by doing some deep breathing. The butterflies kept fluttering, and they fluttered for every one of those 45 minutes. They’re fluttering still because now I need to check my score.

Apart from personal angst, though, what struck me about this examination is that I really needed to know my stuff. The professor is old school, and he wants to make sure we’re reading the material. I am, but the old noggin’ ain’t as sharp as it used to be. It’s a humbling exercise. But that’s the point: it is an exercise, and I’m glad to be doing it. At least in general. We’ll have another test in five weeks — and the butterflies will be fluttering again.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Respite

Respite

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The owls were calling, “Who-who, who-who.” I heard them as I hiked the Glade Trail and when I returned home, too.

Had a flock of visitors moved into the area? Was it the morning’s warmer temperatures? Because by the time I was out, in late afternoon, the wind had picked up and the day had grown cooler. I’ve heard owls before at this time of year, so it may be cyclical, a brief glimpse of the spring we’ve “learned” is still six weeks away.

Whatever the explanation, the owls soothed me, reminded me of all the wild things who live among us and operate on older, more essential rhythms. Their conversation enveloped me in sound, just as the woods enveloped me in beauty. Together, they produced an hour of respite from a world gone mad.

All of Us

All of Us

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The five years I worked for Winrock International were some of the most adventurous and fulfilling of my career. I was part of a team tasked to tell the story of this wonderful organization, founded to help those at home and abroad, and I jumped in feet first.

Winrock implements USAID contracts, which do everything from countering human trafficking to helping set up a fleet of electric vehicles in one of the more polluted cities of the world, Kathmandu. I interviewed trafficking survivors, I rode around in the back of a small electric bus driven by a pathbreaking group of women in Nepal. I saw firsthand the good that USAID projects accomplish.

I’ll never forget my first trip for Winrock, glimpsing on the side of a truck the words that would from then on never fail to move me. “USAID from the American People.” The work I was doing with Winrock allowed me to see the work that was happening around the world in my name, in the names of all of us.

For less than 1 percent of the U.S. budget, the United States Agency for International Development sows a tremendous amount of goodwill. It’s evidence of our values, yes, but it’s also part of the soft power on which the world runs.

Yesterday the Agency for International Development was closed and its website shut down. Employees were told to work from home. The president has said he would like to shutter USAID as an independent agency. The head of the new Department of Government Efficiency called it a “criminal organization.”

The crime is what’s happening now, both to this agency and to the people who depend on it. And have no doubt: In the end, those people are all of us.

Back on Earth

Back on Earth

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The soil was packed and pocked. With temperatures in the 20s yesterday morning, it was anything but springy, but I could tell it had been malleable enough the day before to cast a boot print or two.

Mud quick frozen and crunchy beneath the feet. A living thing, expandable and contractable. Not just a surface but a presence.

For weeks I’ve been hoofing it on pavement, sticking to the sides of paved roads, dodging snow piles and black ice. But yesterday, for a few minutes, I pounded a dirt trail. It felt good to walk on earth again.

Earliest Memory

Earliest Memory

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Mom would have been 99 today. Today I cede this space to the person who inspired me first, and inspires me still. In this “guest post,” Mom muses on her earliest memory.

Where do I start to tell the story of my life? Do I start with the beginning? But what is the beginning? Is that cold early February morning when I was born, only minutes after midnight? But to write of those moments and the moments that followed would be only hearsay. So do I start with my own first memory? I think that would be the honest way.

My first real memory is of sunlight streaming through a window near the little chair where I sat. It was a rocking chair, red maybe, and I must have been fascinated with the way the light seemed to jump through the windowpanes and dance around until it chose to fall right at my feet.

Did I laugh at its playfulness? Did I try to catch it and hold onto it? Did I sit very still and wonder where it came from and where it would go when it left? Or did I just enjoy it while it stayed close to me?