You can stack ’em, you can nest ’em — but before little hands touch them, you must wash ’em.
So I did that, as much as you can when the blocks are made of cardboard. And before they were barely dry, someone found them!
These are blocks that Isaiah’s mother remembers, that all our children played with — and now, our grandchildren.
It’s a little more incentive to tidy up the basement.
After days pounding asphalt and concrete, we had the luxury of a few hours on the water, where legs are for the most part irrelevant. We left the floating home mid-afternoon for a slow cruise on the Multnomah Channel, a tributary of the Willamette.
How calm it all was, how evenly the ripples flowed from our wake.
We cruised under the Sauvie Island Bridge, passed sailboats and motorboats and a contraption that looked like an elliptical on water. There was an osprey nest off our starboard side and an abandoned restaurant farther down. Mostly there was sun and stillness and companionship. When we landed, the light was golden.
Most people assume my Irish roots come from Dad’s side of the family. Something about the last name of Cassidy tips them off, I guess! But Dad’s family has been in Kentucky for generations, perhaps since the Revolutionary War, and he always seemed surprised when someone thought he hailed from the auld sod.
Mom was the Irish one. She was proud of her lineage and traced her Concannon, Scott, Long and Hughes roots back to Counties Clare and Galway. She made us wear little green shamrocks made of green pipe-cleaners every March 17, back when it wasn’t cool to be green.
But it’s Dad I want to write about this morning. He would be 98 today, so I’ve been thinking about him and his way of looking at the world.
Dad was an optimist and an extrovert who took joy in ordinary pleasures: his first cup of coffee in the morning (“ah, Brazilian novocaine,” he would say), a bowl of popcorn after dinner, his wife and children and grandchildren, whom he adored.
He never tired of telling us how lucky he was to be our father, a compliment I threw right back at him as I grew older and (sort of) wiser. But he was lucky in the way that many of his generation were: tried and tested by early hardship and provided with free college, a low-cost mortgage and a trip to Europe aboard the Queen Elizabeth courtesy of Uncle Sam (though he had to fly 35 missions in a B-17 bomber to pay for it).
Most of all, though, he made his own luck. When the tough times came, which they did, Dad just plowed through them. Gratitude came easily to him. Luck, too. Whether it was from being “Irish” or just from being Dad, I’ll never know.
Today I share Mother’s Day with my daughters. I always do, of course, but today I do so in a special way, as two of them celebrate their own first Mother’s Days.
It hardly seems possible. Though all three have blossomed into strong, kind, beautiful young women, in my mind they’re still long-legged girls running through the kitchen.
What can I tell them as they embark on this journey of parenthood? Right now, I can only think of only one thing. Enjoy it all … because it goes so very fast.
My first day of retirement was not typical, if that word can be applied to a condition that has only just begun. Claire was over by 8 with Isaiah, who was smiling his 100-watt smile and soon would be crawling around the house chortling (I seldom use that word but that is what he was doing), positively squealing with glee, especially when he spied the carpeted stairs.
He must be capable of anticipation given his excitement on simply seeing the stairs. He must be able to hold in his infant mind all the possibilities stairs can provide, the pulling up and the climbing. Of course, he did not see the tumbling down and the falling, which I, with my adult brain, was only too ready to imagine.
When I watch Isaiah explore the world I see with fresh eyes how stunning it is, with its corners and shadows and tiny parakeet feathers that he can almost but not quite pick up because, as Claire says, the pincer grasp doesn’t become fully operational until nine months of age and Isaiah is eight and a half.
My desk accessories and headset are in the car. The monitor is parked in the basement, ready to go. I’ll wipe my computer on Friday and take it into the office, too. Then all that remains will be … the annual reports. They were in the car, stationed for return along with the stapler and the tiered folder rack, but I had to bring them back inside because I needed to research a scholarship that began in 1993.
Now that they’re back in the house (and a heavy load they are, too!), I don’t want to let them go. I’ve built a complete set, you see, from 1985 to the present, which ranges from the time when Tom worked for Winrock to the time that I do. It’s a history of the place in a nutshell, a place I first experienced when I moved from Manhattan to a mountaintop in Arkansas right after we married and which has enriched my own career and life experiences beyond measure.
So I asked Tom last night: “Do you think it’s a bad sign that I can’t let go of the annual reports?” He just smiled and said to do whatever I think is right. He can’t really quibble about my packrat tendencies since he’s a primo packrat himself, and he knows this is about more than being a packrat. It’s about loving an organization I’m about to leave.
I do love Winrock. And yet on Friday I’ll type my last words for them and sign off the network for the last time. Because there’s something I love more, which is the freedom to write what I want when I want. It’s an awesome and a terrifying freedom, but I’ve earned the chance to try it, so I will.
As for the annual reports, they’re sitting in the hallway. I’m still thinking about them.
Morning on the Hunter’s Woods Trail: Mozart in my ears, details in my brain, details I hoped would filter away like a dusting of snow through trampoline mesh. And the rhythm of footfall did clarify the day; it reminded me of what is most important, which is to live fully when and where we are.
I was aided in this by the appearance of wildlife: first, a fox sauntering down the trail ahead of me and then, on the drive home, a wild turkey beside the road, bobbing its head as it fled into the woods.
The critters pulled me into the present and away from the fact that this is a departure day, which is not nearly as nice as an arrival day.
But the warmth is finally here, and the day is as perfect in its way as the cold, windy Thursday that brought her here. Both days are required, one for coming, the other for going — with the walks a constant between the two.
You know the days when they come, days that stand out from others not because they’ve been set aside as holidays but because they have not. They’re naturally delicious from beginning to end with no agenda other than spending time with the people you love.
I just had one of those days. Apart from an hour or two in the morning when I finished up work tasks from yesterday, there was nothing on the calendar but a quick trip to the store. Otherwise, it was a block of time reserved for hanging out and staying in.
By 11 a.m. the babies and their mamas arrived to spend time with their aunt and sister. It was loud and chaotic, with gurgles and shrieks from the infants and laughter and conversation from the adults I still call “the girls.”
Copper, revved by the unaccustomed activity, patrolled the gathering like a shark in the water, looking for plump infant toes to nibble. We managed to contain him, but barely.
Now it’s evening. The babies are at home in bed, their parents are pooped, and we … are just marveling at it all.
(“Sock letters” welcoming Celia home.)
I haven’t hugged our youngest daughter since August, when she flew back to Seattle. That’s one Thanksgiving, one Christmas, one Easter, several birthdays (including hers) and one new baby in the family ago. It other words, an eternity.
As I look forward to our reunion today, I think about others taking place across the country, families and friends long separated by work and pandemic restrictions.
Just yesterday, dear friends from college texted me a picture of their gathering. Was it my imagination, or were their smiles brighter than they would have been had this not been a post-Covid meeting? Doesn’t everything seem a little more significant now? And if it doesn’t, shouldn’t it?
I find it interesting that to me the most fascinating character in Ken Burns’ new documentary “Hemingway” is not Papa H himself (though I realize I’ve not read many of his short stories and most of his nonfiction), but Edna O’Brien, an Irish novelist who shines as one of the talking heads Burns uses so beautifully.
O’Brien is calm but intense, and her comments cut to the quick of Hemingway’s novels. In one of her earlier appearances, she takes on detractors who say that Hemingway hated women and wrote adversely about them.
To answer these criticisms, she reads a passage from Hemingway’s short story “Up in Michigan,” considered scandalous when it was published. The passage occurs near the end of the story, after a sexual encounter that the female character did not want, and O’Brien reads it slowly, the camera panning down to her hands, which gesture slightly as she reads the words with that Irish lilt in her voice.
I don’t see O’Brien then but my mother, who was roughly O’Brien’s age when she died. I see the same set of the jaw, the same hair, full and of a color not found in nature. The same unbridled truthfulness.
Mom was a writer, too — though most of her stories were never told.
(In honor of O’Brien and Mom, a photo of the green fields of County Clare.)
