A Trip West

A Trip West

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It’s a big country, a fact I learned from the back seat of a station wagon when I was a kid. To land somewhere exciting, you packed your things, climbed into the car and watched the miles tick away. Only 45 more till Joplin, 62 more till Tucumcari and, after what seemed like an eternity but was only four days, we reached San Bernardino, California. 

 The fact that we’d driven there didn’t make it any less exotic. In fact, I always marveled that by simply sticking with it — by putting in the miles, so to speak — we could make our way to a completely new place with orange groves and movie stars and the big blue Pacific lapping at the land. 

How different it will be tomorrow, when we wake up, taxi to Dulles and fly to the other side of the country — not just the horizontal other but the diagonal other, the Pacific Northwest — in all of five hours.

It will be none the less exotic for us having arrived there on a big silver bird. There will be dark firs and steep hills and that same big blue Pacific. But the amazement I feel being on the other side of the country will harken back to those early trips, to those interminable but (come to find out) essential drives through dessert and plain. They taught me a lesson I’ll never forget.

Look Out, Doris Lessing

Look Out, Doris Lessing

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Week before last, when I left the still pool of full-time employment for the more turbulent waters of freelance writing, I was given a golden pen and notebook. (Thank you, Drew!) 

The golden pen I pressed into service immediately, finding in its slim contour and smooth passage on the page a near-perfect writing implement. I’ve already used it to scribble in my journal on Day One, and it’s now sitting on my desk in a place of honor, the little crystal pineapple on its top harkening back to a many-faceted ornament a friend gave me when I set off to journalism school many years ago.

But the golden notebook is daunting. Should I reserve it for days when I feel the muse is calling with greater insistence? Should it be only for Very Important Writing or become one in a series of notebooks that are otherwise black and pedestrian?

Could I, like Doris Lessing, use it to tie together the disparate threads of my life? Unlikely. I haven’t even read Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. 

For now, the golden notebook will remain open to possibility, which is, I’m finding, a very nice way to be.

(Yesterday I discovered that the golden pen makes rainbows on the page when held outside at the proper angle.)

Luck of the Irish

Luck of the Irish

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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.

Margaret’s Garden

Margaret’s Garden

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Years ago, there was an iris and day lily farm a few miles from here. Gardeners would flock to the farm this time of year to enjoy the blossoms and perhaps buy a few bulbs, which would be delivered weeks later in a brown paper bag. 

Margaret Thomas was the gardener. She was a relic of the old days, of small farms and neighborliness. She lived in a green house with a picturesque shed out back, half falling down. Artists would set up their easels in her garden and paint the iris with the ruined shed in the background. 

Our Siberian iris come from Margaret, and though they share the garden with their showier cousins, they are the ones that catch my eye every spring, their delicate beauty I seek when winter’s done. 

As for Margaret’s garden, it’s now a subdivision: Iris Hills. 

The Spa Treatment

The Spa Treatment

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I’m trying not to make too much of the fact that although there are three mothers now in my immediate family, the only creature who had a spa treatment on Mother’s Day was Copper the dog, who not only is not a mother but was most likely never a father either.

Granted, it was not exactly a long languorous soak in the tub followed by a mani-pedi and massage. It was a trying hour in a van in our driveway during which he almost hyperventilated. 

The groomer finally gave up without trimming his ears and neck, but she got much further than last year’s groomer, who cut short Copper’s appointment, told us never to come back, and left our nervous canine with a funny patchwork trim he’s been growing out all year. 

“Most of the dogs I see have already been banned from PetsMart,” this year’s groomer said. 

How did she know? 

Happy Mother’s Day!

Happy Mother’s Day!

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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. 

Weed Whisperer

Weed Whisperer

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It’s the golden season for weeding, a precious period before the arrival of stilt grass and the more noxious undergrowth, when I can (and do) plop myself down and gently remove the crabgrass, wild strawberries and dandelions from the periwinkle and forget-me-nots.   

Weeding at close range can be a meditative occupation. It feels less like banishing what I don’t want and more like welcoming what I do. It is garden shaping rather than green demolition. And it’s a chance to be part of the landscape, one with the clematis and creeping jenny and bleeding heart.

Before long the tenacious troublemakers will move in, the invasive grasses that seem bent on making the world their own and require a full-scale assault to stop them. But until they do, just call me the weed whisperer.

Missing the Point

Missing the Point

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In the work-for-hire phase of my life (which ended all of four days ago), I frequently used what I’ve come to think of as the make-nice punctuation mark.

“Good morning!” I would say cheerily to IT before launching into my request for help with a tech crisis. “No problem!” I would exclaim to the last-minute request for editing services that, truth be told, was indeed a problem. And of course, the ubiquitous “Thanks!” when I used the exclamation point to soften my own last-minute requests for help. 

Now I must retrain myself in the proper use of this punctuation mark, which is sparing. I must try harder to communicate the import of the thought in the words themselves rather than using a vertical line with a dot below it to do the work for me. 

“Do not attempt to emphasize simple statements by using a mark of exclamation,” say Strunk and White in The Elements of Style. And who am I to argue with them?

Which is not to say that the exclamation point will disappear entirely from my life. It will continue to clutter up emails and personal correspondence, I’m sure. Will I be missing the point? You bet I will!

(Graphic courtesy Wikipedia)

Shared Purpose

Shared Purpose

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It’s a rainy day, the kind of day when I used to like being at the office, once I was there. A coziness descended upon us, an enforced calm, or at least I felt it. At no time was it clearer to me that we were all in this together than in foul weather.

It was then that I thought of us as many parts of one body: the program officers and scientists and accountants and writers and procurement folks and so many others, all bringing their talents to the cause.

I’m remembering that feeling today, one of shared purpose. It’s a feeling I don’t want to give up, even as I embrace the freedom of my new state.

Stairs and Other Frontiers

Stairs and Other Frontiers

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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.

In Isaiah I also see the power of movement for its own sake. The toys that held his attention last week pale in comparison now. It is as if he is reenacting the push of human exploration, the grand urge to trudge on to the next mesa and beyond the far river bend. Watching Isaiah I can better appreciate how the American West was settled, why even now deep sea divers are exploring the last great earthly frontier.