Voiceless

The hoarseness I had last week finally caught up with me this weekend when I lost my voice entirely. It was not altogether unwelcome. It gave me an opportunity to drop out, sleep in, and read — to float along in another world for a few hours.

As I enter Day 2 with minimal voice power, I find myself noticing all the things I can't do: sing hymns at church, order sliced turkey at the deli counter, instruct a rowdy doggie to behave.

If my voice is still rocky tomorrow I will have to navigate the workplace in silence, too.

All of which makes me think about our voice — our aural calling card, that which announces us to the world. As unique as we are, and sometimes as vulnerable, too.

Alfie, Solo

Since Dominique the parakeet died last Saturday I've been spending some quality time with Alfie, the remaining budgie. He's sitting on the outdoor table where I'm working this morning, chirping away at the wild birds, calling out to the day in a way that could be seen as pitiful (poor caged creature who needs companionship) or triumphant (being outside on this glorious summer morning).

I'm interpreting it as the latter ... and I'm marveling at this tiny guy, the beauty of his plumage and the variety of sounds he can produce.  I'm especially admiring his throat spots, the little black dots that encircle his neck like a string of black pearls.

What extravagance, what artistry! The way the black complements the blue of his breast and cere (nose). That nature could contrive such a thing, such an unnecessary but perfect thing, buoys me up this summer day and fills me with wonder.

Chaotic Sidewalks

It's not just road construction, which this morning changed the bus route at both ends of my commute. It's not just the demolition of buildings in Crystal City, which makes the walk to my office a jingling, jangling, high-decibel adventure every day.

It's the darned motorized scooters, too, which seem to be standing or lying everywhere I try to walk. On a quick lunch-break stroll, the scooters are there. On my way in every morning and home every night, they're cluttering up the bus stop and turning the sidewalks into an obstacle course.

I know I sound like a curmudgeon, and I can appreciate the freedom they promise. But the dangers of these devices are being realized as their riders land in doctor's offices and emergency rooms. And that's for the people who sign up for them.

What about those of us who don't?

My First Owl

The call came a little after 7 p.m. The owls are here, my friend said. Come and see them.

I'd heard about the owls last summer, how they would swoop and hoot in the woods and common lands of our neighborhood. I can hear them too, sometimes, always from across the street or down a house or two. Never close enough to see.

But last night I went right over, binoculars in hand. And there they were, two owlets and their mother. The babies sounded like catbirds, with a mewling hiss of a cry. They were hunkered down in one tree while their mother flew about searching for food.

Though they were almost as big as their parents (because a fourth owl showed up eventually, and we assumed it was the father), the babies relied on their mother for food. And she was working hard to supply it. Another neighbor wandered by and said he'd seen the mother bring the babies a bird to eat. Owls eat other birds? Yes, says the World of Owls site I consulted, birds as well as insects, rodents, amphibians and fish.

I'd never seen an owl until last night  — and then I saw four at once (though only one is pictured above, and from far away). But they looked so familiar, just like the pictures, like caricatures of themselves, which is to say feathered and big-eyed and, of course, wise.

Reclining

I've heard that Winston Churchill did much of his work in bed or in the bathtub — reclining, in both instances. Not that I intend to emulate that great man in all his habits (as if I could), but I have grown fond of working in a reclining position.

There is much to be said for it. Comfort, first of all. And with laptops as small and slender as they are now, it's easy to do.

I even think thoughts may flow differently when one is lying down rather than sitting up. They're more fanciful, less rule-bound.

Of course, the modern workplace is not set up for this, but if I was in charge, offices and cubicles would be outfitted with chaise longues as well as desks.

The only occupational hazard would be falling asleep. But it's a small price to pay.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Gains and Losses

Over the weekend I started reading about the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, which we will celebrate next month. One of the tributes was in Parade, which bills itself "the most widely read magazine in America."

I couldn't help but notice how thin this most widely read magazine is. And this got me thinking about what we have lost in the 50 years since humans first stepped foot on the moon — in particular the rich print culture that has been slowly dying during the last two (three?) of those decades.

I'm a print girl from way back, and though I quite happily ply my trade in a mostly-web way these days, I miss the heft and gravitas of ink on paper. I miss the smell of it and the feel of it, the weight of it in my hands.

I suppose you could draw a line from rocket technology to the waning of print. After all, the information age was in part launched by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). But that's not where I'm going with this.

I'm merely musing that our technological gains come with quality-of-life losses. And I don't want us to forget about them.

(A small printing press, from an exhibit at the Museum of the Written Word in May 2013.) 

Rest in Peace, Dominique

Dominique the parakeet, who came to us from the Fairfax County Humane Society shelter seven years ago, died yesterday. We never knew her age, but she could have been 10 or more by the time she passed away.

She was a small but valiant creature, and she proved herself loyal and strong on numerous occasions. Plagued for years by fatty tumors, she never let them slow her down. Even as late as yesterday afternoon she seemed strong enough to chatter and nuzzle with her cage-mate, the ever-so-chirpy Alfie.

In 2016, when her original partner, Sid, was ailing, the canary-yellow Dominique literally propped up the  sick bird with her own body.  And she bravely bore the antics of the young whippersnapper (Alfie) we brought in to take his place. Because Dominique really seemed to mourn Sid when he was gone. I was afraid she would pine away without another parakeet by her side.

The thing about a bird is that its death is preceded or accompanied by a fall. Not unlike humans, if you want to get biblical. But unlike humans, birds are creatures of the air, and to find one lying still on the bottom of the cage is sad indeed.

Rest in peace, Dominique.

(Above: Dominique and Sid in 2012)

Sniffing

With his new summer haircut, Copper reminds me of a Park Avenue dowager, her thin frame decked out in pearls and an old Chanel suit. He's an older doggie now, but still has his pride and his passions, just as these old women do.

Most of all (and unlike them), he loves to sniff.

I've grown far more tolerant of the ambling pace that allows him to inhale all matter of olfactory delights: the soil, the weeds, the marks (and sometimes much more) left by other dogs.

As his hearing has fled and his strength has faded, sniffing is one of the pleasures that remains — and who am I to deprive him of it.

Newly Mown

An unusual Thursday working at home, but other than that, fairly typical. On my walk this morning I was hit with a wave of gratitude for the relative normalcy of my life. Not that everything is perfect, only that it's for the most part blessedly normal.

I often feel this way when I trudge through my leafy neighborhood and see the newly mown lawns, the neatly coiled hoses, the freshly mulched trees. With one or two exceptions, the people who live here care about their property; they paint their shutters and put their trash out: Mondays for garbage, Tuesdays for recycling, Wednesdays for sticks and lawn clippings.

When we first moved here I thought the tidiness was a sign of suburban OCD.  But now it seems proof of increased property values. Something — or someone — has changed. I think it's me!

Usually Summer

The armchair travel of yesterday's post has an explanation, of course. It's almost solstice. School's out for summer.

Once a student and teacher, always one, I guess. Or at least always attached to that kind and gentle calendar, the one that offers summer after a long year of toil.

I know that I live in a fortunate time, one in which I don't have to work every waking minute, one in which I can expect to have some years off at the end of a long working life.

But to get there requires much shouldering to the grindstone now. Most of the time, the grindstone is cleverly disguised as a mission, a life's work, But sometimes, it isn't.

And when it isn't ... it's usually summer.

Rice Paddies Gleaming

Yesterday was a Monday on steroids. I kept feeing all weekend as if a vacation were beginning ... even though I knew one wasn't. I came to the office and dutifully wrote, edited and interviewed. But I was longing to be away from my desk.

So for today's post, a mental vacation, a memory. Two years ago, I was preparing for a trip to Bangladesh. It was a daunting assignment. I was interviewing dozens of people, many of them victims of human trafficking. And, to make me even more anxious, I was leading a writing workshop.

It all worked out, led to experiences and friendships I will never forget. So today, I'm thinking of Bangladesh, of the people there who have so little but give so much. Of sodden green pond banks, of rice paddies gleaming and jute drying in the sun.

Lighting One Candle

It's a strange sensation to lose electrical power in the middle of the night. Already dark and quiet, it might almost pass unnoticed. But I happened to wake at 4 a.m., perhaps missing the whir of the fan. When I glimpsed my darkened bedside clock, the silence suddenly made sense.

It was not just the deprivation of darkness, then, but a deeper lacking. Did I feel it somehow, drifting as we were without power through the night? I think so. My own small reading light seemed an insufficient candle to counter all that darkness. It gave me light enough to read by, though, and the evening was cool enough that I felt drowsy again before long.

Just as I began to drift off, a large truck chugged its way down the street. It was the power company. They were on it. I fell back to sleep lulled by the purr of the big truck's engine.

Long Twilights

I read in the newspaper today that we are not only in a period of long days and short nights but also in a period of long twilights, which occur around the summer solstice.

I learned in this article that there is something called "astronomical twilight," which only ends when the last glint of light leaves the sky. Last night that was 10:33 p.m. And this morning the light was back at it by 3:43 a.m.

Most of us can't discern such minute shadings of gray. But they are there. And they are longer now than at any other time of year.

Fresh Starts

The rain moved out overnight and left behind a bright breezy morning. As the wind blows you can see the underside of the leaves, and that creates an even more varied palette of green. I finished a big work project yesterday and am catching my breath from that. It feels like something new is beginning.

I like to think about all the little fresh starts we are given in a lifetime. Of course, there are the big ones: new schools, new jobs, new loves. And then the really big ones, births and deaths. But in between there are countless others: new weeks or weekends, visiting a friend we haven't seen in years, taking a trip and returning from one, finishing a book that sets the mind a spinning.

These little beginnings are the freshets of regular existence, burblings-up from the wellspring of grace that is there all along but is often forgotten.

Words That Live On

Yesterday would have been the 90th birthday of Anne Frank. Seventy-seven years ago, she received a diary for her 13th birthday, a diary she would fill with words that would live on for decades, and, most likely centuries, beyond her.

The contents were in many ways typical — conflicts with her mother, questions about her future. But it was written in 500 square feet of hidden space that Anne shared with her parents, sister and four other people. And it was written amidst the horrors of Nazi Europe.

“When I write, I can shake all of my cares," Anne wrote in her journal. "My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived. But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something truly great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?”

Anne would die not long after her 15th birthday. The diary she called "Kitty" was left behind in the "Secret Annex." She could not take it to Auschwitz or on to Bergen Belsen, where she and her sister died of disease and malnutrition shortly before Allies freed the concentration camps. But a family friend saved the journal, and gave it to Anne's father, Otto, who eventually had it published. It would be translated into 70 languages and sell tens of millions of copies around the world.

“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out," Anne wrote. "Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.”

(Above: a page from Anne Frank's Tales book. She also penned what she called The Book of Beautiful Sentences -- copying passages of writing that she liked -- started a novel and planned a book called The Secret Annex. Photo and information courtesy of the Anne Frank Museum website and The Writer's Almanac.) 

Good Things Coming?

My punctual and reliable Arlington bus must now make a time-consuming detour to avoid construction in my work neighborhood. You can't walk a block without hearing jack-hammers or the truck back-up sound. Amazon's HQ2 is already making its presence known in the dusty streets, the demolition, even the scaffolding.

Having lived for five years in New York City, I consider myself a scaffolding expert. Not in the sense of knowing how to construct it, but in the sense of knowing how to walk beneath it, which used to be... gingerly.

With all due respect to Big Apple scaffolding, the Crystal City version is cleaner, sturdier — and kinder on the eyes and the feet.

In New York, I felt as if I was taking my life in my own hands to walk in a dark tunnel beneath a contraption of wood and metal. But the pedestrian walkway I take now is open and bright. It even has motivational phrases on the walls: Good Things Coming, it says.

Let's hope.

What Are We Doing Here?

I'm picking my way through Marilynne Robinson's book of essays, What Are We Doing Here? I love Robinson's fiction and am enlightened by her nonfiction. But I have to read the latter carefully, and more than once, so dense is the prose, so tightly packed are the ideas it holds.

The extra time is never wasted, as her ideas are countercultural in the best sense of that word. Robinson writes about humanism and religion — and she writes unapologetically. Most of our great institutions grew out of our theology, which she defines as "the great architecture of thought and wonder that makes religious experience a house of many mansions, open to the soul's explorations."

Robinson does not shy away from delivering charges. Here's an example: "One thing theology must do now is to reconsider and reject the kind of thinking that tends to devalue humankind."

To read Robinson is to be reminded of a world richer and fuller than the one we inhabit now, one where what she calls the "moral self, that old wanderer through the trials and temptations of earthly life," was freer to roam and risk and challenge and live.

Come with Thy Grace

I often go to a Saturday-evening church service that "counts" for Sunday (it's a Catholic thing), and was surprised when I arrived to see the red wall hangings and vestments. I had forgotten that it was Pentecost, or more technically, it was Pentecost Eve. Turns out, I had unwittingly worn orange, and so was semi-appropriately decked out for the feast day.

I've written about Pentecost before, noting that it was a celebration of clarity, that from the many voices came one.  What spoke to me this time, though, was the jubilation of it all: the extra prayers (a sequence before the gospel), the special blessing, and, of course, the music.

It dawned on me, then, and not for the first time, that one of the needs church meets for me is singing aloud. I'm not saying I don't go for spiritual strengthening and inspiration. But to join voices with hundreds of others is not an opportunity I'm given every day.

We opened with "Come, Holy Ghost." Thanks to my parochial schooling, I know the words so well that I didn't even crack the hymnal till the second verse. "Come with thy grace and heavenly aid, to fill the hearts which thou hast made. To fill the hearts which thou hast made." I could almost hear my seventh- and eight-grade classmates belting it out with me, struggling as usual to reach that high "D."

Oodles

Last night we went out to dinner — a friendly, chaotic Thai place. It was just the five of us, a rare occurrence in these days of married and otherwise partnered daughters. It was a lovely reminder of what started it all.

I'm so fortunate to have in my life the lovely men my daughters love. But I also treasure hanging out with the original us.

Layers of family, levels of family, oodles of goodness all around.

(The girls many years ago. It must have been after a band concert, which is why Claire, right, is in formal attire.) 

Fortunate Day

I was waking up slowly when the sound of a falling branch catapulted me into full consciousness. It's a hazard of living in the midst of a waning suburban forest, a place where the old oaks have outlived their three score and ten.

This time we seem to have been spared. It was either a branch from the common land, or a smaller limb off the tree in our yard that's already slated for demolition next time the tree guy comes around.

But the swoosh and thud did serve as a rousing alarm. It got me up and into the morning, where I took a delicious amble through humid air and young birds doing that little looping fly that is so endearing.

A day that begins with an early walk, no matter how one comes by it, is a fortunate day indeed.

The Boys in the Air

Today, as we celebrate the 75th anniversary of D-Day, I think not just of the boys who stormed the beaches but also of the boys who flew above them. One of them was my dad.

Frank Cassidy was 20 years old when he took the trip of a lifetime, courtesy of the U.S. government. It was an all-expenses voyage to and from what Dad called "Jolly Old" England. He was stationed at a base outside the village of Horham in East Anglia.

On June 6, 1944, Dad had just turned 21. He had become adept at crawling into the tail-gunner's seat of a B-17 bomber and firing the gun when necessary. That day, he and his crew would fly two missions, softening up enemy defenses, backing up the infantry, the men who were landing and dying on the beaches of Normandy.

Dad always insisted that what he did was nothing compared with them. "I don't think the American people appreciate what some of those men did," he told a newspaper reporter in 2009. "Those guys, they deserve all the honors."

With all due respect, Dad, I disagree. I think you deserve the honors, too.

What He Learned

Today, walking to work from Metro, I thought about the book Everything I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.  It was crossing the street that made it come to mind and, once there, it wouldn't go away.

The book was quite a phenomenon when it was published in 1986, and a 25th anniversary edition appears to be selling briskly. In it, Robert Fulghum says that he stands by his simple rules, that he still believes if we only practiced what we learned in kindergarten we would all be better off.

What did we learn? Things like "share everything," "play fair," "clean up your own mess" and "when you go out into the world, watch for traffic, hold hands and stick together."

Though it's easy to poke fun at the simplistic message, given the state of our nation and our world, Fulghum's words resonate even more deeply today than it did when he wrote them.

Exceptional!

We've been dished out a couple of exceptional early June days with cool nights and mornings and bright, breezy afternoons.  It's the kind of weather where you're equally comfortable in long sleeves or short, blue jeans or capris.

It's flexi-weather. Choose from a, b or c. Add d, e or f. Mix thoroughly and enjoy.

Which is what I've been doing. A short walk last evening took me only halfway round my usual course, but al fresco dining completed the night.

And this morning, I threw open the windows and let the air in.

We have so few days like this; I want to savor each one.

This Old Kitchen

The wallpaper is original, the cabinets, too. The countertop is Formica and the appliances don't match. Storage is minimal and opening the refrigerator door blocks off the entire room.

Yet, more than 11, 000 meals have flowed from this room and countless family conversations have occurred in it. It's been the scene of celebration, jubilation and consternation.

It was put through its paces this weekend, with all the meals prepared, dishes washed and leftovers crammed into any fridge nook and cranny I could find. And of course with the girls together making coffee, slicing fruit — and hanging out.

Though we took a few "formal" family shots over the weekend, it's candid ones like these that I appreciate the most. They capture the allure of the kitchen, the craziness of it, the love and laughter it has known.

Will we ever renovate it? I doubt it. But if we do, I hope all the good vibes remain.

Shark Week!

I don't think it's officially Shark Week, but it was shark week at my house yesterday as Celia and I took in last summer's "The Meg."

Imagine the largest Great White you can, multiply it by 10 and you have a megalodon, a prehistoric shark-like creature that was thought to be extinct but which (in this rousing tale) lives on in a hidden part of the ocean floor below a layer of gas.

When a band of explorers finds a way to permeate the barrier and descend into an eerie place deeper than the Mariana Trench, they find a shark so large that it eats the explorer's roving pod for breakfast.

Celia and I had great fun trying to figure out who would be eaten and who would survive. We were right about half the time.

Wow, it's good to have her home!