Mom's Scott Hotel

It is February 1, 2024, what would have been Mom's 98th birthday. Today, I cede this space to the person who inspired me first, and inspires me still. In today's post, Mom writes about one of the homes she lived in when she was growing up. The Scott Hotel is still standing, and is a source of continuing fascination. 

Most towns have a street called Broadway, wider than the rest, wider than Main or any of the tree- or number-named streets. The name itself makes one expect it to be wider and more important than most — and in the early life of most cities, it was. In Lexington, Transylvania, the first college west of the Alleghenies, and the Opera House, where the Barrymores and others performed, were built on Broadway. 

So when my uncle wanted to build a hotel by the railroad, he built it across Broadway from the Southern Depot. More than 20 trains a day passed that way and all but the fastest stopped to deposit or pick up passengers. Some wanted meals, some lodging for a night or even longer. 

None of my friends at St. Peter's School lived in a hotel. But I did. It was my Daddy's hotel, started by his uncle John Scott, and the street beside it was called Scott Street. It was a small hotel, three floors and about 20 or 25 rooms. The Southern Railroad ran right beside it, and the impressive yellow brick Southern Station was right across the street. 

One of the rooms on the second floor had been turned into our playroom. We kept our toys there and played all sorts of games. Several times we put on plays there, hanging a sheet and pretending it was a velvet curtain. We practiced hard and then we had to find an audience. We would go down to the lobby and ask some of the regulars to attend: Cigarette Charley and Pink-Eyed Whitey.

Mom's writings don't always have a natural conclusion. This one, like so many, leaves me wanting more.

Together Again

It's the last day of January, and I'm thinking ahead to tomorrow's post, the only guest post I have all year. My mother will "write" that one, as soon as I browse through her papers and find which of her writings to highlight.

In the meantime, I'm thinking about Mom, who would have turned 98 tomorrow. Yesterday I was repairing a tear in a blue-striped toddler dress that I wore as a baby. I found the pinafore for this dress earlier (see basement decluttering, below) and put it aside for sweet Aurora. When I delivered it to her on Saturday and her mother slipped it over her head and shoulders she immediately started to dance. It's that kind of garment. 

But a pinafore requires a dress, and once I dug through another box and found it, I could see why I'd not set it aside, too. The dress was badly torn, the skirt pulled away from the bodice, the sash unattached on one side. Nothing to do but find a needle and thread and begin. 

Once I got into the project, I could see the previous repairs, the mended side seams, the hem that Mom had let down, her stitches surprisingly small and tidy. For an hour or so last night I felt like we were working shoulder to shoulder, laughing and chatting as our needles flew, together again.

Visits to Grandmother

I awoke to a snow-globe world, a yard transformed by frozen precipitation that, at least as far as I knew, wasn't predicted. It's a perverse way to celebrate what would have been Mom's 97th birthday. She would have hated the snow, as she did all winter weather. Another, better way to celebrate Mom's birthday is with this guest post by her, a tradition I established after she died. In this except from a story Mom wrote years ago she talks about visits to her grandmother Concannon. Mom is pictured above, second from right, with her sisters and brother. 

I can still remember our silent rides to see Grandma every Sunday afternoon. Daddy drove us to her house on High Street in his big brown Pontiac with the yellow wire wheels. My sisters and brother and I would have rather been anywhere else in the world. The dread we felt mounted as we got ever closer to her home. 

Her door was usually unlocked (most doors were in those days), but my dad always knocked gently before he opened it and led us inside. Sometimes our grandmother stood to greet us, but often she didn't get up from her high-back chair at the far end of the room, which to an impressionable child like me looked for all the world like a throne. We each said hello to this tiny woman my dad called Mama and she always answered with a similar hello followed by each of our names. I always wondered if she did that just to prove that she knew the three of us girls apart. 

After we spoke to her, we took our place in one of the small hard chairs along the walls and waited to be called on to speak. Once we were of school age we were always asked what we were studying and what we were reading on our own. I often rehearsed my answers silently on the way over, then gave them quickly and breathed a sigh of relief that it was over until the next Sunday.

Through all those years I watched Grandma and my dad together, mother and son, with so little to say to one another. Each bit of conversation between them was followed by a long period of silence. Although I did learn from listening that they both liked Franklin Roosevelt, were sure no other Irish tenor would ever replace John McCormick and didn't believe in buying anything you couldn't pay cash for, I was never able to figure out if they really loved each other. 

Grandma died when I was a senior in high school so she didn't get to see me graduate from college, the first in our family to do so. I wish she had known. I think she would have been pleased.

Mom in Manhattan

It is February 1, 2022, what would have been Mom's 96th birthday. On this day, as on several previous February 1sts, I cede this space to the person who inspired me first, and inspires me still. In this post, written in 1994, Mom describes a snowy Manhattan and muses on what the city meant to her.

I have been snowbound in New York now for several days. I look out the window on 27th Street and watch the snow pile up. Hardy New Yorkers trudge through the ever-deepening snow. 

At home in Lexington when it snows, we rarely see a car drive down Colonial Drive and almost never see anyone venture out on foot. Here it is so different. The attitude is "nothing will stop us, even 18 inches of snow." That must be a part of the chemistry that makes New York City what it is. 

I wish I had lived my life in New York City. It excites me as no other place has. There's never been a time when I was ready to leave. And each time I have left, there's been a little bit of myself that's stayed behind.

(Photo: Vincent Paul, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Seeing Mom

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.) 

Two for the Road

When Mom and I traveled to Europe together many years ago, we bought matching sweaters "just in case" it was chilly. We were immediately glad we did. We donned them the first evening, as we listened to an outdoor concert in a chill June drizzle in London, and wore them often throughout the next six weeks as we toured England, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria and Italy. 

We slipped ponchos over them when it was raining and slept under them on overnight train trips. They also came in handy as robes and cushions. We wore them so much that we never wanted to see them again when we got home. 

They've always been sentimental to me, enough that I stuck them in a suitcase and stored them in the attic for years. And that has preserved them, preserved the memories, too. 

Jammin!

Every year at Christmastime, Mom made a jam cake. It was a recipe from Dad's side of the family, and was passed down with great care. Mom copied the recipe over several times, but she saved the old versions. Reading through them, which I did to make sure I was getting the ingredients right, was like an archaeological dig; there was the same fragility to the oldest artifact.

Once I figured out that the "modern version" (which included purple crayon scribbles, proof of its age) was indeed a fair and true copy, I still had to make the cake, which began, as it did for Mom, with an all-out search for jam with seeds. In my case, the search took me 20 miles away, to a Walmart Super Store in Sterling. (I found this highly ironic since Mom never visited a Walmart; she thought the stores were destroying small-town America — and in this case, as with so much else, she was right.) 

Once the jam was purchased and the other ingredients assembled, I proceeded to make the cake. Mom had always made a very big deal of it, as if she was making a four-tier wedding cake. How hard can it be, I wondered. 

Pretty darn hard, it turns out. There is the sheer muscle involved in stirring the thick batter. There's separating the six eggs, beating the whites till frothy (I was convinced I had botched this part) and pre-mixing certain ingredients (such as vinegar and baking soda) before adding them to the batter. 

By the time I got the cake in the oven, it looked like a small tornado had ripped through the kitchen. But after a tense baking period (I can remember holidays where the jam cake fell — and that was not a pretty sight), the cake emerged more or less intact. I couldn't have been prouder. Now all I had to do ... was frost the thing.

Mothers and Daughters

I've been missing Mom more than usual lately, not just because it's Mother's Day but also because of what I'm reading and thinking, because there is so much to tell her, and most of all because not just one but two of my daughters are soon to be mothers.

It's a joy and a privilege to watch your child become a parent. It's role-bending and life-affirming. It's an excellent counterbalance to a worldwide pandemic. And it's the sort of experience that makes me wish my parents were still here to share it with (putting aside for the moment that I would be worried sick about them if they were).

So today I will just have to share it virtually, as we do so much these days; share it by saying here how thankful I am to be not just a mother, but a mother of daughters — and of daughters becoming mothers.

Tissues

If I ever doubt I am my mother's daughter, I need look no further than my pockets ... or my purse ... or the sleeves of a cardigan. For in all of those places, I am sure to find ... tissues.

I was just downstairs washing a pair of Mom's pants that I have decided to give away. I will snap a photo of them before doing so, a new practice I've been told works wonders in the quest to declutter. But before putting them in the washer, I checked the pockets — and there, of course, I found a Kleenex.

Mom kept them everywhere. Her pocketbooks were full of them and so were her bedclothes. It was probably the problematic sinuses that have come to plague her children as well, and the lung condition she suffered certainly didn't help.

But to me the tissues are endearing — and I hope I never come to the end of them.

Remembering Mom

I'm remembering Mom today on the fourth anniversary of her passing. So much has happened since she died, so many changes in my own life and the life of our country.  I often wonder what she would make of them.

She would be surprised by my "new" job, not so new anymore. It's strange to think she knew nothing of this chapter of my life, a chapter I didn't anticipate, with its travel to faraway places and writing about some of the world's neediest people. She would approve ... to a point. But she would also be encouraging me to write another book.

As for the life of the country, Mom (a lifelong Democrat who grew more conservative with age) saw enough of the 2016 campaign-to-come to offer this pithy observation of the Trump phenomenon: "It's the right message but the wrong messenger."

I'm thankful that both she and Dad were spared having to live through the rancor and divisiveness of these times. In that sense, their exits were perfectly timed.

But of course, I wish they were both still here. And today I especially miss my strong, beautiful, intelligent, inspirational, one-of-a-kind mother.

(Mom at the Franciscan Monastery in Washington, D.C. )

Pink and White

They were selling pink and white carnation corsages at church yesterday — pink if your mom is living, white if she is not. I bought neither, but even the choice made my eyes sting.

I can remember wearing corsages on long ago Easters and maybe I could even fish up a memory of wearing a corsage on Mother's Day. It wasn't reliving memories that made me sad. It was knowing that, if I had bought a flower yesterday, it would have been white.

Which is why I was even more grateful to come home, take a walk and spend the rest of Mother's Day on the deck with my daughters. There were some vague plans for a group hike, but we all agreed that just sitting and talking was best.

There was a fullness to the day that doesn't come often enough and is all the more precious when it does. There was laughing and talking and cooking and eating. And there was this thought, poignant and comforting : If my girls were wearing corsages, theirs would be pink.

Mother's Day

On this Mother's Day, my first without Mom, I think about a scene I witnessed at the beach and have thought about often since. It was nothing special; in fact it (or something similar) happens all the time. A little girl in pink was running down the shore. She caught my eye because there were precious few people on the beach that day — it was cold! — and also because she seemed young to be on her own.

I had no fear for the child, assumed she was being watched from some distant towel. Instead, I thought about what the world looked like through her eyes. Maybe her first burst of independence. The horizon spreading out before her, endless sand and a squawking gull she wanted to catch.

Then I saw a woman in quick pursuit. "Marina! Marina! Where do you think you're going?"

The little girl turned, ready to be caught. The woman threw her arms wide open and dashed toward Marina, who was now flying toward her. Soon they came together; the woman gathering the child up in her arms and twirling her around.

It's the oldest story and the truest story. And it made me think of this passage from Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, which I can never read with a dry eye, especially not today.

I write this at a wide desk in a pine shed as I always do these recent years, in this life I pray will last, while the summer sun closes the sky to Orion and to all the other winter stars over my roof. The young oaks growing just outside my windows wave in the light, so that concentrating, lost in the past, I see the pale leaves wag and think as my blood leaps: Is someone coming?

Is it Mother coming for me, to carry me home? Could it be my own young, my own glorious Mother, coming across the grass for me, the morning light on her skin, to get me and bring me back? Back to where I last knew all I needed, the way to her strong arms?

Finding Francis

It's not as if I had lost him, or didn't know about him at all. But there was a bit of the miraculous in what happened yesterday.

I was facing a difficult situation at work, a delicate, pretending-like-everything-is-okay-but-it's-really-not situation. And that, on top of the grief and worry, was making for some desperate hours. I needed quick relief, an instant infusion of calmness and strength. So for some reason — I'm not sure why — I googled a 16th-century saint, Francis de Sales.

This is not St. Francis of the Franciscans, namesake of Pope Francis. This is the other Francis. I know about him because my parish priests are of his order, the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales, and his writings are sometimes reprinted in the bulletin.

Still, googling saints is not something I do in times of trouble. I'm more likely to pace or bite my nails. Nevertheless, the impulse was so strong that it was like reaching for Motrin when I feel a headache coming on. There was the near certain promise of relief. I knew this was what I was supposed to do.

So I found this: "Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset." And this: "Have patience with all things but chiefly have patience with yourself." And this: "The same everlasting Father who cares for you today will care for you tomorrow and every day. Either he will shield you from suffering or give you unfailing peace to bear it. Be at peace then and put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginings."

Yesterday I found Francis when I needed him the most.

The Word

It's been more than a week now since my mother passed away. The wake and funeral are behind us. Closets have been cleaned, clothes sorted, papers boxed for another time. The Kleenex box is almost empty. This is not a good time to run out of tissues!

What I'm searching for, I realize, is not closure but continuance. How will Mom go on? I can save a few of her sweaters and dresses, plenty of photographs and other memorabilia — but what I want most are the words she's written.

Father Linh, who said Mom's funeral mass, wisely made the Word his theme. "In the beginning was the Word," he said. In the Word we find eternal life.

Mom started the Museum of the Written Word. She dealt with words all her life. She didn't write as many words as she had hoped. But she encouraged others to write them. One of them was me. I best get on with it.

Eulogy

I don't even know if I'll be able to go through with it, but I hope I will. Today at Mom's funeral I hope I'm able to stand up and say a few words about her. It's a sad duty, but an important one. Because she can no longer speak for herself, we must speak for her.

But how to do that? How to sum up a life in a few paragraphs?

No choice but to plunge in, to type words on a page, print the page, edit the page, add some new words, remove some old ones. No choice but to try and do it. Because the eulogy is not just for the person who is gone, of course; it's for all of us still present, all of us who must keep on living.

People and Place

The long drive west, this time with new eyes. Wondering how often I will make this trip with Mom and Dad both gone. Still, when the people are gone, the people become place. So visiting the place becomes a way to be with the people.

Here in the house every sight my eye lights on is filled with thoughts of Mom. Here is the dining room with its Chinese screen print, the vase I bought her in New York City's Chinatown, the bird prints that go back as far as memory.

In the family room, her books on writing are stacked on the organ bench. I can barely look at them. Those were the books whose ideas we'd talk about for the Museum of the Written Word, some of them I gave to her. Books on Cuneiform script or the Dead Sea Scrolls. The books stand for all of Mom's projects, all the big ideas she had and never quite completed.

At home in Virginia I'm well insulated. Here in Lexington, I'm raw. This is what we must do, I know; this is part of grieving. To look, to see and remember, is as painful as it is necessary.

Suzanne Concannon Cassidy, 1926-2015

My mother died on a crisp autumn Saturday afternoon a few minutes before 3 p.m. She had been ailing for some time, but the end came quickly.

When my father died, it was easier to put the words into some order, to describe the indescribable.  But for Mom — a writer, the founding editor of two magazines and creator of the Museum of the Written Word — I'm having trouble. She was my mom, after all, and I was so close to her.

Last Sunday I slept on a strange little pull-out couch next to her hospital bed. I woke up throughout the night and looked at the glowing orange numbers of her pulse-oxygen meter. Admittedly not the most restful sleep.

But at about 5:30 a.m. I dozed again and dreamed that Mom and I were taking a trip together. She was driving a car — barefoot and in her hospital gown. At some point I realized this was not the best way to be tootling around the countryside. "I should take the wheel," I said to myself. And I did.

It was not a subtle dream, but it was comforting.  It was helping me know that life will go on. I'm not sure exactly how, but it will.

Continuous Loop

In the hours I've spent at Mom's bedside recently I've found myself staring at a TV screen playing a continuous loop of nature shots. There is some New Agey music that goes with it, what we used to call Muzak, only with an airier, lighter touch. But the sound is usually turned off, so I'm looking at photographs without the benefit of soundtrack.

One thing I've noticed is the similarity of the shots. Though the landscapes may be of mountains, seascapes or red-rock deserts, the foreground is usually green. There's a reason for that, I believe, something to do with our earliest origins, the safety of enclosure giving way to an open view. Splendor in doses. Domesticated wilderness. 

All I know is that it is mesmerizing. I look at Mom, I look at the screen, I think of all that can be held in a head and a heart.

A Mom, Running

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.