"UP IN YEARS" That's the title of a small booklet of essays written by Clara Cassidy, in 1974, at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. It is an autographed copy.
It contains thirty-six, one-page essays, two recipes for cookies (Ginger Snaps and Sugar Cookies, a full page black and white drawing of comfortable-looking, armless rocking chair - a drawing done by A. Preissler and on display at the Albatross Gallery, Harper's Ferry.
This is the sort of nostalgia book one buys on the spur of the moment when traveling, reads through hurried, then,so often, gets lost on the back of a bookshelf or in a drawer with travel folders, motel, post cards other such things which en to save themselves for many years.
The kindly lady pictured on the back cover is about right in every respect as what I imagined Clara Cassidy to be or have been, because, having been born in l902 in Lancaster Count, Nebraska at would place her right up there as the book's title suggests "Up in Year" and there is a parenthetical subtitle appended which sets the tone of the entire book for me: "Up In Years(...and off my rocker.) Clara Cassidy was a warm somebody I'd liked to have known.
She wrote short essays about her "Neighbors", A Funny Happened" in which she discovers that "...what happens is not important. What matters is one's attitude to what happens." She compiles "Rainy Day Lists" and urges you to do so, as well. She contrasts her early living in Nebraska and in California's Sacramento Valley
She gave her opinion in sideway glances at society: "Suppose Goldilocks have been put in a day care center? What if Red Ridinghood's grandmother had lived in a Leisure Colony?" or
"Sometimes well-meaning relatives remove all incentive for living by being too helpful."
I find, too. that Clara Cassidy was quite adept at composing those short seventeen syllable Japanese style poems called "haiku".None are included in this rocking chair book but she did a great many of them - indicative, perhaps, of the precise, manner in which she had trained her alert mind to work.
Some people think "checkers";others think "chess".
"Many" she commented at one point, "seek companions of same age and similar tastes, thus guaranteeing a humdrum old age."
A.L.M. April 17 2006 [c395wds]
