Rhode Island is a funny place.
Everyone actually does know everyone. I remember buying a drink during intermission at a show at the old Ocean State Theatre (formerly Loew's State Theatre, now the Providence Performing Arts Center), and looking at the guy morosely nursing a drink across from me, and realizing that he was the Lieutenant Governor.
And you know the dancing traffic cop? Of course you do. Well, that cop is my barber's brother.
People seldom leave their own neighborhoods. People don't like to cross bridges, or county lines, or state lines, if they don't have to. Usually they don't have to.
People talk funny. It's not quite a Boston accent and not quite a New York accent. It's got its own vocabulary, but a lot of the words are dying now; people don't order “cabinets” anymore, they order milkshakes. But they still say “downcity” instead of “downtown.”
We choose odd emblems and symbols. Our state bird is a chicken. Our state drink is coffee milk. Our state shell is the quahog. The Tennis Hall of Fame is here, near where the the Croquet Hall of Fame used to be. Streets have the names of virtues and intangibles and qualities: Friendship, Benefit, Beneficent. Our state motto, endearingly, is “Hope.”
Everyone remembers where everything used to be. “Turn where the Outlet department store used to be, and take a left where the Speidel factory used to be.” I can point out the location of the Rhode Island Auditorium, even though it was torn down before I moved here. And anytime you want to go up to Federal Hill, I can show you where that vending-machine place used to be. You know the one. The Mob one.
We were “founded” by a renegade Baptist preacher named Roger Williams, with some help from an Antinomian preacher named Anne Hutchinson. (It was news to the Narragansetts that we needed to be “founded” at all.) Before either arrived, back in the 1630s, a man named William Blackstone built a cabin in what's now Cumberland, and lived among the Native Americans, and grew apples, and once he rode up to Boston on the back of a bull. He preached under an oak tree that stood in Cumberland until the legendary Hurricane of 1938 toppled it.
Our neighborhood includes two houses where George Washington spent the night. One is vacant, echoing, badly renovated; the other is small, cozy, like your grandmother's house. When you go up the narrow staircase, it occurs to you that you're climbing the same stairs that Washington climbed on his way to bed, and probably the house didn't look so much different then than now. It gives you a pleasant odd solemn feeling.
The ocean is never far away. Narragansett Bay is murky and usually choppy. The ocean off Newport and Matunuck and Westerly is wide and flinty and bright. You can pretend that you see Block Island and Long Island to the south. Sometimes maybe you can.
Winters are gray and cold. Summers are humid and stifling. Spring is brief and vivid and very beautiful. Autumn is long and bright and very beautiful.
A few months after coming here, back in 1978, I sat near a duckpond in Roger Williams Park and wondered if I'd made the right decision in coming here.
Thirty-two years later, I'm still here.
No comments:
Post a Comment