Seward's Folly Bookstore

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Back in the 1970s / 1980s, there was a little bookstore on the corner of Transit Street and Brook Street in Providence, called “Seward’s Folly.” It was run by an older couple, Schuyler Seward and his wife Peterkin.

It was a small musty wonderland of a bookstore, and the Sewards were always very kind to me. I went there whenever I could. I wanted a book by Will Cuppy the 1930s / 1940s humorist, and they managed to find it for me, and after that they knew me as “Cuppy,” because who in the 1980s remembered Will Cuppy?

Schuyler had a beard and mustache as I do now, and was very wry and very smart, and one online source claims that he was a speechwriter for the Truman Administration. Peterkin was small and walked with difficulty, but had a wonderful smile. They had two dogs when I knew them: a huge poodle and a huge bulldog – both elderly and tired – who had to be taken upstairs (where the Sewards lived) and showered with cool water from time to time in the summertime, so that they wouldn’t overheat.

The Sewards were lovable people, and very memorable.

I wonder how many people remember them now?

And who will remember me when I’m gone?

This is the very last bit of Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”:

“But soon we shall die . . . and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” 

Do you get that? We don’t last forever, but we will leave something behind.

The Sewards left me a wonderful legacy – a memory of two intelligent kind friendly people. I hope, when my time comes, that I will leave behind some tiny fraction of the kindly legacy the Sewards bequeathed me.

(Postscript: while researching this blog, I discovered that Peterkin died only a few months  ago – on July 30, 2013 – not far away, in Rumford, Rhode Island. Schuyler evidently predeceased her, though I couldn’t find his obituary. They are survived by their daughter Abbi.)

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H. P. Lovecraft

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As soon as I moved to Rhode Island, I discovered Howard Phillips Lovecraft. He was a local author, who died back in 1937; he wrote fantasy and horror stories and novels, often with Rhode Island / New England settings. Sometimes he used real locations (there are a couple of stories set in Providence); in other stories, he used New England settings, but gave them assumed names. (If you’re a follower of the Batman saga, and the “Arkham Sanitarium” means anything to you, you should know that Arkham was Lovecraft’s alias for Salem, Massachusetts – “witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham.”

In Lovecraft’s story “The Haunter of the Dark,” a man on the East Side of Providence (where I live) sees an oddly-shaped building on Federal Hill in the distance. He walks over to see it – and awful things ensue.

In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” a New Englander takes a bus to a little Massachusetts coastal town and finds that its inhabitants are not quite human.

In “The Dunwich Horror,” some professors from Miskatonic University (whose campus is, of course, in witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham) seek out a horrible invisible presence somewhere in central/western Massachusetts.

Lovecraft believed in something he called “cosmicism.” In brief: the universe is utterly incomprehensible to human beings, and is in fact mostly inimical to them. Almost all of his stories show human beings as foolish pawns, always on the verge of total destruction.

My favorite Lovecraft stories involve the Great Old Ones. They’re kind of hard to explain, because they’re supposed to be mysterious, but anyway: the Great Old Ones are extra-dimensional beings lingering right off to one side of our reality. They are very powerful, and they are just waiting to get back into our world. One is Cthulhu, a gigantic horrible octopoid god-monster; another is Yog-Sothoth, a mass of glowing lights. There are many others, like Hastur and Nyarlathotep and Azathoth (who “blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity”). It’s only a matter of time before they reassert themselves here, and once they do – that’s all, folks.

So, kids, repeat after me, before it’s too late:

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

(It probably won’t help, but it couldn’t hurt.)

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Geese gone wild

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When it rains, the geese take over the greenspace near the Providence River. There are usually at least a couple dozen of them – big fat waddlers, with beautiful light-and-dark markings. I took this photo yesterday morning:

Lots of good eatin’ there! But wild geese are tough. My sister and brother-in-law had some wild geese fly over their farm back in the 1970s, and shot a few, and Susan prepared one for Thanksgiving, and – well, we couldn’t even chew it. Wild geese get a lot of exercise.

And geese are rumored to be foul-tempered. I’m always a little timid when they’re standing in front of me on the sidewalk; I never know when I’m gonna get stampeded and squawked at. They’re smaller than me, individually, but they outnumber me. They could swarm me.

And then there are the poops. Kids, there is nothing in the world quite so vile-looking as a goose poop. It’s a big green slimy-looking thing about the size of a small cigar. And geese poop a lot. (My mother always used the expression “go like a goose.” Evidently she knew what she was talking about.)

But I like to watch them. The other day, I saw two of them pecking at one another, running around aimlessly in a circle and honking.

Get it? Wild goose chase.

Ha ha.

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The wildflowers of downtown Providence, Rhode Island

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A local photographer has taken some lovely photos of plants and flowers that occupy the property formerly occupied by I-195 in Providence (which, for the past two years or so, has been a vast green space in the very middle of the city).

I walk through that green space every day. I rejoice in it. I love my friend Oma’s comment recently: “Here in England it's not so important to drive as over there [in the USA]. In your neighbourhood it looks similar. As long as you can get to the shops, you can walk along the sidewalks and look at the flowers or the weeds.”

Notice what she said: “the flowers or the weeds.”

She and I feel the same way: weeds are lovely too. She sent me a lovely book about weeds a while back, and it was after my own heart.

Here are some of my own photos of weeds / wildflowers in the neighborhood. They’re not as good as they might be, but oh well, I’m a terrible photographer, who cares?:

CHICORY (Cichorium intybus). Beautiful blue/purple flowers. This is a picture of a lovely stand of them very near the Point Street Bridge. The roots are roasted and ground and mixed with coffee; I’ve had coffee with chicory, and it’s delicious.

BUTTER AND EGGS (Linaria vulgaris). A beautiful roadside wildflower. Not useful for anything that I know of. Also called “toadflax.” I like the name “butter and eggs” better

MILKWEED (Asclepias sp.). I mistakenly told a coworker recently that this was “Joe Pye Weed,” which is horribly wrong. The flowers are very fragrant, and the plants are attractive, and the seeds are big cloudy masses of fluff.

RABBIT’S FOOT CLOVER (Trifolium arvense). I only identified this one a few weeks ago. It’s obviously a clover, but fuzzier, and very cute. This one was huge until it was cut down by the city, but it began to come back within days. You can’t kill clover.

BIRDSFOOT TREFOIL (Lotus corniculatus). Obviously a legume, with beautiful yellow pea-like blossoms. The whole field was golden with these, until they were cut down. They too came back within days.

JAPANESE KNOTWEED (Fallopia japonica). A terrible invasive species from Asia. But it has lovely foliage and nice flowers.

DEADLY NIGHTSHADE (Atropa belladonna). A relative of the tomato. Look at this pretty little lady, with pretty purple blossoms! But she’s terribly poisonous. Notice the cute little green mini-tomato berries; they’ll be a delicious-looking red later in the season. Just don’t eat them, okay?

QUEEN ANNE’S LACE (Daucus carota). The wild carrot. This is a sweet little flower that also grew very healthily where I was born, back in southwest Washington. This is a very small specimen, but nice; I’m always glad to see it.

These are all just as beautiful as any garden flowers. More so, really, because they don’t rely on gardeners to take care of them.

They take care of themselves.

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Skunk hour

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The Providence area is full of wildlife. I wrote about fisher cats not long ago, nasty weaselly things prowling down by the riverside. Foxes are being seen this summer all over the East Side (though I haven’t seen one yet, and I would love to, because I think they’re cute). Bunnies are everywhere. Ditto big ugly garbage-eating raccoons. Ditto possums, one of which hissed at me a few years ago when I passed it on the street.

And then there are skunks.

They’re always smaller than I think they’re going to be, like kittens. Their colors are lovely. But they’re alarming, for obvious reasons, or maybe just for one very obvious reason.

I can usually smell them when they’re in the neighborhood. Either I’m especially sensitive to their scent, or my rural upbringing makes me more aware of them. (Our old family dog back in the 1960s got sprayed more than once, and I can still hear him whining and crying in my mind.)

I was coming out of the local market one recent evening. It’s only about two blocks away from our apartment, and I have my choice of two routes home: a dull route that goes straight down the avenue, and another much more interesting sidewalk that winds up the hillside and is surrounded by shrubbery. I usually choose the winding sidewalk for the sake of aesthetics (even though I know that robbers and muggers are probably waiting among the shrubs to jump me), and so I did the other night.

But a young skinny guy was coming down the walk toward me, jabbering at me. I thought (charitably) that he was speaking on his Bluetooth, but then he approached me with an earnest look on his face. “There’s a skunk up there!” he exclaimed. “At the top of the path! He’s looking very – territorial!”

“Which way was he facing?” I said. “Toward you, or away from you?”

“Toward me,” he said. “But he wasn’t moving, and he had a determined look on his face.”

That was enough for me. I thanked Mr. Skinny Bicycle for saving me from a fate worse than death, and went home via the dull safe route.

Here are the last four stanzas of Robert Lowell’s great poem, “Skunk Hour”:

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

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Pirate gardens

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There used to be a big nonsensical loop of interstate highway through the middle of downtown Providence. Some years ago, they rerouted the highway more sensibly, and tore down the old highway (which ran through some really prime downtown real estate). It’s mostly just green now: grass, and weeds, and wildflowers, and now and then (especially after a good heavy rain) huge angry geese.

When Boston redeveloped after the Big Dig, they left a nice strip of green through the heart of the city, and it’s a beautiful long narrow park snaking through the downtown area.

Providence won’t be that smart, I fear. I’m sure developers are already sparring for the land. But, for now, it’s mostly open space.

As I walk down Wickenden Street toward the Point Street Bridge, I cross a corner of this open space. And this is what I encountered about a month ago:

Some local person – “Pip” – had claimed a few square feet of it, to grow sunflowers and cosmos and various other charming odds and ends.

Within a week or so, some other people had joined Pip and made their own tiny garden beside his own.

I wanted to see this pirate enterprise prosper. I wanted to see ten or twenty more little pirate gardens spring up by Pip’s garden.

But gardening is hard. Weeds and wildflowers can grow all by themselves without care; garden flowers need water and cultivation. Back about a week or so ago, things were getting pretty dry down there, and Pip’s garden was suffering

No one ever said that piracy was an easy life.

But Pip learned his lesson. It’s been a pretty hot summer, and Pip has been keeping everything watered nicely since then. The sunflower especially is very cute (as you can see).

I’d like to see more of this. I’d like to see more people reclaiming unused land, in vacant lots and by the roadsides, for flowers and whatever they wish. I’ve tried scattering seeds and planting things in odd places myself, but nothing ever seems to come of my attempts. (I should stick to wildflowers, I suppose.)

Pip’s kind of piracy is the kind of piracy I can really support.

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Buzzards

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I walk to work most days – well, part of the way, anyway.  On the way, I cross the Point Street Bridge, which crosses the Providence River just as it flows out into Narragansett Bay.

 

 

A few weeks ago, I was walking across the bridge, observing the usual bird population: seagulls, ducks, cormorants.

 

 

Then, out of a bush in front of me, a huge bird rose. It flapped its wings lazily and flew away, its ass toward me, obviously unconcerned about me.

 

 

It was much bigger than a gull or a duck or a goose. Maybe a heron or a stork? They’re not uncommon here, except you don’t see them much in the winter.

 

 

But the mystery bird glanced back at me as it soared away, and its long beak was crooked.

 

 

Aha. A vulture, or a buzzard.

 

 

They also are not unknown here. There are communities that are plagued by them: they’re noisy and messy, and they eat garbage, and they crap garbage.

 

 

And in our neighborhood!

 

 

What is this, a Warner Brothers cartoon?

 

 

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From paradise to parking lot

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You know I have a great affection for weeds. I grew up on the edge of a National Forest, and we had more land than we could use (my parents started with twenty acres of woods and pasture, sold half, and still couldn’t figure out what to do with the remaining ten acres). There was one small patch of weeds, probably twenty feet square, just off to one side of our house, on a little hill. My mother insisted that it be mowed from time to time, but I resisted. I rejoiced in it. It had everything: dandelion, chess, quack, vetch, three kinds of clover, plaintain. I literally used to roll in that weed patch on sunny days. It was a miniature jungle, just right for a little boy.

 

 

I visit my old home on Google Earth from time to time. The house is still there (though greatly changed). But I see that my old patch of weeds is all plowed up now, made into useful ground.

 

 

What a pity.

 

 

Even here in Providence, where people have been building and ripping up and building again for over three hundred years, there are still little patches of chaos. One of my favorites was on Angell Street, a few blocks from where I’m writing this. In summer it was practically tropical; it featured a couple of gigantic trees-of-Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), that fabulous fast-growing weed tree, bigger than any I’d ever seen in southern New England, and at least two dozen smaller species.

 

 

Then, about ten years ago, the bulldozers moved in, and they plowed it under, and they built a Starbucks.

 

 

Another piece of paradise gone.

 

 

There’s another little patch close to our apartment, a hill with trees and flowers. Huge mullein thrive there, and weedy maples, and Queen Anne’s lace in summertime.

 

 

The backhoe was there this morning, ripping it all up.

 

 

Sing it, Joni Mitchell!

 

 

 

 

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Greggs: the Rhode Island place to have Gentile food

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Rhode Island, as I’ve said before, is a good place to put on the feedbag. We have tons of places to eat, and a surprising number of them are good: in Providence alone, we have Hemenway’s, and Red Stripe, and Cassarino’s. We have our share of chains like Shula’s and Fleming’s, and they are very good also (Partner and I are very partial to Fleming’s).

 

 

But sometimes you don’t want to spent $100+ for a meal.

 

 

And, for those evenings, there is always Greggs.

 

 

Greggs is only found in Rhode Island. There are four locations: Providence, East Providence, North Kingstown, and Warwick. (I’ve never eaten at the Warwick location. Maybe someday.)

 

 

They serve Gentile food.

 

 

They have sandwiches, and pasta dishes, and salads. They have wraps. They have liver and onions, to which I am partial.

 

 

Most significantly of all, they have huge delectable-looking cakes, which rotate inside big glass enclosures. You can always see them out of the corner of your eye while you’re dining.

 

 

Usually we skip the cake. Sometimes, however – especially if we go on Monday or Tuesday, when they’re having a special – we are forced to have cake, because it’s part of the meal, and we’ve already paid for it. We take it home with us, and it’s always wonderful.

 

 

The clientele is funny: lots of older people, lots of big families. It’s not expensive. It’s comfortable, and the waiters get to know you after a while. One of the waiters at the North Main Street location (who has a wrap named after him) still knows me after all these years, and still brings me a martini without asking. I mean, really!

 

 

Rhode Island is a great place for food. But you can’t always eat steak or lobster. Sometimes you want something simple and comfortable.

 

 

It is for this that Greggs exists.

 

 

So let’s go to Greggs. I’ll have the liver and onions, and you can have whatever you want.

 

 

And afterward, maybe a piece of cake.

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Bad poll

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I don’t mind participating in telephone polls. I like telling them how I feel, especially in an election year.

 

 

However . . .

 

 

The phone rang around 8:30pm last Sunday evening. It was a young woman calling from somewhere else in the USA (she had a vaguely Southern accent, and had no idea how to pronounce names like “Cicilline” and “Doherty,” so she certainly wasn’t local).

 

 

The first few questions were okay. Have you heard of the following, and how do you feel about them? Paul Ryan: yes, and strongly negative. Barack Obama? Yes, I think I’ve heard of the President of the United States, for whom I seem to remember I voted four years ago, and yes, I think he’s done well. Mitt Romney? Yes, and blech.

 

 

Then my pollster (who, poor thing, was only reading a script from her monitor) began subtly changing the script.

 

 

Here’s some background: our congressman, David Cicilline, used to be the mayor of Providence (I voted for him every time). He did a pretty good job, we thought, and we sent him on to Congress.

 

 

Then the city crashed. Turns out that David was using up rainy-day money to run the city, and now the city is a mess. The new mayor, Angel Taveras, has done a nice job of trying to pull the city out of its financial morass. But – and I hate to admit this – David, bless his gay / Italian / Jewish heart, had a lot to do with causing this.

 

 

But he has been an impeccable congressman for Rhode Island District One. He has upheld the Democratic agenda and helped the President, which is Job #1 as far as I’m concerned, especially when the House is dominated by the GOP.

 

 

Is he a saint? Not at all. Is he the perfect candidate? By no means. Is he doing the right thing in Congress? But assuredly.

 

 

Then, kids, I am for him. I don’t much care about what came before. All I care about is how he votes in Congress right this second.

 

 

David’s current opponent for the Congressional seat, Brendan Doherty, is a former Rhode Island cop who’s never held political office. He (with the assistance of lots of outside-of-Rhode-Island money) has made lots of awful commercials, in which he appears with his sleeves rolled up, ready to beat up rowdy Democrats and Communists (both of which he apparently anticipates meeting in the House of Representatives), telling us how his experience as a Rhode Island state trooper uniquely qualifies him to root out corruption in Washington.

 

 

O-kay.

 

 

Leaving aside the irony of someone claiming that, as a freshman congressman, he’d be able to do anything (does he think he’ll be patrolling the aisles of Congress in a policeman’s uniform, bopping people on the head with a nightstick if they don’t do the right thing?) –

 

 

Anyway.

 

 

So back to this telephone poll. “How do you feel about Bran Dan Doggery?” she asked me languidly. (As I said, she had no idea how to pronounce any of the Rhode Island candidates’ names.)

 

 

“Strongly negative,” I said.

 

 

“Did you know,” she said, “that Barack Obama’s health care plan will gut Medicare?”

 

 

“No,” I said, “and by the way, that’s a lie.”

 

 

“Did you know,” she continued, “that the enormous debt that Barack Obama has piled up – “

 

 

“Enough,” I said. “These aren’t statement of fact. I’m hanging up now.”

 

 

And I did.

 

 

I feel bad for the woman on the other side of the line. She sounded African-American, and if so, I can only imagine how uncomfortable she was asking these questions. (I know, I’m making assumptions. So sue me.)

 

 

That was a bad poll. It was a Fox News broadcast masquerading as a poll. It presented “facts” that were nothing of the sort, and then innocently asked: “Does this make you more or less likely to vote for David Cicilline?”

 

 

I don’t care if David Cicilline runs down the avenue naked. He votes the way I want him to, and that’s all that matters.

 

 

I’m not voting for a single solitary Republican in this election.

 

 

Got it?

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Rhode Island: the best place in the world to live

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I was listening to one of those endless radio talk shows the other day while riding the University shuttle. The topic was: Is Rhode Island a good place to live? “Of course it is,” one of the participants said. “It’s great. I’m glad I live here. I mean, my god, the beaches are great!”

 

 

“That’s it?” another participant said.

 

 

“Well,” the first participant said, “there’s a lot of culture here, and music, and – um – beaches –“

 

 

“You know,” Participant Number Two said, “I’ve been hearing that for years. Culture? Probably you want Boston or New York. Music, probably LA or Seattle or New York. Beaches? You know, I would have said Hawaii.”

 

 

“But still!” Number One said. “It’s great for so many reasons!”

 

 

“Like the beaches?” said Number Two in a bored voice.

 

 

And on like that for some time.

 

 

I didn’t know what to think when I first moved to Rhode Island. I remember walking downtown on a cloudy weekend in early September 1978, and frankly the place looked like WWII Dresden: bombed-out and dismal. There were (and are) bright cheerful bits of architecture, and lovely bits of history, but much of the city is urban/gray/utilitarian.

 

 

There have been (many) ups and downs since then. Downtown (we call it “Downcity”) keeps getting “revived,” and then gets “revived” again. We are between revivals right now. There are a few positive signs: the Arcade, one of the oldest and most historic buildings downtown, is getting another facelift. (This is its third facelift in thirty years. Maybe this one will do the trick.)

 

 

I’ve said it before: Providence (and, by extension, all of Rhode Island) is a big ugly dog. You love it even though it slobbers all over you. In fact, you love it because it slobbers all over you.

 

 

Also, there are those beaches.

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The other side of the hill

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When I was growing up in Washington state, I was always surrounded with heavily-wooded hills and mountains.  I have a distinct childhood memory of sitting in a supermarket parking lot and looking into the corner of a small but impenetrable-looking forest that seemed to roll forever up the side of a hill.  I knew this was impossible, because we weren't really far from Portland/Vancouver.  But it seemed that way.

 

 

My fantasy was (and is) always this: to walk into those trees, up that hill, and come to the summit, and see what's on the other side.  I bet it's lovely.  I bet there's a river in the valley below, under a perpetual ruddy sunset.  I bet there's a town, or maybe just a general store, where you can buy supplies for the journey onward.

 

 

I treasure this fantasy. I will never let go of it.

 

 

Rhode Island is very flat. Jerimoth Hill, the highest spot in the state, is barely over eight hundred feet high.  There are hills – Providence used to brag of its seven hills (College, Constitition, Federal, Smith, Tockwotten, Weybosset, and Christian) – but they’re anthills really; some have been dismantled completely.  You can look out from Prospect Terrace over downtown and see all the way to – what? – Johnston, maybe. 

 

 

It’s lovely, but not very inspiring.

 

 

So I still dream of those lovely Northwest horizons, with mountains and mysterious treelines and hills disappearing into the blue distance, into -

 

 

Into something.  I don't know.

 

 

But it’s something wonderful.

 

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Rhode Islandiana

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There is a little curiosity shop just down the street from our apartment.  It is called “What Cheer Antiques.”

 

 

Okay, I’ll explain. 

 

 

Back in 1636, when Roger Williams first rowboated over from Plymouth Colony to set up his own little homestead hereabouts, he’d taken the trouble to learn some of the local Native American language, and he knew the Narragansett word for friend was “netop.”  So he greeted the local inhabitants, upon arrival, with: “What cheer, netop?”  (“What cheer?” was a perfectly okay seventeenth-century English way to say “How ya doin’?”, by the way.)

 

 

It resonated, somehow, through the years.  The motto of Providence is still “What cheer?” (I love the charmingly primitive version of the city's seal given above.)

 

 

And one of the things What Cheer Antiques sells, according to their own advertisements, is Rhode Islandiana.

 

 

No, this is not a cross between Rhode Island and Indiana. 

 

 

It is Rhode Island memorabilia.

 

 

It is West Cranston High t-shirts.  It is promotional material for the Rhode Island Reds hockey team, long defunct.  (My friend Apollonia was hit in the head by a puck at a Reds game.  Beat that!)  It is Rocky Point amusement-park merchandise.  It is cookbooks and city guides printed by the Providence Journal in the 1940s.  It is old postcards showing Providence’s downtown area looking, in 1920, not so different from today.  It is costume jewelry with the word “Coro” traced in fine script on the back.

 

 

This is why we love Rhode Island.  It is dowdy and loveable, like a fat shaggy dog. 

 

 

We were founded by pretty much the only colonial-era personage I ever heard of who bothered to learn the local Native American language.  (He even wrote a book about it.)

 

 

We Rhode Islanders are cranky, and wary, and proud of our history, every little scrap and crumb of it. 

 

 

And it brings us great cheer, netop.

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Saint Joseph's Day in Providence

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Today is Saint Joseph’s Day.  Yes, Saint Patrick was two days ago, we know, believe me; there are lots of Irish-Americans in Rhode Island / Massachusetts.  But Italians revere Saint Joseph, and today – March 19 – is a special day here.  Mostly you celebrate by eating sweet Italian cream puffs called zeppole (which can be translated as “little Joes”).  In my office (under the auspices of the almighty Apollonia), we celebrate Patrick and Joseph together, with a buffet of Irish soda bread and zeppole from a reputable local Italian bakery.

 

 

Rhode Island has a proud and richly diverse Italian-American community.  I’m only a quarter-Italian myself, but I speak the language – badly, nowadays – and that’s the magic key into any ethnic community.

 

 

My Sicilian-American boss back in the 1980s had six sisters; he was the only boy.  I was adopted into the family, as I had no local family (which is automatically grounds for being adopted into a traditional Italian family).  Also, since I spoke Italian, I could converse with Mamma (then in her nineties), and was often seated next to her at family events.

 

 

This was a big mistake.

 

 

She used the opportunity for all it was worth.  “All those little girls,” she told me in trembling old-lady Italian.  “And finally I had my little boy, my Severinuccio.  He is my jewel.  He still is.”

 

 

I look up at the family sitting around the table – mind you, these are people in their fifties and sixties and seventies – and the girls, Annunziata and Costantina and Preziosa, are all praying that I’m not understanding what Mamma is saying.  And Severino, my boss, is glowing, knowing (one more time) that he’s his mother’s jewel.

 

 

Then Mamma begins with the torture. 

 

 

“That one,” she says (in Italian), pointing to Costantina, a dignified retired schoolteacher, “peed her pants all the time.  And that one - ” (this time pointing at Preziosa) “ – wouldn’t go to school.  I had to beat her.”  (Preziosa had recently retired from a teaching post at a local university.)

 

 

On and on it went.  Mamma was enjoying this: it was her revenge on her daughters, for whatever reason.  Horribly enough, my boss, Severino, didn’t seem to notice that his sisters were made uncomfortable by this.  After all, he knew that he was his mother’s jewel.

 

 

One sister never appeared at these dinners: Susanna.  Finally one of the sisters told me: “Her husband’s on the lam.  They have to lay low.  Besides, you’d be shocked by Susanna. She’s very vulgar.”

 

 

Susanna (AKA Susie) showed up at Easter one year, and I finally met her.  She was draped in a fur coat, and she was wonderful.  She told me dirty jokes all night, and I told her a few, and we had a wonderful time. 

 

 

And the family was scandalized by both of us.

 

 

(This was many years ago.  I’ve fallen out of touch with the family.  I’m sure Mamma has left us.  Probably some of the sisters too.)

 

 

(But what a wonderful family.)

 

 

Now: zeppole for everybody!

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The Providence Public Library

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The Providence Public Library is a grandiose pile of masonry on the corner of Empire and Washington downtown.  I went in a few times in the late 1970s, but it seemed very hoi polloi to me. (What a nasty little snob I was in those days!)

 

 

Also, I was entering that phase in my life in which it was important that I own books rather than just borrow them.

 

 

Thirty-five years have passed, and my home bookshelves are groaning with books, loved and unloved, read and unread.

 

 

And a few months ago, for some reason, I don’t know why, I went back to the Providence Public Library.

 

 

And I fell in love with the place.

 

 

Let me tell you first that it’s open for less than forty hours a week.  It opens at 12:30pm four days a week, which is a crime against humanity.  I didn’t know that when I first started going there; I got there around 12:15pm one day, and was surprised to see a line of people waiting to get in.  And do you know why most of them were there?  To use the small bank of public-use computers.  By the intense look on their faces, they were job-hunting.  What does that tell you about the usefulness of the public library?

 

 

The other sections of the library – the reference stacks, the reading rooms, the music rooms – are very quiet.  Well, maybe “quiet” is a stupid word to use about a library.  Let us say instead: deserted.

 

 

Which is itself a sin and a shame.

 

 

But I have to admit I enjoyed it.

 

 

I wandered into the fiction section as if by instinct.  I was the only person for miles, amid racks and racks of books, acres and acres of books, with that musty elementary-school smell all around me.  Do you remember those crackly plastic covers that library books always had when we were in school?  They still have them.

 

 

I got my bright blue library card that very first day.  I have been back at least once a week, and I get such pleasure out of it.  I return my last week’s reading in the little basket, and I wander light-headed through the stacks. 

 

 

And I’m borrowing them!  I’ve finally gotten away from the idea that I have to own books!  I used to love the idea that I owned them, they were mine, I could keep them on a shelf and pull them down anytime I wanted to . . .

 

 

Sometime around the ten-thousandth book, this stopped making sense.

 

 

Let’s face it: ultimately we own nothing, not our homes nor our cars, not even our precious books, not even ourselves.

 

 

We can only ever borrow things and use them for a while.

 

 

And maybe libraries are a perfect expression of that.

 

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Providence, Rhode Island: my gritty little city

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When I first got to Providence in 1978, most of downtown was being ripped up, in preparation for a walking mall on Westminster Street. I took a stroll on my first Sunday here, not knowing that Sundays in New England in the 1970s were pretty much business-free, because of the blue laws still in effect in those days. The city looked like Sarajevo in the 1990s, or Dresden after the firestorm.

 

 

It's 2011, and they've dug up downtown again. For what seems like the seventeenth time in thirty-three years.

 

 

Providence has some lovely neighborhoods. Partner and I live at Wayland Square, a residential district on the East Side of the city, and there are some really charming houses around us, as well as some really pretty grandiose mansions. And the Brown and RISD campuses are fun and interesting. But much of the rest of the city looks perpetually bedraggled, like a dog just come in out of the rain. Downtown (locals call it “Downcity,” just to be unique) always looks that way.

 

 

There are hints and glimpses of terrific architecture: it's great fun to look up when you're downtown, to admire the fanciful decoration on many of the buildings. The O'Gorman Building has a facade decorated with peacocks, their tails running down to street level. The Conrad Building has an gilded onion dome like an Orthodox church. Trinity Rep (which the AIA Guide to Providence Architecture calls “delicious”) is an alabaster jewelry-box, built in the 1920s as a showroom for fancy Packard automobiles. The old Providence Journal building has an exterior like a French chateau.

 

 

But, at street level in Downcity, not much is going on. There are Hello Kitty outlets and handmade-soap stores and hipster cafes and SPACE FOR RENT signs. Businesses come and go.

 

 

But here's one of the reasons that I love Providence:

 

 

There's an old used-bookstore on Mathewson Street called Cellar Stories. You have to climb a steep flight of stairs to get to it. Know why? Its original downtown location, back in the 1980s, was in fact in the downstairs section of another building. The owner / proprietor and I have known each other for decades – not as friends, not on a first-name basis, but as regulars, people you know by sight. A couple of months ago I remarked that this was the – what? - third location for the store?

 

 

“Well,” he said in his deep imperturbable voice, “There was the downstairs place. And then we moved again down on Richmond -”

 

 

His wife – I think she's his wife, I don't know – looked on, laughing. This is a typical Providence conversation: reminiscing about where things used to be.

 

 

But it was important, for him and for me, to remember.

 

 

That's not just the store's past. That's our past, man.

 

 

And, in Providence, the past and the present are the same thing.

 

 

Or something like that.

 

---

 

Roger Williams Park Museum

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Providence, like New York City, has a large central urban park. It's hilly and full of greenery, marshy and irregular, with a network of ponds and canals running through it. There's a merry-go-round, and a “casino,” and a zoo (which is actually not bad), and a very nice exotic-species greenhouse, and a couple of bandstands. It's also full of lots of secluded spots ideal for drug-dealing (which explains a good deal of the automobile traffic running through the park).

 

 

In the middle of the park stands the Roger Williams Park Museum. It is a fanciful castle, decorated with elaborate stonework. Inside: rock collections. Antiquities. Native American beadwork. A small but cute planetarium.

 

But I am always most fascinated by their huge turn-of-the-century taxidermy collection. It is beautiful, and horribly sad. Have you ever seen a passenger pigeon? Of course you haven't; they're extinct. But I saw one the other day at the Roger Williams Park Museum, long-dead, stuffed and mounted. There is, in fact, a display of every bird found in turn-of-the-century Rhode Island – some of which, like the passenger pigeon, are gone from the earth altogether now (thanks at least in part to museum collectors), and many of which are no longer seen in Rhode Island (or at least I haven't see any Great Auks around lately). There's a lioness and lion cub, posed together, and they are beautiful, until you think about them a bit. And two big polar bears nuzzling one another. And a big grizzly bear rearing up on its hind legs. All dead, all stuffed. “I wonder,” Partner said quietly as we were looking at the polar bears, “if they had any idea they'd end up in a place like this?”

 

 

The Museum quite evidently runs on next to no money. The exhibits seldom change. I think Partner and I were the only people there that morning; I spent seven dollars, including admission, and I was thanked profusely three times by three different staff members.

 

All those odd beautiful things sitting in an odd building in south Providence, gathering dust. All those artifacts of science and culture.

 

If they announce the world is ending soon, probably a lot of people will go to church to pray.

 

Myself, I think I'll head over to the Roger Williams Park Museum and sit with the rock collections and fossils and stuffed passenger pigeons. It will be a good place to meditate on going extinct.

 

 

And I'll be in excellent company.

 

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Memories of the Mob

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I am not a native Rhode Islander. I moved here in 1978, so I will always be a newcomer, although I have been here only a little less time than Roger Williams himself.

I arrived just a few months after the Blizzard of '78, which had taken place in February of that year. Everyone was still talking about it; the state came to a standstill for days. Today, thirty-two years later, if the word “snow” appears in the weather forecast, there's a huge mob at every supermarket in the state, buying milk and bread. “Milk and bread.” I don't even drink milk.

And I arrived toward the end of the Great Rhode Island Mob Era.

(I hope I don't get whacked for this.)

...

In 1981, I took a job on Federal Hill, which is the old Italian neighborhood of Providence. Its Italianness has faded steadily over the years; other groups – Hispanics, Asians – have moved in. And the Italian stuff has taken on a kind of Epcot quality. DePasquale Square has been rebuilt with a big fountain and a mock-Italian plaza; the lampposts are turn-of-the-century mock-European.

But it was still pretty Italian in the late 70s and early 80s. You could still get decent Italian pastry at Piccola Italia, and there was Tony's Colonial Market, and Scialo's Bakery, and the Heritage Loan and Investment Company (which went belly-up in 1990, but that's another story).

Every week or so, the front window of Micheletti's Restaurant got boarded up. Word was that Friday nights was always a “getting out” party: if someone got out of jail, they gave them a big Friday night dinner party, which usually ended with gunshots and violence.

The Patriarca family was still in charge of local crime in those days. There was a vending-machine company with a small storefront on Atwells Avenue; you could usually see someone sitting inside, doing nothing. That was the Patriarca headquarters. For those of you who watched “The Sopranos,” it was sort of like Satriale's. The Corleone family in the “Godfather” movies is based partly on the Patriarca family.

Even nice people were connected somehow. My boss, who was Sicilian, had five or six sisters, all of whom I got to know, and all of whom were terrific. There was one, though, whom I'd never met. Oh, hey, my boss said. They're in Florida. There was some mix-up with real estate, and they're – um – on the lam.

On the lam!

(I finally met her, by the way, and she was amazing. She swept into the room wearing a fur coat, and she and I spent the whole evening telling dirty jokes to one another, and her sisters were scandalized.)

I worked for a small electrical-supply company. Construction, you see? You can imagine. I knew two grown men named “Bambi.” It's short for “bambino,” kids.

A coworker of mine on the Hill was tired of her car. Oh, well, she said. I'll tell my dad. He knows some guys.

Some guys who do what? I said.

She looked embarrassed. You know. They'll – um – make the car go away. And I'll collect the insurance, and I'll get a new car.

Neat, eh?

The final story isn't mine.

I was in Tunisia, in 1985. I was staying for a few weeks with a couple from Maine, who were amused to hear I was from Rhode Island. They'd lived there when they were graduate students, on one side of a duplex house. There was a young married couple, very nice, on the other side of the duplex. Except that, once a month, a big car would pull up in front of the house, and some guys in suits would get out, and there's be a big argument on the other side of the house. Something about the husband not joining the family business.

I stopped them at that point. I know the punchline of your story, I said. The name on the mailbox in front of the house was “Patriarca.”

And they grinned and nodded.

…

Kids, those were horrible days. But everything seems quaint in retrospect.

Even the horrible things.

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