A Day in Rhode Island

I am on the road. Yesterday evening I kissed the girls and Mari-Rose, stopped off to get a haircut, and hit the road to Indianapolis, from which I was flying this morning.

Last night I called Shane for his birthday and hit the sack at midnight, for a short night - I woke up at 5:00 to fly from Indy to Detroit to Providence.

Providence is not what I expected. I thought it would be this gentile old city, smallish but elegant - like Portland, Maine.

Instead it's rough around the edges. I drove through the city tonight, and most of what I saw was quite run-down. It's a city that has been rode hard. It looks a lot like Decatur.

It appears to be a completely different situation in the downtown area, though. There, and in the area of Brown University, it's upscale. Construction cranes criss-cross the skyline, setting up new skyscrapers.

In short, it's a city of two tales.

A few other observations on the city:

Drivers here are more willing to give up the right-of-way than anywhere I've ever seen. One time I was trying to make a left onto a busy street, and a car on the street stopped for me and let me out. That driver clearly had the right-of-way, but she gave it up to let me out.

A couple of other times, as a pedestrian, I was waiting for traffic to clear when people in their cars stopped and waved me across.

It wasn't like these people were going to stop for any other reason; they just stopped right in the middle of the road, just for me.

I found a beautiful park: Roger Williams Park. So many cities seem to have a park like this. Big, sprawling, with ponds and old trees and wandering walking trails. In Bloomington it's Miller Park. Here it's Roger Williams Park.

Roger Williams said, famously, in 1631 that there should be separation of church and state - which was heresy at the time. So I like him a lot.

In the park there was the biggest sycamore tree I have ever seen. This thing was about 6 feet in diameter at the trunk, with great rambling branches. Seeing that tree made me nervous about the sycamore in our front yard; though I guess I shouldn't worry because it will be about 150 years before our sycamore is as big as the one in the front yard of Betsy Williams' cottage.

There were families out in the park, a whole lot of them fishing. As I walked through the park, I recall thinking, "It's odd that there are no seagulls here," - and then I saw some seagulls.

I'd forgotten how terse, and almost confrontational, the language of New Englanders can be. When I checked in, the hotel clerk was on the phone with the maintenance guy. A guest had reported some kind of problem in her room, and the hotel clerk was telling the maintenance guy.

"What's the specific problem?" he asked.
"The guest didn't say," she replied.
"That's unacceptable. I have to know what the problem is."
"She didn't say."
"That's unacceptable ... I'll call her and ask her what the problem is. What's the room number?"

I love the way the guy went through two rounds of "that's unacceptable" before just calling the guest to inquire about the problem.

In a restaurant later in the afternoon, where I had a broiled haddock sandwich the likes of which we never see in Illinois, a young man and woman entered the restaurant.

"Where do you want to sit?" she asked.
"Where do you want to sit?" he shot back.

The thing was, this wasn't petty or acrimonious. This was just a terse way of saying, as we would in the Midwest, "It doesn't matter to me."

The young couple enjoyed their lunch and seemed very happy with one another.