My Kind of Town

Spring in Newport, RI.....there may be better places to have a getaway, but this town is pretty nice. I suspect that late May is the lull between the rather low-level Winter and the hectic touristy Summer. Not our sort of place socially, of course. Apart from the Navy, much of the town seems to be folks with aspirations to gentility, but with more money than anything...including the knowledge of what they really want. They buy a house that was built in the early 18th c., but the founders of Providence Plantations who fled the New Jerusalem in Massachusetts are no closer to them, and no more of their mental furniture than those days in History class they missed. The old Quaker clapboards are mixed in with Victorian wedding cakes and the elegant Federal piles with fanlighted entrances....all telling their stories, if some part of a lifetime is spent learning to understand the tale. And there's precious little appetite for that, and, I suppose, in any age. What drives occupancy of these houses is the same thing that moves the owner to buy an Audi because the neighbors on each side have BMWs or Volvos: exclusivity. The overwhelming need of so many to somehow be distinguished from the mass of the middle class. We have no titles of nobility, and a ragamuffin's dress may belong to a bum or billionaire in this society, and so a particular accumulation of property becomes our identity, and a monument that will be raffled off like Scrooge's old bedclothes when we pass.

As for the rest of Newport- pretty much like the rest of these United States. Unserviceable traffic problems, made worse here by the insular geography. Street signs posted at regular intervals declare "Restricted Parking Resident Vehicle by Pass only 6PM - 6AM, May through October." These are the signs of our times.