Darkness Visible

A week expires here in Rhode Island, our inaugural week, and I feel as if I am a splinter lodged under prickly New-English skin. I am wracked with doubt, with fear. I despair of making a life here, quaint though it may be, because I find my temperament dissonant with what appears to be the prevailing spirit of Providence -- impatience and haste. The Portuguese inhabitants of Fox Point have been warm and engaging; Arizonans to them are exotic. The roadways are, however, not nearly so. They are sphincter-tightening, hair-whitening. And it seems that my car has become a bone of contention among the other residents of our apartment building. Though I was assured a parking spot -- Providence has this senseless statute, apparently intended to reduce crime, prohibiting motor vehicles from parking on the street overnight -- I have been given a pseudo-spot against a fence separating the alley behind the wine shop I live above and the residence behind, creating a situation where the other residents, believing my car to be blocking the only convenient egress from their parking spaces, come knocking on my front door or ringing my doorbell from the street below at strange hours with the request (more like a demand) that I move my car to the street. I have become, it seems, the de facto valet of the building, a predicament I find ennervating in the extreme.

Also ennervating has been the weather, which can only be described as "soupy": fifty-plus percent relative humidity and lowering skies. Our apartment, not equipped with air-conditioning, which is obviously some decadent luxury on the east coast, becomes stifling when one wanders away from either of the two fans we have. The net effect of my presence in Providence heretofore has thrown me into a black despair, and I sleep many more hours than I should -- often until three or four in the afternoon. Then I give C. an earful of bitter reflections born of the horrible anomie I feel. I have had several times to resist the urge to jump in my Honda and drive as far as my credit cards will allow -- far from here ... oh so far from there in Tucson which, while dirty and hateful and maddening, was at least familiar. There at least my fear and loathing was specific and itemized.

Saturday night and the natives are restless. Rap music churning from open car windows mixes with the shouts of rowdies into the streets below. Never did a place so singularly threaten to thwart contemplation. Dumb beer-fueled mayhem floods like a tide, and I am as if lashed to a pylon, forced to gulp and hold my breath.

Rhode Island ... Providence -- R.I.P., E.