50 years later
Thursday, September 26, 2019
I’m in Narragansett at the Christian Brothers Center – what used to be the district’s administrative offices and the Novitiate.
I was assigned a room in the new wing. In the image, I’m on a small deck between the old mansion and the new wing. (This is the first of several images that I shot through a ‘looking-glass’.) Greg is in the mansion; and where my room, in the addition, is modern and well appointed; his is a bit more dated.
The drive up was amazing – the area around Newark Airport was a massive traffic jam and getting across the George Washington Bridge was nightmarish.
And when I crossed into the Bronx, the density of the region just hit me – from Philadelphia east it’s a mega human colony – and I shivered remembering a time when I too lived in this eastern beehive.
Thankfully, Waze took me off I-95 and sent me up to the Hutchinson Parkway and then onto the Merritt Parkway; these ‘parkways’ made up for the New Jersey Turnpike and the George Washington.
I-95 through Connecticut was also an experience in driving through human density just not as stressful as earlier in the drive. But once I hit Rhode Island and turned south towards the beaches, the environment changed. The buzz and swirl of I-95 gave way to the bucolic Rhode Island landscape. A landscape and lethargy I remembered from years gone by.