Day 127, Saturday August 10, 2024: West Hartford, Connecticut to Narragansett, Rhode Island

Carnegie libraries visited: None

Days sober: 415

Last night, Paul was most solicitous. When we were in graduate school in Wisconsin, if we went out it typically involved a search for beer to drink and women to flirt. He was taking me out to watch a college football game – I don’t remember which, and it doesn’t matter – and our first stop was unacceptable to him, and not because it lacked either suds or senoras: “It’s too much of a bar.” Paul knew that I was sober and he wanted to take me to a place where I would feel comfortable. After much mapquesting, we ended up at a bowling alley which was also, well, a bar, where we could watch both (foot)balls and bowls. We drank Diet Cokes and ate chicken fingers.

Today we planned to drive to a vacation home in Narragansett, Rhode Island, where Paul would spend a week with his son and I would spend the weekend. We drove separately so I could continue on my way, and on my way to Narragansett I stopped at eleven libraries: a red barn in East Glastonberry; an awning-prominent one in Marlborough; the Cragin Memorial looks-like-a-Carnegie in Colchester; the dual-towered Otis in Norwich; a could-almost-be-a-bunker in Prescott; the symmetrical, stone Wheeler in North Stonington; the Italian palazzo Westerly library, built as a memorial to Civil War veterans; the more like a Y than a ✙ one in Cross Mills; a “this would make a comfortable vacation home with hydrangeas lining the path” Beverly library in Hale, Rhode Island; the Richardson Romanesque Peace Dale library (to remind you, a Richardson Romanesque building is a French, Spanish, and Italian melange); and finally the “we’re on the beach!” Maury Loontjens Memorial library in Narragansett. All were distinctly different and, I hoped, beloved by their communities. After all, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

Before dinner, I took a long walk on a quiet road on the top of a ridge, with a single row of houses on my left overlooking the water. At the apex of my stroll I could see a long beach curling away from me, waves rolling in eternally, beachcombers there ephemerally. And I wondered: is all this walking just making my hips worse, or is it making my overall health better? And, not or, I conclude.