Milestones. They keep coming at you, don’t they? We’d just completed our first global volunteering tour, during which time we ticked past our 30th year of being nomadic. We’d just had another wedding anniversary. We were about to take our final RV trip across the continent. And during it all, Dennis hit what has come up entirely too soon: his 70th birthday. Seems like only yesterday he was worried about the draft; and now drafts are a nuisance but not a real threat.

It seemed like an appropriate occasion to divest ourselves of some more of our worldly goods. In fact, it was absolutely essential, since we also were preparing to divest ourselves of the trailer that many of our belongings were being transported in, as well as the RV that was yanking it around. Already, we’d unloaded as many things as we could on friends. Now the time had come to just head to a thrift store donation center, and get it to take things off our hands. Goodbye to the remnants of three decades of touring the nation, putting on theatrical productions for kids, and raising a son of our own.

Yet in the midst of this enormous downsizing, Dennis decided to spend 5 dollars on a little gift for himself: a basketball that he could play with during the remainder of the summer while we were still in the U.S. And then it would have to go away too. He put it to use that very afternoon, when we visited our son Zephyr in Providence. Across the street from his house is a little park with a basketball court where the birthday boy could work on his jumpshot. And also get in his traditional birthday barefoot cartwheel in the grass.

He also got rid of one more load of possessions, bequeathing Zephyr his comic book collection — some of which he’d had since the age of ten or so.. Hey, it was no major sacrifice — he only paid ten to twenty-five cents for them back then.

Hunt Mills

A couple of days later, we went on one of the little hikes we’d been working in almost daily, trying especially to hit points of natural or historic interest. This time it was Hunts Mill in nearby East Providence (in Rhode Island, nothing is very far from anything else), which provides a little of both. There’s a hiking trail through the woods along Ten Mile River, but the centerpiece of the park is the John Hunt House, built around 1750. It’s now home to the East Providence Historical Society, which maintains a museum there. But it has very restricted hours, the second Sunday of the month from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. March through December (and maybe only in even years when a comet passes through), so we didn’t get to go inside.

Long after the Hunt family and their kin operated a mill here, a water pump was built here in 1892 to supply water to a chemical company. And after that, the property was the site of an amusement park until it closed after a fire at the dance hall in 1925. Today, you can see a circle of granite blocks where the carousel once stood. Later still, the city (it was then called a town) of East Providence took over the pump for its water department, making use of it for about half a century. Oh, and the site was also used as a training facility for the fire department, which is why there’s an old abandoned tank in the weeds.

The day after that, or rather in the evening, we went to a bowling alley to meet up with Zephyr and his girlfriend Koree, as well as friends Carol and Jeff, and friends Tara and Kevin (all of whom we’d already seen at least once during the past few days). Tara had constructed an unorthodox “birthday hat” for Dennis, which was so delightfully bizarre that of course he had to wear it the entire time.

Now we may have mentioned this before, but we are really terrible bowlers. We mean really, really terrible bowlers. We’d probably do better in a game of cricket (which we’ve never played before) than in a bowling match. And yet we so often seem to end up at a bowling alley on special occasions or when we just get together with a bunch of friends. Eventually, we keep thinking, maybe we’ll show some improvement. Well, it didn’t happen this time. But maybe, just maybe, we managed to add our hundredth gutter ball to our list of milestones.

5/22-24/2024