Journal of a Sabbatical

June 4, 2000

tern table

Today's Bird Sightings:
Watchemoket Cove
9 common terns
6 ring-billed gulls
16 herring gulls
3 starlings
33 mute swans
44 Canada geese
2 double crested cormorants
2 redwing blackbirds
2 American crows
1 American goldfinch

Today's Reading: Summer: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake,
Uttermost Part of the Earth by E. Lucas Bridges, The Birds of Brewery Creek by Malcolm MacDonald

Today's Starting Pitcher:
Jeff Fassero

Bought an end table for $2 at a yard sale 'cause I liked the shape. It needs to be repainted and the joints re-glued, but I think it will be a fun project. The oddest thing about the yard sale is that it was in a small park in Providence on the spot where Roger Williams landed in his flight from Massachusetts (I mean flight as in "to flee" not as in "to fly"). The monument that marks the spot is in great disrepair. An article in yesterday's Providence Journal about how some developers want to tear down the building across the street and put up a Dunkin Donuts talks about how one would think the site of Roger Williams' landing would be a big tourist shrine kind of like Plymouth Rock. Buses used to take tourists by there but they don't anymore. I impiously suggested to Nancy that the reason it's not a big tourist spot has to do with the fact that an awful lot of Americans don't want separation of church and state - they want the theocracy the Puritans sought (and kicked Roger Williams out of Massachusetts for opposing). I'm sure Roger Williams is not exactly a hero to the Christian Right. However, our desire to inspect the disrepair of the monument for ourselves led to finding the perfect end table - mundane and secular though it is.

Saw more terns at the cove today than I've ever seen at one time there. Most of them were fishing industriously by the bridge in the turbulent water where the tide was going out. A few of them perched on the bright orange sewage containment boom with the ring-billed gulls. I couldn't get a picture of the array of terns and gulls on the boom without crawling through some bushes and I was wearing shorts so didn't want to sacrifice the skin on my legs for "art". Maybe I'll plan for possible cool photo op on the sewage boom next time ... Meanwhile, I have decided the title of my book (the one my mother imagines I am writing for the imaginary book contract) has to be Sewage Outflow and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch. Nancy approves.

Browsed for a long time at the Brown Bookstore 'cause they're having another 20% off sale. Amazingly I did not buy anything. There were a couple of books I really wanted: one about hero-botanists (The Plant Hunters) and the new Terry Tempest Williams book (of which I have immediately forgotten the title but it's about the afore-referenced Hieronymous Bosch painting rather than her usual southwest nature stuff). However, I have vowed not to buy any more books until I finish reading a significant fraction of the ones on the pile by the bed. How long this resolve will last, we'll see.

It started raining hard on the way home.