Crowne Plaza Hotel parking lot, Warwick
Friday, 12 October 2018
The bottom dropped out of the sky last night and it absolutely poured all night. It was still pouring this morning and it was hard walking the dogs at first. I delayed our departure because I needed to dump my sewage tanks and didn't want to do it in the downpour. It was 10:00 before we got out of there.
I didn't take a picture of a route map today because it's the same roads I've been driving lately. I have to move from the campground because they're full this weekend - they're having an early Halloween weekend and expecting many families with children. So I'm off to see if I can use my same hotel parking lot as last weekend.
I also wanted to track down my cousin Marian - actually my mother's cousin, my first-cousin-once-removed. Her brother sent me her address and phone number and I'd tried calling several days ago, but the person who answered said I had the wrong number. My only choice being to go over and see if the address was right, I went.
That was harder than I'd thought because the address I had wasn't right either but found Marian anyway.
Turns out I had the right phone number but her hearing is so bad, and her hearing aids help her so little, that she couldn't understand what I was saying. She said the doctor tells her she could hear much better if she'd get new hearing aids, but she said they cost $6000 so she doesn't want to do it. The problem is that her hearing loss has almost totally isolated her. She doesn't visit with other people or join any groups any more because she hears so poorly, so she limits herself to her family. Luckily they're very attentive, but she spends most of her time alone.
I ran into this with my mom, who refused to get hearing aids, said there was nothing really wrong with her hearing and other people just mumbled and she wasn't interested in what they were saying anyway. After I'd lived with her a while and gotten sick of having to shout at her even just a few feet away, I finally talked her into it as a matter of safety, and they changed her life.
But it was one thing to tell my mom how to spend her money and another to tell a first-cousin-once-removed, and anyway she seems to know what her decision is doing to her.
Other than having to yell at her to converse, we had a good visit. She looked just as I remembered her from about 10 years ago, and I was relieved to see she has a very comfortable apartment in a nice neighborhood. She said her husband Bob left her his firefighter's pension and their savings, and Rhode Island also contributes something to her monthly because of her husband's firefighting career, so she's able to live comfortably. Except for her hearing, of course. She and Bob were married for 56 years, she said, and she still misses him very much.
We talked a little about family, and I told her a little about my traveling and took her out to show her the RV, but her hearing loss made conversation really difficult. I wish I had the $6000 to give her and make her go get the new ones.
Marian told me her daughter Trish lives in Warwick and has spent a lot of time on family genealogy and gave me her email address and phone number. I'll try to get together with her while I'm still in RI.
On my way to find Marian, I drove through a lot of western Rhode Island as I have been daily lately, finding a mostly very rural area. There are towns here and there, but most seem to be villages (though I'm not sure that's what Rhode Islanders call them). Coventry, the Pride Of Rhode Island (they say), is the largest population center on the west side of the state. Western RI seems to be fairly solidly Republican, with a number of Trump signs around. Despite RI being reliably Democratic in most elected offices, the Republicans aren't taking it lying down, and I hear a lot about the Republican challenger to the Democratic governor.
There are trees all over Rhode Island - lots of them - but there seem to be forests in the western part that are missing in the east, undoubtedly a casualty of population growth. You wouldn't think a state as tiny as RI would have room for such distinctions, but they're here and they're real.
I went back to my previous hotel and found the previously-nearly-empty parking lot to be half full, which made me nervous about my chances for the night. When I went inside, I found the lobby to be full, too, and a large banner proclaimed a gathering of some group or other that I couldn't quite read. But the concierge asked for me at the desk, and they agreed I could stay no problem because they had 2 more parking lots. So back we went to the spot I'd picked out as the least likely to keep me awake all night with strong parking lot lights.
No comments:
Post a Comment