An existential moment in Newport

One of the best things about living in Newport is the way history seeps out of the sidewalks, usually when you least expect it. Ghosts are everywhere...

Yesterday morning I took my dog Gwen for a walk. We were headed to Island Cemetery to check out the gravestone of Richard Morris Hunt, the architect of Wrentham House, which I'd just been to see a couple of days before & which had blown me away.




Anyhow, on the way we passed some guys from the Department of Public Works replacing a stretch of pavement. Naturally Gwen dragged me over so she could sniff out the excavation trench, and there, right smack at the bottom of it, were the broken but clearly recognizable remains of a colonial clay tobacco pipe, just lying there in the dirt for all to see. The sight immediately unmoored me from my normal reality. Who'd dropped it? When? What was their life like? What IS time?

How very odd, that they were there & now they were gone & I was there instead...and someday it will be my turn to be gone, and someone else will be standing on this street corner, scratching THEIR head over this same existential riddle. Because no matter how I sliced it, there was no denying the fact that there at my feet lay a small clay pipe - proof that time exists, reality exists, that life and death are unutterably & irrevocably real. Really real. Almost every second of every day we allow ourselves to forget that.

Overhead fluffy white clouds slipped unconcernedly and implacably by. So what else could I do? I walked on, to the cemetery.