Castle of dreams

Browsing through the antiques at the Armory on Thames Street has long been one of my most dependable emotional pick-me-ups. To wander through the jumbled aisles of time definitely helps to put things in perspective. That cracked china plate? There’s a story hidden in its chipped surface, a story about other people, other times, other lives, other possibilities. It’s a concentrated version of the same thing that imbues historic places with their healing power. Hard to feel like you and your problems are at the center of the universe when you’re staring at the Great Pyramid of Giza…or the Coliseum…or Newport’s Friends Meeting House or the Old Stone Mill, for that matter. Historical places have a comfort-factor built right into their fabric, and a place like the Armory, filled to the brim with the survived detritus of the past, has it in spades. Yes, I know…as an activity, technically, going there probably DOES qualify as “shopping”, but the good news is that you don’t need to buy anything to reap the benefits. Like meditation, you can do it for what you’ll get out of it, or you can just do it with no thought of gain. For those of you who like to read, I offer the following bookwormish analogy: the experience triggers the same kind of light trance state brought on by a good book.

So. You head over, you arrive. The building itself looks exactly like a fortified castle. The only thing that’s missing is the moat. I find that highly satisfying. And symbolically it validates the entire experience. What do you expect to find in a castle? Treasure, that’s what. The out of the ordinary, that’s what else. Anything you buy in a castle has automatically got to be better than anything you get anyplace else, and even more to the point, anything you find in a castle is, by definition, NOT a piece of junk. Value, safety, strength. Talk about crucial messages for anyone selling anything to impart! From the moment the big heavy front doors crash shut behind you, you know you’re safe. Bring on that fantasy! Safe from crowds, safe from being ripped off, dealings, safe from boredom. Safe from loneliness. Safe from pain. Just plain safe.

From there on in I give myself over to the aimless, meditative joy of drifting through time's back alleys. Say I spot an old alarm clock from the 20’s. How did it get here? Who did it once wake up and where did they go each morning? That daguerreotype, why does that woman look so sad, that man so severe? What yachtsman did that oyster plate feed? That old doll – that rusty fire truck - where are their owners now? To what cemetery did those childhoods lead? Dance cards, cruise ship menus, faded postcards trivial (having a great time, wish you were here) and profound (we left Scituate hard at dawn, & I wept inconsolably all the way to NY), old doorknobs and keys and pond boats…autographed Elvis photos, braided hair brooches, oil lanterns, gimbaled compasses, hand painted carousel animals hewn out oak, heavy as iron…Here you’ll find all the ephemera that fills up our human lives, but disconnected and out of context, like a kaleidoscopic surrealist assemblage. Holy relics all, alive & still sparking. And so many of them, so many, it stuns. In these disjointed, discarded objects resides whatever remains of the “real” Newport, and to wander amongst them and their incoherent tales is to understand, at last, the complexity and strangeness of where you are.