Café Providence

I was in Providence, Rhode Island, last week for work (a PhD defense in History at Brown University).

It was a courageous piece. An adventurous dissertation. And it was both a privilege and pure fun to consider, construct and coax among new friends, smart, cool people.

But what a revelation it was —this particular Autumn, and ahead of this New Year— just to cut out, to wander and hang —and then to wander and hang some more

— to just savour the day.

Heidi came down from Northampton (we call her home Hampers, and sometimes The Hamp, just to puncture its pretensions un poco) . . .

Providence is vast-US-inequality in a nutshell, and so it shone in its way. The spruced-up-but-still-edgy-sketchy downtown, the water ways and various hills, all the art deco and stacked wealth, the studenty undertow of incredible RISD and Brown, amidst everything else

the aspiring angles and the wild contradictions, the baying undersides.

Preservation-worthy Benefit Street meets that dark abandoned alleyway.

Familiarity is part of it. (The John Carter Brown [rare books] Library feels like my second home.)

It makes Providence an automatic escape hatch. The place is exquisite books,

and it is adventure and freedom.

It allows me to break away from obligation, from the responsibilities, from the meetings upon meetings, the letters, the evaluations, the full manuscripts every weekend, the oh-so-honoured-to-have-been-askedness of academic life, in Michigan in particular. Teaching goes fine, the students are spectacular. What wears one down is the relentless, diligent dueness. The due, due, due, overdue, the due, due, due, overdue, week after week: so damn much work.

The following drawing-become-painting —begun amidst queues of people on a sunny autumn Saturday— is my offering. An attempt at the venerable interior of the Coffee Exchange on Wickenden Street.

I’m no longer in Providence. Love from A2, where Friday’s duties await. I’m in the days just ahead of the blessed-if-oddly-timed holiday-behemoth I call “American Thanksgiving.”

*photographs and watercolours by Kenneth Mills