West Warwick, Rhode Island was one of the first towns to be sucked dry by the malls.

I remember returning to Rhode Island in the mid 60's during one of my fathers innumerable reassignments with the Navy. When we arrived one of his friends was all excited about a new shopping center that had just opened up called the Midland Mall. (It has since been renamed the Rhode Island Mall.) So we took the short drive up Route 2 and suddenly came upon a shopping nirvana. It was all indoors! You didn't have to get cold or wet going from store to store like you did at Garden City. There were stores everywhere; a Newport creamery if you got hungry, even a theatre if you decided to make a night of it. There was even a Radio Shack which was like a wet dream to my young mad scientist mind. (This was back when Radio Shack was more of a parts store rather than the electronics boutique that it's become nowadays.)¹

But this isn't a story about a mall. It's a story about a town and how, as Joni Mitchell sang "you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone." West Warwick used to be the premiere shopping area of Rhode Island. People came from all over the state to shop Main and Providence Streets and eat at our restaurants. The Majestic Theater brought in vaudeville acts from around the country.

The Majestic. To look at it in recent years the exterior appeared to be an old warehouse or store front. Not many people in town realized what was behind those bricks. Unfortunately because of its run-down appearance it had become an eyesore in the center of town and a burden on the tax rolls. Some ideas were floated to renovate it but no one could come up with both the vision and the money at the same time so demolition seemed the only option. It was only after the wreckers had caved the side walls and the interior was finally exposed that the people saw how ornate, how plush, how majestic the theater had actually been.

In its place, though, the town fathers built a gazebo. They began to have free concerts there on warm summer evenings. Trinity Square Repertory came down from Providence to perform Shakespeare. Not long after September 11th the entire town gathered there for a candlelight vigil in memory of the dead and to honor some of our own brave firefighters and policemen who had to to New York City to help with the devastation there. In a sense it became a center for the town; a heart that had been missing for quite a while.

Then someone lit a match.

It's difficult to put emotions to the numbers. One hundred people lost their lives in a fire at the Station nightclub that cold February night. Someone once said that there are six degrees of separation between any person and anyone else in the world. Rhode Island is such a provincial state that the average is said to be more around three.. In West Warwick that night, it dropped to one. Everyone knew someone who died. I myself didn't discover until later that one of my sons special education school bus drivers had been among those killed.

To put it in starker perspective, one hundred people would have, for us, been almost an entire high school graduating class.

In the early morning after there were only nineteen reported dead. Later, there were twenty three. The numbers kept growing throughout the day and as more bodies were discovered you could feel the life draining out of the town. One hundred people lost their lives. Quite a few more of us lost our hearts.

But then sometimes events happen that make you realize what kind of town you really live in. A few months afterwards I went to the Springtime Concert at my daughters junior high school. They put one on every year at that time but this one was special. Their chorus group had just returned from a regional competition at Six Flags where they were the only group to receive a perfect score in every category. So this years concert was to be a celebration of that accomplishment. It turned out to be so much more.

The junior high school turned out to have a small jazz band with a most unusual line-up. They had your standard guitar, drums, saxes and brass, but in the middle of it providing a solid bottom they had a Didgeridoo. Yes, here in the uncharted backwater of Rhode Island, we have a didgeridoo player! They played a piece called "Tinsel Town" which sounded like Sun Ra as channelled through Philip Glass. It was something you'd expect to hear in a more mature group from New York or Los Angeles, not from some junior high school ensemble. I'm not sure if a lot of people in the audience either understood or appreciated it, but everyone was completely blown away.

Then came the topper of the evening.

The regular band came out led by Mr. Robert Izzo. Mr. Izzo had been director of the music department for quite a few years and had picked that night to announce that he was retiring and that this would be his final concert. They performed their regular show and at the end received a standing ovation; both the band for their music and more importantly, for Mr. Izzo and his years of service.

Suddenly everything stopped as the doors at the rear of the auditorium burst open and ten or twelve adults, instruments in hand, came rushing to the stage. Someone had gone and contacted some of Mr. Izzo's old students (some of whom, I understand, actually make their living in music now) and to a man asked him,

"Mr. Izzo. Would you conduct us just one last time?"

They came back because they loved and because they remembered.

In the midst of downfall we often need a reminder of what kind of heart and love we are capable of; as people, as a town, as a country. I live in one of the coolest towns in the United States.

You probably do, too.

Perhaps you just don't realize it yet.

¹ : Route 2 has sadly lost any rural quality it once had. What was once a quiet, tree-lined drive through rural farmland has now become a nightmare sprawl of auto dealerships, fast food, strip shopping centers and traffic lights. Ironically, the Rhode Island Mall itself has now been overshadowed by newer more upscale malls. More than half of it's storefronts are empty now.