Seventeen years and two months ago I packed up and left Providence for good.
I mean, I said it was for good at the time, but by then I had left and come back more times than I could count on two hands.
Let’s go back a bit and start from the beginning.
My Providence life started when my father drove me from Lyme, Connecticut (home of Lyme Disease) in his little pickup truck and dropped me and my plastic milk crates of stuff on the front steps of Rhode Island College’s Thorp Hall two hours before it opened and drove away. The year was 1984.
There may have not been any weekend food service on campus but with my older sister’s expired driver’s license and my hair razor sharp with gel, I was at Lupos and The Living Room and the Met Café and Rocket several times a week and all weekend seeing all the best rock and punk shows my alternative heart could handle. I saw REM and The Replacements and The Butthole Surfers, and The Violent Femmes, Husker Du, The Dead Milkmen, The Pixies, The Ramones, Human Sexual Response, Roomful of Blues, and all the local favorites like The Neighborhoods, and the Schemers, and Rash of Stabbings.
My academic career was wholly unremarkable (my mother would say disappointing). But I used my time at RIC judiciously: as an editor of the college paper; running student activities and booking some great shows like Billy Bragg and Aimee Mann and The Bangles; elected to Student Government; hanging around the radio station and the theatre department; and traveling all over the country and the world on the Debate Team.
It was those experiences that prepared me for an eventual career of public speaking, writing, advocacy and rabble rousing that I enjoy now all these years later. I left RIC without a degree to work at Brown as a secretary, the first of three jobs I would hold at Brown (which would also encourage and pay for me to finish my undergraduate degree). And I met a boy who worked at Wyatt’s on Benefit Street by day and played bass in a kind of punk rock and roll band by night. We even had overlapping friends group – he was good friends with the brother of my debate partner’s roommate. He was from Connecticut, too, and had gone to Providence College. He also kept returning to Providence, after graduation from college, after basic training with the Marine Corp, a choice he made instead of going to law school, and after deploying to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. When he returned physically unscathed, we got married.
Together, we tried to leave Providence, moving to Portland, Oregon to chase dreams. I was going to launch a real career at Columbia Sportswear, and he had a position as Executive Chef at an Italian restaurant. But we were back within two years.
After returning, we fell into the old routines: breakfast on Wickenden Street, and later at Nicks on Broadway (at the first location, at Broadway and America Street, where Pizzeria Gusto is now) with the friends from college and post college; going to rock shows and parties and eventually weddings and baby showers and first birthday parties. Our friend group expanded to include friends and family of friends, partners, and spouses, and children. And we all bought houses in the same general neighborhood—that stretch of Federal Hill between Westminster Street and Atwells Avenue, stumbling distance from what was then known as The Decatur. (It’s now The Avery.)
We were all at that magical age where our careers and lives were taking off, and Providence was too. Developers were coming around and looking at the mill buildings. There was money available via community development block grants for brownfields and asbestos remediation. There were opportunities for those of us interested in public service and politics and opening restaurants and small businesses. I left Brown to become Providence’s “Tree Lady” running the Providence Neighborhood Planting Program, and it was one of the most rewarding jobs ever to bring hundreds of trees every spring and fall to the city streets.
I was appointed to the City Plan Commission at a time when Providence was considered a “renaissance city,” between WaterFire and the Providence Place Mall, and waterfront development, and Downcity lofts. But we were losing important places too, like Fort Thunder and other artist spaces at the mills, music venues, and historic buildings, and affordable neighborhoods.
But the summer days of backyard BBQs, celebrating milestones, and organizing around saving a building can’t last forever. Restaurants and bars like The Red Fez, Leon’s and The Decatur closed. Jobs were lost. Friends moved to Warwick and Barrington and Scituate with their kids and new dynamics in the friends group caused strife. Plus divorce and illness and funerals and all the things that happen in life. Providence had been a constant safe space for over 25 years, a place where I could keep returning to, where my people were, where I knew I’d be welcomed back and fall into the same comfortable habits and patterns. But it could not repair what eventually became irrevocably broken. It was time to go.
I left for the last time in 2008, but I kept one toe in Providence. I hated sterile Northern Virginia with its traffic and eight-lane highways and strip plazas and not a decent restaurant or bar to watch a Red Sox game. My personal compass was always pointed north, comparing everything to Providence and within a year I started to apply to every job I could to get back. I drove that miserable trek up 95 every few months for interviews and to visit my parents and my friends, continuing even after my father died. At one point my mother, thinking she was being kind, but sounding exasperated, told me to give up the pipe dream and make a life in Virginia.
Despite all the good will and work and connections in Providence, I did not get one job offer. My skill set of community organizing, advocacy, and public speaking, and knowing a guy (plus a brand new master’s degree) which had served me so well just a year before was of no interest. Eventually I had to accept that I had used up all my “return to home” cards and I simply unsubscribed from job listing mailings, the Providence Journal, and other things that fueled my homesickness.
***
I’ve been gone for seventeen years now.
There are still things I miss like it was 20 years ago—friendship, fellowship, and community, an Italian bakery like Scialo’s, and the carrot cake at Pastiche and pancakes at Nicks on Broadway and the Decatur (RIP). I had made a life elsewhere but without those things that raised me: the activism, buying a round of beers for the kitchen staff at The Red Fez, the street-tree job, the faculty at Brown encouraging me to finish my degree, the Southside Community Land trust Plant Sale, the ability to drive to Matunuck after work and wash off the trials of the day in that clean salt water of the Atlantic ocean. (Yes, we have the Atlantic Ocean in Virginia but have you ever tried to get anywhere after work in the DC Metro area?) Those things live in my heart and I visit them when I need some emotional reinforcement.
I am more cynical now than I ever was in Providence, having been in Virginia when the State Police used pepper spray and tasers on peaceful protesters and a state legislator at a Black Lives Matter rally, and when I was literally in the traffic leaving DC after January 6. Recently, I have watched my few friends, colleagues, and neighbors lose their jobs at NOAA and the DOD and the State Department and FEMA, and every other government agency.
I am cynical and I do not make friends in real life as easily as I did in Providence because there’s no (literal?) space here for that. Everything is spread out and sprawly. There’s no walking to the local pub (if there was one), or a place where folks gather after work for a cocktail, or a group of neighbors you see every weekend at some breakfast diner. You go to work, and you come home and if you don’t have a faith community or kids in the school system or any of the things that tethered us together in Providence: the local advocacy, the RISD Alumni Art Sale, backyard cookouts and parties with friends of friends.
But, I make friends online. In fact, I have made more friends via social media from Providence than I have made real-life Virginia friends. I don’t know if that says more about me, or Northern Virginia. And I have become braver and louder. Our household is the one who keeps a watchful eye out for ICE, who keeps Spanish language “Know your Rights” flyers and “No Warrant No Entry” stickers in my Little Free Library. I got these materials from a social media friend in Providence.
By giving me the relatively small but supportive space to find my voice, in Providence, I grew into a person who understood that you could start young and quiet and get involved with your community to nurture that small voice, using it to show up at planning and zoning meetings and licensing hearings, and have instant access to local lawmakers to thank them, or hold their feet to the fire, on an important community issue. Most of those legislators you knew personally because – as I gesture with my hands – “Providence.”
In my current capacity as an environmental advocate in Northern Virginia, I talk with people who have lived here for years and have never contacted their local or state legislator; they have no idea who represents them. Even though it is not REALLY my job, I will spend a half an hour, sometimes more, explaining how politics work here and who they need to call for whatever it is they need some help with. I give them names and phone numbers and tell them: “Make sure you tell them that you talked to me about this, and hopefully they’ll get on it, but if you don’t get any resolution in a few weeks, I want you to call me back.”
Providence raised me to be an uncompromising and assertive adult who will throw hands to defend not just my community but everyone’s community. Providence ensured that I would never forget where I came from and who my neighbors are, and who, as an advocate, I care for.
I do not know if I have changed as much as Providence has, though. I keep track of the politics and the players, and I could not have ever imagined that Trumpism would take hold in any part of the greater Providence area. How is it that housing is MORE expensive than when I left but wages appear stagnant, and jobs are fewer? And, good lord, what is going on with the Mayor? Is he really going to take a position on which flags can and cannot be flown from City Hall? I honestly can’t imagine that happening in my day. Heck, I can’t imagine that happening HERE, in the South!
Here’s the thing, I would have come back, Providence, a hundred times for a hundred jobs in the last 17 years, if you would have had me. But you told me repeatedly that you were going in a different direction.
And I guess now I have too.
Jen Cole lived in Providence from 1984-2008 and now lives in Prince William County, Virginia where she has a job running an environmental non-profit and of course has a podcast where she complains about the humidity, and lack of Italian bakeries in Northern Virginia. Before she dies, she hopes to get the recipe for the Pastiche Carrot Cake.
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