Block Island Beckons

Summer is right around the corner and before you know it the strains of "Sail Away on the Block Island Ferry" will be heard on every radio station. The island is located 13 miles off of the southern coast of Rhode Island and is known for its excellent bicycling, hiking, sailing, fishing, miles of free beaches, and now a Lila Delman Real Estate office!

Located within walking distance of the ferry, the office is in theFigurehead Building on Water Street. This new location brings the total number of Lila Delman Real Estate offices to five: Narragansett, Newport, Jamestown, Watch Hill, and Block Island. The Figurehead Building is a newer mixed-use structure built to historic standards and is one of the new icons on Water Street. The office is located at the rear of the building and will be staffed by Sales Associates Kaylan McAleer and Don Huggins.

John Hodnett, Principal Broker and Block Island vacationer, stated "we are excited about offering our Block Island clients a local presence as well as the internationall reach of Lila Delman Real Estate. We are confident that our extensive marketing reach will, for the first time, introduce Block Island to our clients who may hot have considered it or were unaware of the island prior to beginning their home search." The doors to the new office are barely open and already Kaylan and Don have a great listing!

So this summer, or any other season, if you're on Block Island be sure to stop in and say hello, or give us a call at 401-466-8777. Kaylan and Don will be more than happy to help you with all of your Block Island Sales and Rental needs.

The Right Stuff

In this time starved world of ours when newspaper headline after headline alarm us to the economic perils that confront us and the freak natural disasters that are occurring, becoming negative is not only natural but worst so, it becomes a habit. We fail to see the more quiet and silent wonders that surround us and the true miracles and synchronicities that exist if we are in a state of waiting and openness. This story is a about a miracle that no doubt was meant to be and to be told.

Twelve years ago our son Scott was in ninth grade at Bishop Hendricken High School in Warwick. Just for the record, our son Scott was there only for one year. During this year, one of Scott's schoolmates, Patrick Lynch, was battling leukemia and needed a bone marrow transplant. Bishop Hendricken scheduled a bone marrow donor drive one night on February 16th, 1998 in hopes that family and friends would come to the school and register as bone marrow donors. Many like us came, registered, but did not provide the match that Patrick needed. Fortunately, however, Patrick found a match elsewhere.

Ten years later out of the blue, my husband, Jaime, was contacted to see if he was still interested in being a bone marrow donor. We could hardly believe or remember that we had signed up on the bone marrow registry so many years earlier. The RI Blood Center thought that there might be a match between Jaime and a needing individual, but who knew. There were many more tests to come in the next several months to see if indeed there was a good match. And ultimately after four months of tests, there was a potentially wonderful and almost perfect match. This donation held a lot of promise.

When Jaime actually donated his bone marrow; all that we knew about the recipient was that he was a fifteen-year-old male with leukemia. We had no idea of the ultimate destination of this gift. Nor did we know that there was a wonderful volunteer team in place that would immediately fly the refrigerated marrow to an allocated airport and hand deliver it to the necessary hospital where the recipient lay waiting. Protocol dictates that at least a year must elapse before a donor and recipient might have contact, so it was an anonymous gift. Along with the bone marrow, the volunteer carried a letter that Jaime had hand written to the recipient whom we named "Charlie", sending him prayers and our deepest wishes for a good outcome.

Fast forward to one and a half years later, Jaime received a call that "Charlie" wanted to make contact with him. We were so thrilled to learn that Charlie was still alive. "Charlie" is actually a young man now who just turned eighteen, is graduating this spring from high school and lives in Phoenix, Arizona. The Banner Blood and Bone Marrow Center in Phoenix is flying us out at the end of this week to meet Charlie and his parents and attend a celebration for the cause.

We now know Charlie's real name. It is Justin. After many long conversations with Justin and his family, we learned that he was first was diagnosed with leukemia when he was five years old. When he was eleven years old, he had hearing problems and a brain tumor was discovered lodged in his ear canal. After brain surgery and chemo, Justin recovered. Sadly, he was diagnosed with leukemia again when he was fifteen. After exploring all options, when Justin and his family decided to look for a bone marrow transplant, he was given only a ten percent chance of survival.

But the best news is that Justin made it! During the year after Justin had the transplant, his only contact with friends was via e-mail or phone because personal contact would have compromised his non-existent immune system. His family bought him a dog during his recovery and, not knowing Jaime's name, they named the dog "Donor." This brought us all to tears because everyone who knows us knows that our preferred creature of choice is of the canine variety. My husband's "Dear Charlie" letter has sat on the mantle over the family fireplace since Justin's bone marrow transplant took place.

When Jaime and I go out to meet Justin and his family next weekend, we will bring him a graduation gift. We selected a ship's clock as a memento to symbolize the deep bond that Jaime shares with him and the gift of time that Justin now enjoys. Jaime decided on the engraving. It reads "Justin and Jaime Wilson: the right time, the right place, and the right stuff."

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a novel about 150 years ago called The Scarlet Letter . It is an incredibly authentic and moving story of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmessdale and their illegitimate child, Pearl. It is a story about adulterous behavior and the morals of a society set in Puritan Boston.

The townspeople were not satisfied until Hester was forced to permanently wear a scarlet A on her chest, forever. She was, from time to time, displayed in the public square, and harassesd and tormented by the upright and self-righteous town’s people. Somehow, and for some ungodly reason, seeing Hester humiliated made them feel superior.

Whatever another human being’s perceived transgressions may be, do we really want to be the kind of society that takes pleasure from others’ pain that subjects others to public humiliation for very private behavior and likes nothing better than to set ourselves up as judge and jury as to how other people should live their lives?

Recently, the last straw for me was during The Masters Golf Tournament, seeing that old windbag in the green jacket, just about beside himself, spitting out how Tiger had let everyone down, including this man’s children and grandchildren. He displayed no grace, no forgiveness, no sense of detachment - he felt completely justified in the public flogging of a sinner. I wondered, just who the heck does this guy think he is?

the honest kitchen

Whatever happened to the honest kitchen? Remember when a kitchen was just a kitchen, not a statement? Everybody you knew had kitchens with Formica counters, linoleum floors, white sinks. If you wanted a new look, you’d repaint the kitchen cabinets, perhaps switching out the knobs for something more au current. Pin spot counter lighting? Get real. You put a lamp on the counter and called it a day. Neither you nor anyone you knew had granite countertops or stainless steel appliances or custom made glass fronted cabinetry. This was not because you and your friends were stupid, but because you weren’t. It just wouldn’t have occurred to you to put that much effort into the looks of the thing. Why bother? Your kitchen was not supposed to be a design manifesto. If you wanted to express yourself, you propped a couple of expensive-looking cookbooks up against the Cuisinart or put some apples in a bowl.

But O how the ethos has changed…those were simpler, less pretentious times. Now the stark, clinical uniformity of stainless and granite is de rigueur in the kitchens of just about everyone I know, including myself. For reasons that now seem totally ill-advised, about ten years ago I hopped onto that particular aesthetic train after a bad fire prompted a complete renovation of my kitchen. Now glass cabinets, polished concrete and stainless steel are the order of the day at my house. Sounds ricochet relentlessly off the hard shiny surfaces with the force of atoms smashing about in a particle accelerator. The mirrored faces of the stainless appliances evilly magnify every drip mark, accentuate every smudge. I wipe smears off my refrigerator three times a day and it’s still never clean. Glass shatters as explosively on my super-hard countertops as if hit by a bullet, spraying shards as far as the dining room, where they lie in wait for a bare foot to impale. The racks in my high efficiency “green” dishwasher are not configured in a way that will hold bowls, which is pretty much all we eat out of at my house. Adding insult to injury, special high end cleaning products are required for all surfaces, except for the concrete counters, which nothing will clean because I stupidly used abrasives on them shortly after installation, thereby irreparably compromising whatever passed for a protective sealant. And the equally impractical concrete farmer’s sink – which to this day I continue to destructively use abrasives on, because there’s no other choice if I want to get it clean - is now as pitted and scarred as if it had been formed out of lava and just about as sanitary, shredding sponges with the effectiveness of a cheese grater along its ragged, petri dish-like bottom. Anti-bacterial? Don’t make me laugh. The people in my family are lucky to be alive.

So what, pray tell, is the ultimate advantage of all these “improvements”? No matter where you go you see it again and again, in kitchen after kitchen, a Sorcerer’s Apprentice effect of granite & stainless endlessly multiplying across the land. I’m envious of the few who stuck to their guns and stayed in the past. I joined the stampede into the future and I regret it. Not a day goes by but that I don’t wish I still had an old fashioned ceramic-over-cast-iron sink, a butcher block counter top, cabinets that didn’t ostentatiously display the disorder within. A white refrigerator. A place to put some cookbooks. A lamp on the countertop. And my $100,000 back.

And The Winner Is...

Thank you to everyone who participated in our "My Rhode Island Summer" Story Contest and congratulations to the finalists. All of us at Lila Delman Real Estate truly enjoyed reading these wonderful tales of summers spent in our little Ocean State.

And the winner is...

Amy Nichols - "Rhode Island Born & Rhode Island Bred"

For nine long months every year, Cranston seemed about as far away from the beach as you could get. So far, in fact, that a phone call to a “summer friend” in Narragansett or even a “summer love” in South Kingston would incur long distance charges that were sure to get a teenager like myself or my sister grounded. So we endured long wait between Labor Day and Memorial Day.

But for three months out of the year, we gladly relinquished our MTV for the sound of the ocean outside our cottage. We happily gave up Garden City for The Pier. Our “city friends” knew we would disappear for a while… and they knew we didn’t have a phone where we were going either.

Spending the summer with my mom, dad, and sister Erin at the beach in a shack that was essentially 20×20 (with no bathroom) might not sound fun to some. But anyone who has spent the summer with their family in Rhode Island surely knows what a gift it was. As our family grew to add another generation, my niece Olivia and my daughter Sofia, we simply made space. For five generations my family spent the summer at the beach, in a safe place where you never had to worry about your kids walking to the Point to go crabbing or racing to the ice cream shop for a waffle cone.

We never took fancy vacations – my parents saved their money, as did their parents and grandparents, to make the 45 minute drive from “the city” to “the beach” as soon as school let out for the summer. Chances are, at least during my childhood, that the drive back would only happen once or twice. We were the lucky ones that never had to endure the beach traffic.

But as my parents got older, the winters seemed longer and colder. The cottage needed more work than we could handle. The beach began to slip away due to coastal erosion and our expanding families just simply didn’t fit in that 20×20 shack. My sister was the first to head for sunny Florida, and my parents and I followed shortly after. Letting go of our summer escape was difficult, especially since Olivia and Sofia were 8 and 12 – the best time to be a kid at the beach! This was the time for them to make those “summer friends” and maybe even start thinking about a first “summer love”.

Every year we hope for a family wedding in Rhode Island, or some other excuse for us to all convene for a week or at least a few days at the beach. Olivia is now 16, and Sofia is 12. I can’t give them a summer like I used to have, but I’d sure like to try…

Finalists Announced!

Drum Roll Please...

The finalists in the Lila Delman Real Estate "My Rhode Island Summer" Story Contest are:
(in no particular order)

Amy Nichols - Rhode Island Born
Mary Stoner - Attachments
Lisa Apostolakis - My Summers in Rhode Island
Debbie Wilson - Narragansett Memories
Susan Donegan LePage - Growing Up in Newport
Each finalist will receive a $75 gift certificate to Spain Restaurant.

Our grand prize Beach House winner will be announced on April 7, 2010. Thank you to everyone who entered; your stories have reminded us all why we love and live in Rhode Island!