BY ABBY FOX

The economic uncertainty we’re living in is making many people stay home and save their money, but several Main Street businesses say they’re hanging on and they think they’re going to make it after all.
The businesses who feel they’re on the sunny side of the street have one important trait in common: the confidence that comes with years of experience in their work and a long-standing relationship with customers.

By Jonathan Gibbs

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How does that cliché go? March comes in like a Devil frog and leaves like a Clown anemone fish. Or maybe it comes in like a Giant anteater and leaves like a Laughing kookaburra. Maybe it comes in like a Madagascar Hissing cockroach and leaves like a Warty newt. Whatever it is, I’ve seen 56 springs approach now and it always surprises me how my happy anticipation begets optimism which then has the juice squeezed out of it like a Naked mole rat in the clutches of a Green anaconda.

Katie Bialy with Best Buddies  Josh and Will at a Christmas party for Best Buddies.

 By Matt Cate

    Many high schoolers drift aimlessly through their four years of mandatory institutionalization and only find meaning later on in life.  For Katie Bialy, however, high school is an opportunity to reach out to people who need contact the most.  
    Katie, a junior at East Greenwich High School, is a member of her school's Best Buddies club.  Best Buddies is an international organization that reaches out to individuals with intellectual disabilities.
 

BY ABBY FOX

East Greenwich lost one of its most devoted and valued history keepers Sunday, when 89-year-old Thaire Adamson, considered the town’s unofficial historian, died.
“She was a walking library: that was her nature, to gather information and put it all together,” said Marion Helwig, president of the East Greenwich Historic Preservation Society, a group Adamson had helped found in 1967. “She loved doing it, and she loved talking about it.”
 

Photo: Abby Fox

EGHS students went to the ACI last week to get first-hand accounts from inmates about drunk driving.

BY ABBY FOX

Four prisoners at the Adult Correctional Institute in Cranston, doing time for killing people on the road while driving drunk, told more than 150 East Greenwich students their stories, last Thursday night at the ACI.
They spoke of their loneliness and self-loathing behind bars, of the constant reminders of the pain they had caused other people. The event was coordinated by school committee member Anne Palumbo who encouraged a record number of students to come.

By JONATHAN GIBBS

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 Several weeks after the hospital lets you take home your new-born baby, they send a nurse out to your house to see how things are going. Ostensibly it is to see if there’s any practical advice or needs the new parents might require. The motive behind that motive is to watch for signs of neglect, or worse.
  Being a mature man of principled behavior, I prepared for their visit three years ago by doing what, for me at the time, felt like the right thing to do: I borrowed a baby doll from a neighbor, put some gauzy black material around it and waited for them to come down our street, watching from a perch by our upstairs bathroom window. It was not long after Michael Jackson had displayed his child rearing expertise in very public display from a Berlin balconey, and so I readied the window and held the doll by the feet for a quick presentation of my brand of conceptual humor. “Hey, lookit us!” I was prepared to shout, “We got our own Rockin’ Robin and it’s as simple as ABC!” In hindsight it’s probably just as well they never showed up.