RoadsideOnline

East Ferry Deli, Jamestown, Rhode Island.

It's al fresco time in New England.

This past Memorial Day weekend begged us all to get outdoors. Perfect was the perfect word to describe the weather, save for a quick thunderstorm that raced through my hometown Saturday evening. My wife Jan and I had no holiday obligations, so Sunday we decided to just head south for the Rhode Island shore and wind up anywhere. Indeed, about the closest thing to a plan we had was our intention to dine outdoors as close to the water as possible.

Anyone can appreciate the pleasures of dining outside on a perfect day, even if we can't imagine who Al Fresco is. That would be why there are so many terraces, gardens and patios devoted to dining in the open air. Yet so often al fresco dining smacks me more as a marketing strategy planned in a windowless boardroom and less as the recognition of a perfect setting by some restauranteur. There's a Chipotle Grille near where I work (I don't know if I spelled that word correctly. I still haven't decided how to pronounce it. It's one of those words that seemed to come out of an ad so I don't worry about it). It's on the edge of a parking lot on a rise above Bald Hill Road, one of those highway strips surrounded by commerce. The view is spectacular -  if you like to gaze out at parked Toyotas and traffic jams.

The most courageous thing any musician can do is to get up in front of an audience and, armed only with a keyboard or guitar, sing a song they created.

There might not seem to be much of that in these days of contrived and manufactured celebrity, where talent takes a back seat to "marketability." After all, when producers can actually correct the pitch of a weak or faltering voice, even live, and layers of digitized accompaniment can add sparkle to dull songwriting, who needs talent?

Besides, who's listening, anyway? Music serves most folks simply as accompaniment to their own lives. To burst through the wall of background-noise they hear every day, a song has to catch their attention the first time they hear it blasting out of that background. It's the popular styles that do that. Who takes the time to find substance?

One of the things I like about Mom ‘n Pop operations is they don’t get caught up in market-research.

Mostly, it’s because they can’t afford it, I’d guess, but I think it might as much be the case that they don’t really care to quantify their customers. When do-it-yourself entrepreneurs get ideas, they make them reality and then test them, not the other way around. That’s why you see Mom ‘n Pop businesses surviving by offering products and services you didn’t even know you wanted, ones you’d never see in the follow-the-poll-results world of mega-corporations.

The Traveler Restaurant serves as the perfect example. When you hear about the deal they offer patrons you’ll wonder if you heard right. The Traveler offers its customers the opportunity to choose any three books from a score of bookshelves that run through its dining room. For free. To take home. You heard it right.

The Jolly Cholly

Every town seems to have one. It's that strip of land straddling some stretch of road, maybe a state route or old federal highway, that's been reborn as the town's new commercial center, usually to the detriment of its old one.

Often this commercial strip rises from fields of old farmland. Sometimes it replaces old commercial buildings that once housed businesses long gone or still waiting for their own deaths or the deaths of their owners. But whatever is replaced, it's the old-timers who are left to remember while the new-timers flock to the mall, big-box building-center or mega-store built there. Sometimes what is replaced doesn't deserve to be missed, like the auto junkyard or factory. But for at least one commercial strip of which I am aware, in North Attleboro, Mass., much of what was replaced is worth missing.

For years now my wife Jan and I have had a tradition of heading out to western Massachusetts in early spring for breakfast. It started when her daughter Ruby - now searching for herself out in southern California somewhere - was just a little kid. Since then we've repeated the trip with various family-members and their friends tagging along. It always makes for a relaxing and enjoyable day.

Okay, so it isn't breakfast we're after. What got us driving two hours was an article in a Boston paper about sugaring-time in the Bay State. I had an idea of the lore of maple-sugaring, but I had no idea that sugaring was practiced in southern New England. And since this winter/spring tradition combined three of my favorite things, namely maple syrup, western Mass., and breakfast, I figured this was worth a day's driving, eating and browsing.