I saw a post by Maura Healey – the Mass Guv – welcoming college students with a bit of honesty. She had three bullet points.
“We take sports seriously.”
“No one really calls it Beantown.”
“Regular just means cream and sugar.”
I thought I’d borrow the idea to welcome students arriving here.
Except that Rhode Island, known for its myriad quirks, has a much longer list.
But newcomers need to know, so here goes:
- It’s not only OK to get iced coffee in winter here, it’s weird if you don’t.
- There’s even a drink called “ Coffee Milk .” Yes, it’s a thing. Coffee-flavored milk. They don’t have that in North Dakota.
- It is often ordered to chase down “three all the way.” That refers to three hot wieners with spicy meat sauce at one of the most Rhode Island places of all. It’s called New York System , even though it’s a Rhode Island original. I know – but we embrace the name.
- We are less happy when faraway outsiders say, “Rhode Island? Isn’t that part of New York?” No sir. That would be Long Island. But it’s a little-known fact that Rhode Island has a border with New York – across water.
- Calving icebergs. Military bases. Wildfires. Texas ranches. No other state is used as often as Rhode Island as a unit of measurement for such things.
- It’s not a baked stuffed clam. It’s a stuffie .
- Our most God-like idol wears a loincloth. He’s 11 feet tall, an icon at the State House. His name – “The Independent Man” – is a reflection of the populace. Almost a century ago, the famous horror writer H.P. Lovecraft described Providence as “a haven of the odd, the free, and the dissenting.” It’s still true in 2024.
- Why are we that way? Rhode Island was founded as a free-thinking refuge from the doctrinaire Puritans in Massachusetts. We were the first to renounce the crown, the last to ratify the U.S. Constitution, and are among the few states with an official appetizer. That would be calamari. We catch a ton of it here out of a pair of biblical villages named Jerusalem and Galilee.