Day: May 29, 2014

My daughter lives in Brooklyn and finding good restaurants with great food is a simple thing, if you can find a seat. Restaurants come and go, there are hundreds, thousands and they are taken for granted.  No one there ever wonders if they will find a good place to eat, only if they can get in. Yet something is always missing in those places for me, the food is great, but I feel I can never been known there, am unlikely even to come back,  the odds are against them lasting for long, and there are so many other places to try.

It rarely feels like community to me.

In the country, finding good places in a community to gather and eat can be more complicated. We spent a lot of time driving around in search of places that are special to us, that fit us. Maria and I came to Cambridge nearly two years ago and we have been finding community there, friend by friend, place by place, hardware store by local bar, restaurant by restaurant.

The Round House Cafe has become part of the town’s heartbeat, and it is woven into my own life. It is not just a cafe but also a place of community where we can eat well and connect with one another we can avoid the fragmentation and disconnection so many people feel in bigger cities and communities. We can be seen and be known.

Our hardware store is like that, so is Battenkill Books, Bridget’s Pharmacy, the local vet, the food co-op. We become aware of one another there, such places are the glue that binds us together when life is always pulling us apart. We all end up knowing everything about one another – sometimes to much. A meaningful life is one of balance, it requires thought and adjustment.

Recently, we have found another such place the Marigold Pizza Kitchen in North Bennington, Vt. – essential in my sense of community – a clean,  pizza place with style and atmosphere, fresh salads and great and healthy pizzas. We have been looking for that for a good while. We have found it. The vegetables are all grown locally on organic farms, practically a religion in Vermont. The pizzas are thin and delicious. The pizzas all have their own names.

We got the Fiona – Basil Pesto, Fresh Mozarella Asiago and Goat Cheese, Sausage and Artichokes on wheat dough.

I hadn’t really thought of writing about the Marigold – we have been going there on and off for a year now –  and I’m not interested in writing restaurant reviews. But I realized tonight that this is precisely what I ought to share, that we had expanded our sense of community. This was a story about connecting, and I think it’s important to share our search for connection and community, it is a difficult thing for many people to find. Kevin, the owner and I finally met and talked, he says he has a great book in him.  He recognized me from some book readings he attended. We will get past that.

We went with our friends Kim and Jack Macmillan, we usually go out to dinner with them each week and at the end of the meal tonight, we all looked at one another and said, “hey, we have a new favorite place for dinner.?

The Marigold, like the Round House, is informal, comfortable, clean and warm, classy paintings hanging on the walls. It has the signature elements of college restaurants – posters, music, espresso machines.

It has that sense of community, of individual place. It is in part a hangout for Bennington College, and I love the gaunt and skinny intense and artistic types who hang out there – Bennington College is an artsy, sometimes snooty kind of place.  I feel sometimes that I am back in Greenwich Village. I appreciate being around the young, I soak up their energy and purpose like a social vampire, I love listening to the new music that is always playing in the background.

A great pizza place with fresh and healthy food is a thing to cherish, an important piece of the puzzle of community, at least for me.

It is one of those places where you feel comfortable, the owner is obsessed with healthy eating, friendly service, and he also has super-duper espresso machines going in the cafe room.  Restaurants near colleges have a lot of life and feeling in them, so does Marigold’s.I believe that connection is the universal desire of human beings, it is something we all want, all seek.  I think we all suffer when it is missing. Perhaps it comes when one is open to it.  We are both happy to see we are yet another step closer to community in our curious and wonderful little world, on our great adventure.

Liam is quite the stud these days, he is so big he has to kneel down to get milk from Susie. The lambs are beginning to hang out with one another, to butt heads, dance and hop around the meadow. They are beginning to wander a few feet from their mothers and climb the rocks. Liam’s posse is a fixture in the pasture.

I met Jack Metzger soon after I moved to the first Bedlam Farm, he would pull up in his station wagon, his car loaded with antique treasures, desks, signs, jars and statues. Every book I’ve written up here has been written on a Jack Metzger desk, my headless statue came from Jack, his shop is a trove of wondrous old things, and Jack has become an acclaimed environmental artist, showing his sculptures made from discarded things in galleries, at shows, in his shop. He introduced me to George Forss and Jack is a genius at matching people and things with one another.

And yes, that is Jack’s hand in the photo, I didn’t even see him reaching for the books when I snapped the shutter.

He called me up to tell me about the Macaws he reclaimed from an old amusement park – nobody knows where Jack gets his stuff, he has a photographic memory for what people like. I love these two pieces, (I once bought a carousel piece from Jack, it is hanging on my wall) in my prior life I would have bought these two in a heartbeat – they cost over $500 and I will not buy them now. They would be perfect in my study, inspiring muses.

But I loved seeing them on Jack’s porch, it is an art gallery in its own right, there is always something new and dear there. Jack is unique, a beloved fixture in my town, a sweet and artistic man. I believe the country is the most tolerant part of the country, there are all sorts of people here living their lives, supporting one another, working and struggling on their own behalf. I am grateful for Jack’s Porch, it is a mirror on our world.

Some years ago, a prescient author and psychologists wrote that Americans were becoming disconnected from the natural world and from the world of animals. They would, he said, be disenchanted with technology, politics, the decline in faith and spirituality, the rise of greed and corporatism. In order to heal themselves and the world, he said, they would turn to nature and animals to try and heal. I thought of his prediction out taking photos of the natural world around me, and understanding how important it has become to me and my own sense of healing and spirituality.

On this winding road, I stood and felt the wind caressing my face, my shirt flapping in the breeze, the sense of openness and possibility, I recalled the time in my life – most of my life – when I did not ever see a country road, or feel this openness, this sense of possibility, this gentle breeze rolling along a spring meadow. Without the natural world and without animals, we are broken. Our plant is broken and each of us make our own choices about how to respond.

I can no longer live without open roads, they are the pathway to my spirit, my soul.