Maria and I met our friends Ed and Carol Gulley at the New Round House Cafe Friday night, both of us really needed to get out after a long and challenging week. Since so many of you contributed to the Round House in its long struggle to survive, and since the new care is more vibrant and welcoming than anything we might have imagined, I wanted to share it with you a bit.

A community cafe is very different than a franchise restaurant, or even a good local diner.

A community cafe is part business, and part labor of love.

Community cafes are not conceived only as profit centers, but as gathering places.

This sense of love and commitment permeates them.

Unlike most restaurants, community cafes are places where people to to know others and be known.

I am not fond of community eating tables, and don’t generally use them, but I grasp the importance of being known, even if I can’t be loved. That is the essence of community.

We need to pay for things in a community cafe, but money is never the point. Safety is the point, security and connection.

In my small town we cling to old and new values. We are all online, we all have our banking apps, but we all understand that the search for community is at the heart of the human experience. It is something every human being wants and needs.

In my own view, the lack of community is a kind of cancer, I can see it every day erodiing our political system and degrading our way of speaking to and about one another, just look online.

It is commonly understood in my town that we speak respectfully to one another, because we can’t escape from each other or hide behind our computers to hurt insults and crudities. I have made some friends at the Round House Cafe, settled some differences.

We know where to see each other, we know where to find each other, we have to be able to speak to one another.

The community cafe tonight, the New Round House – reminded me of my younger days in New York City, living in Greenwich Village, then a sea of community cafes. Every night, I ended up in a cafe, talking to friends and newcomers, sharing ideas in safety and finding connection.

There was that feeling in the New Round House tonight, the buzz of warm conversation, the sound of laughter of discussion, of friendly argument. I was sitting there for two hours before I knew it, and I thought, wow, Scott and Lisa have done it, they’ve done the impossible. Community cafes are supposed to be dying, not being reborn.

My town is defying conventional wisdom. Our independent bookstore is strong, even in a village of fewer than 2,000 people.

Tonight, I could see and feel it, this warm place, an open an inviting space. Maria and I shared one small pizza, it cost $13, was thin and healthy, we stayed for  hours and talked and talked.

We are grateful for this place, I was drawn back into time, sitting at the Cafe Wha at the corner of MacDougal street, where my apartment was and Minetta Lane. listening intently while a young folk singer named Bob Dylan got up shyly in front of a fading spotlight singing Highway 51, I think it was, I’m not certain.

He was a skinny, short figure with a lot of anger and feeling and we all knew he was something different something special, there was a white glow all around him.

Ed and I and Maria and Carol slipped into  a rhythm, trading stories, memories, ideas. It was a kind of ballet.

I loved those cafes, they made New York seem so small, we were so connected and known and safe.  And here I was again, at the other end of life, sitting in one. It was miraculous to have that feeling back in my little upstate New York town. I hope to spend man nights like tonight, an old man hanging out with old friends, telling tales and spinning yarns.

Community cafes are not just about money.