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.