A man came up to me on the street yesterday and thanked me for using the blog to help raise money so the Round House Cafe could move to another site and remain in our town, battered by the migration of so many businesses and jobs for so many years.

“It would have been horrible to lose the Round House cafe,” he said, “it would have been an awful blow to the town.”

We have been fighting hard for community in Cambridge, N.Y., we have saved the old vaudeville house – now an arts and education center, and soon to be the new and very atmospheric home of the Round House. We have kept our diner, our bead store, our antique stores, and also kept our wonderful independent bookstore.

Now, thanks in great measure to you, the Round House is getting bigger and better, and moving right next door in a 150-year old space that is four times larger and will boast a full kitchen and sandwich counter, among a lot of other things. Things really are working out for the Round House, and much of the thanks go to you.

Nobody works harder than Lisa and Scott, but it is tough to start and run a small business in America these days, especially if you are not a corporation with deep pockets and reserves.

Mickey lives in town with his stepbrother, George Forss, the brilliant landscape photographer. He was hospitalized for schizophrenia when he was a teenager in the 60’s, and he came upstate to live with George 20 years ago.

He is gentle and quiet, and every day, in all weather, he walks up and down Main Street, sometimes, when he has the money, stopping for coffee at Stewart’s or a pack of cigarettes. The whole town looks out for him, making sure he crosses safely and has coffee when it is cold.

Once a day, he comes into the Round House. During one cold winter day, Scott went outside to look for Mickey and to invite him to come into the cafe whenever he is cold or wet or hungry. It took Mickey months to get comfortable with that offer, but Scott persisted, and now, Mickey is often in the Round House, having some coffee, or today, a bagel.

Mickey is my only paid photo subject, he is paid $2 a photo with his permission, $5 today, to celebrate the great triumph of community that the Round House and Scott and Lisa Carrino have come to represent. Mickey needs a place to go. He wouldn’t dream of walking into Applebee’s, even if there was one here.

We all feel lucky today, this day could have marked the closing our beloved cafe and gathering space. We dodged another budget in the time of the global economy.

The Round House has come to mean so much to Maria and I, and to so many other people in town. Maria and I often call up to order hot soups in the winter, or go for pizza on Friday, or for cold soups in the summer. She meets there every week with the good witches, Athena and Mandy, and I have developed some strong and lasting friends there. We meet people and stay in touch with friends there. Community is about being known, for me, for Mickey.

The Round House is where that happens.

Students and local musicians perform there, prayer groups meet there, and people like me, with restricted diets, can get fresh, healthy and unprocessed food there. It has become a tourist destination, drawing people into town, and hires a lot of kids to work in the kitchen, clean tables and run the cash register.

It has become part of the heart and soul of our town, it would have been an open wound if it closed.

Whenever I see Mickey in there, I see the power of community and the sanctity of being known. The Round House Cafe is a triumph of determination, hard work and the importance of keeping community – and humanity – alive in our distracted world. If we can do it, any town can do it.

Today, Maria and I are bringing a bottle of wine over to help celebrate the closing of the First Round House Cafe. Monday, an army of workers, carpenters, employees electricians and townspeople will gather at the New Round House Cafe to help Scott and Lisa Carrino  begin their move to a strikingly new and original space a few feet away and to finish the renovations there. It will take a few weeks.

We already miss them.

Thanks for making this possible, the Army Of Good is undefeated.