ATHENS — I remember walking to grade school one day near the house of an old Italian man in my neighborhood. He used to sit on his tiny porch, reading the morning paper, with his feet propped on the railing. On this particular day a bum (for so we called the homeless in those days) came wandering by some distance ahead of me. I recall he had no shoes.

“Hey,” said the Italian. Then he got up, walked down to the alley, and gave the man his

shoes. Without a word he went back up, propped his stocking feet again on the railing, and continued reading.

Twenty years ago, and a continent away, the miles-long concrete wall built by the Communists, which locked in free Berlin, was opened. I can still remember the East Berliners who came through, blinking at the cameras as if they’d awakened from a long, surreal sleep.

For such it really was, as the BBC so artfully put it, as they emerged into the interior of an immense cage where only the inmates were free. We memorialize this great day for that is when an unnatural split in a huge community was healed.

Both the Italian and the fall of the Berlin Wall tell us how important the idea of community is. Community — where people naturally come together.

I recall a quaint little Dutch village center, where a church, small stores, cobble-stoned streets, and lampposts beckoned the walker to meet others. Small squares in American town centers, surrounded by businesses and offices, help people meet and know one another. Large cities, with their wonderful museums, sports stadiums, coffeehouses, manicured parks, social centers, vibrant, engaged educational centers, restaurants with tables on the squares, historic buildings, and preserved neighborhoods attract us.

They create places where people want to live, meet, converse, dine together, and enjoy life.

A real community is a place you want to be a part of. It is a place you want to contribute. Some years back the city fathers of Chattanooga, Tenn., St. Louis, Mo., St. Charles, Ill., and Paducah, Ky., to name a few, assessed their cities. What they saw did not make them happy. They set to work, engaged the businesses and donors, but also — perhaps most important — the skills of local talent, of artists and sculptors, of landscape designers and

ecological students.

They made their cities places you want to go, places you would like to help. You can visit charming waterfront districts. They are places you want to stroll. Different in each case, but each by design of its architecture, statues, memorials, and parks links us to what makes that town unique in all the world.

Here you can find pedestrian-only zones like you find in European cities, parks and artistic centers, redeveloped abandoned homes, which now are prized addresses.

Such places encourage people to develop a host of skills. Art fairs, movie weekends,

and social events showcase them. The cultures of many, many ethnicities are celebrated, not feared, as each vies with one another to make theirs the more attractive event and neighborhood.

Classes are available through local colleges, which take an active part in the awakening of these towns. One citizen of Tuscumbia availed himself of his memories of happier days. Today you can visit his favorite renovated and preserved ice cream parlor and a first-rate bookstore with a waterfall inside. This mirrors the actual waterfall he’s developed as part of a particularly memorable park.

Only a few miles away in Sheffield a former government building and disused sound studio was transformed into another artist’s dream, and is now is home to an active movie company.

A real community is a place where everyone can be a part. There are no boundaries. There is no “we” and “them.” In successful places I’ve seen, people care about one another. In such places, everyone feels a part of “us.”

In little Rogersville, a group of citizens formed a community chamber of commerce. They got together and came up with a plan to restore their community, to make vacant downtown come alive.

Today, if someone visits that little town, they will find common advertising for a host of small enterprises. I was particularly taken by a poem, framed on the wall of a quaint little coffeehouse. Sally Manry wrote:



If these walls could talk,

They would tell of the laughter,

The joy and the pain ...

The hard work, the wisdom

Of loss and of gain.

So many have traveled through and left their mark

Both old and young, and young at heart.



This coffeehouse, a place where community develops, captures first the taste, and then the heart. Such a coffeehouse reminds us of why we have communities; it links us to our past, lends hope to the future, and makes our present experience memorable.

We slow down a little, because there is something here worth our time.