Leave All Your Love and Your Longing Behind

The distance between who we are and who we hope to become can vary from very great to very small depending on our plans, abilities, aptitudes and perhaps, most importantly, our desire and will to improve. You have to risk something of yourself to close the gap and the fear of making a mistake is, itself, a mistake. Just because we haven't yet succeeded, doesn't mean we won't.

No one ever says 'ready, set, stay!' at least no one who wants to be successful. Everything on Planet Earth must adapt in order to survive and succeed or it becomes history. Cheap gas and affordable automobiles helped change the landscape of post World War II America, with families moving out of cities as vast tracts were converted to housing developments and shops and merchants followed the population and exited downtowns across the country.

Half a century later, the tide of urban exodus has ebbed and escalating costs for services and infrastructure combined with less ready cash and diminished credit have helped spur a second look at cities whose best days were thought to be behind them. Turns out those who'd written off our urban centers may have another think coming. If you abandon a sinking ship that does not sink, you must be an excellent swimmer.

Having lived in Norwich for twenty years, I've been comfortable, if not benumbed, with the idea that as unfulfilled as the promise of this city may seem to many, we have spared ourselves the finality of despair and disappointment by never actually planning and then committing and executing our plan. If we never really try, we can never really fail-at least that's what we'd like to believe.

But in recent years, we've edged, albeit uneasily towards learning to work together towards goals larger than the next election cycle and beyond the next budget year. We've finally conceded when you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. I don't think we've agreed on the destination, but it's starting to take shape and the timeline is looking a lot more like sooner rather than later.

There's a "Vibrant Communities" public meeting at four this afternoon in the Artspace community room at 35 Chestnut Street to develop ideas and insights on how to use a $50,000 community development grant awarded by the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation earlier this fall to target one building and create a strategic plan for rehabilitation and reuse. Not a 'build it and they might come' but more of a pick a point of leverage to move a neighborhood forward.

It's okay to be skeptical that we can create a consensus and critical mass but check your attitude and then your watch because at 6:30 tonight, the formal dedication of the newly renovated Kelly Middle School, under budget and ahead of schedule, could cause you to rethink that 'no, we can't make this work' mindset, because it seems, yes we can.

Speaking of making things work, Saturday morning's One City Forum, starting at nine (I had the wrong time earlier and in a local newspaper today; just getting old, I guess) in the Occum Volunteer Fire Department reviews a year-old outline, the "Norwich Community-wide Economic Plan and Process." The intention is to extract as much manner and method from that proposal and include it in the Plan of Conservation and Development other city residents have volunteered to improve with the understanding that our political leaders have to fully and finally implement.

We can stop looking for lone developers on a grassy knoll. It's not about buildings anymore-it's about building long-term relationships that reflect everyone's interest in our community. I'm not going to pretend Norwich's dark days are over but I believe it's time that together we step closer towards the light on the horizon.

-bill kenny