Dunwoody:

Continued from Page 4 have core values built into some of our plans, But maybe in isolation. So how do you connect it all.”

Leaders spent a large portion of their time at the joint city meeting talking about one specific part of Canton’s Roadmap for Success — Celebrating the Diversity of Our Community — which Canton leaders said was a good example of the successes they’ve had after creating the roadmap.

Grant said they had to work very hard to build trust and make connections in the city’s growing Hispanic at the same time, alive, engaged, and fun. community. That effort to reach Hispanic community members started small, with interactions in city schools and churches by police officers and other city employees but has since morphed into a vital citywide effort.

Anyway, as we sat around the table post-show, my wife was telling a story, and part of the story for some reason had something to do with Johnny Carson. She stopped mid-sentence during her story though, and looked at the granddaughter and said, “you have no idea who I am talking about do you? You don’t know Johnny Carson, do you?” Kelsie’s completely blank look on her face was her answer. She looked around the table for clues. Nothing. We got nothing.

“I knew we were making progress when a couple of months ago, I got a call from one of the churches asking me if I would come and talk to their men's group,” he said. “It just shows me that we're slowly breaking down those barriers, and there's so many, but I think we are slowly making progress.”

Like Canton, Dunwoody has a rapidly growing and diverse community. Over the past decade, Dunwoody’s

Kelsie Conley also owns and manages her own gallery in Knoxville called “Bad Water Gallery” (website: LvL3official.com). It is located at 320 East Churchill Ave. Her gallery recently was cited in London’s Financial Times along with three other galleries around the world as an example of the new emerging art venues of note – “making shows for the next generation.”

I think most of us were caught off guard momentarily – surprised and startled a bit. It was no big deal though; it was just one of those moments. I mean, why should we expect a gen Y to know Johnny after he had been off the air since 1992? (The last show was May 22, 1992 – wow. The first show was October 1, 1962.). The rub is that he/his memory remains so clearly in place for my generation and those close, and it is hard to remember that our frames of reference – no matter how clear they are to us – may be diddly squat to others.

Who is Johnny Carson?

Who is John Galt?

How about Lenny Bruce, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey or Wavy Gravy?

How about David Foster Wallace, Julia Butterfly Hill, Bobby Sands, or H Rap Brown?

And Rachael Carson?

I know them all, but, well, that’s just me. Others do not. Indeed. But they know people and stuff and events that I don’t know. Maybe that’s the point.

When son Hans was in first or second grade at Alpharetta Elementary, his teacher (Mrs. Benton?) asked him what his favorite music was. “Anything by Rodgers and Hammerstein,” population grew by more than 12 percent, including significant changes in the city’s Asian and Hispanic populations and a downward shift in the city’s average age.

Those demographic shifts will require Dunwoody officials to change how they are reaching and engaging with residents, Deutsch said.

“We're getting younger, while some of the North Fulton cities are getting older,” she said. “We aren't the same community we were when we became a city, we all experience it on a daily basis.”

Dunwoody doesn’t have the same resources that Canton does, as the Cherokee County seat, she said, but there are still many elements they can replicate, like starting to build trust in the DeKalb County schools and doing as much good as they can in underserved communities.

I polled my kids – just for fun –asking them if they knew who Johnny Carson was. They made fun of me and my question. Figures.

To try to buffer possible embarrassment for Kelsie, I asked her if she was familiar with Howard Finster. Her face lit up. “Yes, of course. Summerville. I was at his studio last year. Some of my friends have some of his stuff.” It didn’t look like anyone else at the table – there were about 10 of us – other than my wife – had Finster on their radar.

Who is Howard Finster?

I often say that “everything important I learned in life, I learned from my children.” Well, almost everything. And the irony is that one of the main reasons they can teach me, is because I taught them – and they remember.

William Faulkner said that “the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” It is still with us – every day. And he could also have said that the future is here too, now. That was crystal clear in Kelsie’s show – for all to see – frozen in time in the museum that afternoon, in a still moment – ha, Elliot’s “still point,” while we talked, listened and looked.

The older I get the more I realize that every moment matters. Every connection. Every memory. Every player on stage. The more we see, the more context we absorb, the more meaning we add to our lives. And the moments we miss, or ignore, or don’t see on late night tv, or hear in our parent’s voice as they read to us, or study about in school, is an excruciating loss that we often don’t even see or realize. But it is a loss for all.

Who is Johnny Carson? Who is Howard Finster?

Indeed.

“You have to get where they are,” Cpl. Tania Cruz of the Canton Police Department said. “That way, you can bridge that gap and always let them know, we're not immigration, we're not here to lock people up and send them back to their country. So that way, they know it's a safe space.”

After the meeting with Canton officials, Dunwoody City Manager Eric Linton said he plans to begin meeting with city staff soon, to see how they can begin developing their own type of roadmap, using input from the entire community.