29. At Century's End, A Nostalgic Glance Back

Real letters on paper. Sunday dinner with the family. A live person at the other end of the phone. Homemade ice cream.

Ask some people what they will miss about the 20th century and the answer is quick and specific.

But for many others, the question prompts a nostalgia, a sense of loss. They speak of neighborhoods gone now, of too little unhurried time, of a bygone feeling of community.

It's not that life is likely to change suddenly just because the calendar rolls over. But as humans, we take the end of an era as a time to assess. What was important? What was forgettable? What will we miss?

Berkeley biology professor Marian Diamond wishes it was still safe to give a ride to someone on the side of the road with his thumb in the air. Diamond, who turns 73 this month, hasn't done that in years.

The Rev. Joseph L. Roberts Jr., pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, misses the days when people could unify around a goal and a leader.

"There were key people that we looked to for leadership and we followed them," says Roberts, 64, pastor at the church since 1975. "That seems to be long gone. ... There's been a disillusionment with what we can do as groups."

Eighty-year-old farmer Rupert Blair of Warren, Vt., fears what is gone forever is the feeling that a community was a person's extended family.

"Before the fire department was organized, when there was a fire in town, they would give one long ring on the telephone," he says. "You would pick up the phone and they would announce where the fire was and everyone would go help."

It is that sense of community and neighborhood that many associate with the 20th century, and which they fear has already begun to disappear.

A lifetime away, at the Manganaro's Grosseria Italiana in Manhattan, the pots are on the stove before 10 o'clock on a weekday morning. Lunch will be served on small tables in the middle of the shop. The pungent smells of eggplant frying, pasta sauces and meatballs waft through the store.

Sal Dell'Orto, with help from three of his five daughters, runs the family store, founded in 1893 by his uncle's uncle.

Stuffed with old-fashioned food sausages hanging from the ceiling, shelves filled with prosciutto, pastas, and biscotti, Manganaro's has served everyone from Broadway types like Tony Randall to workers from the garment district a block away.

What will 71-year-old Dell'Orto miss in the new century?

"The people. It's the yuppie crowd now," he says. "The customer vendor relationship will become very cold. It's not going to be on a first name basis anymore, and everything will be prepackaged.

"People are in such a hurry now. All they do is work, work, work. They don't have time to try things when they come in," he says.

Though Dell'Orto's store today looks pretty much the same as it did a century ago, he has already had to update. It has a Web site now and, to Dell'Orto's chagrin, takes credit cards.

"I'll miss the cash," he says.

While 20th century technology has made many day-to-day activities quicker and easier, some say it also has been detrimental because we have come to expect and demand speed in everything.

Rosemarie Ives, mayor of the high-tech town of Redmond, Wash., loves the Internet's infinite information and communication.

The problem? "As soon as somebody sends you an e-mail, they expect a response," says Ives, 52. "There's not that give and take, old fashioned deliberation, thoughtfulness."

Gone to speed, too, says 74-year-old Isabell Sorrells of Midvale, Utah, is the importance of an unhurried meal with family and friends.

"We never felt bad if we were over at someone's house and it was close to dinnertime and they would say, 'Stay for dinner,'" she says. "You knew you were welcome, you didn't have to worry about it. You can't do that anymore, be that comfortable in other people's homes. They're just living too fast."