This opinion column is part of John Archibald’s Diary of Alabama.

Tom Saab, the chef and owner of Bistro218 in downtown Birmingham, opened a new restaurant this year, an Italian place with house-made pasta and white tablecloths in a space previously occupied by Rogue Tavern.

Bocca opened in late February, with fresh bucatini and garganelli and a fresh take on it all. It opened, he said, with a boom.

Three weeks later, the world shut down.

And so did his restaurants. For now.

“We got blindsided,” he said. “We didn’t know it was coming.”

One could talk of the bum luck, of the fear and uncertainty. And why not? Restaurants across Alabama, like so many other businesses, have been hammered by quarantine and safety concerns. Chefs and owners like Saab have had to send workers home – workers desperate for income and hours – and a hard business becomes even harder.

Saab believes his restaurants will make it through. He keeps in touch with staff, and tells them they’ll have a job when all this is over. In the meantime, though, he and volunteers from his restaurants have been using their skills – and that fancy new pasta maker from Bocca – to make chicken pasta salad by the bushel.

They plate it up and call Don Lupo, the city of Birmingham’s Operations manager, who makes sure it gets to the homeless in Linn Park, or to feed whole shifts at Birmingham Police Departments, or those at the county health department who face hard and important work.

“We’re concerned for the first responders,” Saab said. “If that breaks down, we’re in big trouble.”

There are so many people doing so many things to hold on to humanity in this socially distant time, to reach out when their own worlds might be closing in, that it makes Lupo breathless and emotional when he talks about it.

There are small restaurateurs and large ones donating food they cannot use. There are laid-off workers volunteering to help those who have it worse than they do. There are all those people who gather from places like the Church of the Reconciler and go into the world “at great personal risk” to make sure people have food.

“If we don’t have people like that, groups of people don’t eat,” Lupo said.

He runs through those people as if giving an Oscar speech, trying desperately to name everybody all in a rush, worrying that he will forget to mention many, and ultimately running out of time. It is an impossible task.

There’s George Sarris at the Fish Market who calls him every week with a check for a homeless shelter, even though his own business is suffering. There is Tasos Touloupis at Ted’s, feeding medical staff at UAB with help from a fund set up by Alan and Lynn Ritchie and UAB Foundation. The people at Bamboo are feeding health care workers, and those at Rodney Scott’s send barbecue to first responders.

Lupo talks of how Jack's Family Restaurants – sorry, I will always think of them as Jack’s Hamburgers – donated truck loads of food from the warehouses to homeless shelters, and how Vestavia Hills Elementary West did the same. Strawberry milk from the elementary school was wildly popular on the streets.

The lists grow so long you start to believe that goodness might be the rule, rather than the exception.

Don Lupo often connects helpers with those who need help.

The CareHealth campaign works with restaurants such as Saw’s Soul Kitchen, Post Office Pies and others to send restaurant meals to doctors and nurses. It is easy to feel Lupo’s frustration. It is impossible to name them all across Alabama – people who put aside their own safety or discomfort or financial distress to do what they know how to do, to care for someone other than themselves, to make a hard world a little more caring.

That’s what Saab wants to do – though he admits the feeding program was in part motivated by his hopes to stay in contact with his staff while the restaurants are closed, for he knows they are valuable and wants more than anything for them to return when the doors are opened and the future is as bright as it looked when the year began. Most of all, though, it is just the decent thing to do.

Lupo is an emotional man. He knows people who need help as well as anybody I’ve ever met, and is driven to help at a risk to his own health -- though he brushes that aside like it is a germ.

“We are fortunate to live in a giving community,” he says.

But when he talks of those who are helping, or those who are being helped, he must stop, and compose himself, before speak again.

A decade from now, he says, those people who are now handing out lunches to hungry children and adults may remember what it feels like to give, and it will shape them.

And a decade from now, those who were in need of meals today may just remember the love and the dignity that was shown to them when they were hungry, and perhaps it will be the thing they need to improve their own lives.

Maybe it’s a pipe dream. I don’t know. But it is Lupo’s dream, and has been for a long time.

It is comforting, these days, to see that he is not alone.

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register, Birmingham Magazine and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.