The Book Club Refugee Finds Shelter

I have had an essay in progress for some years now, with the working title “Book Club Refugee.” It begins to recount the amazing number of book clubs I have attended, at least briefly, since leaving full-time employment in 1996 and moving to serial small university towns with my growing family.

I do hope I’ll finish the essay eventually. Some of the memories are just painful—the play group from hell that morphed into the book group from hell where the alpha women allowed 15 minutes max of touching on the book before launching into vicious gossip; the university women’s book club that picked a whole year’s slate by a committee of long-time members (who wouldn’t allow newer members to speak); several groups of lovely, earnest, intimate women where I just couldn’t break in.

But some of the memories are priceless treasures. The group I found just before I moved to Bloomington looked to be an excellent fit, with a mix of serious readers and hip professors who genuinely wanted to discuss the chosen selections. The second evening I attended, just as I learned I would be moving, we discussed a fabulous book in a secluded backyard hot tub with glasses of excellent chardonnay and candles balanced on the surrounding ledges, as huge, airy snowflakes drifted down around us in a mild New England evening.

I also attended unbelievably rich, public “Author Events” at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA, a second-generation family-owned bookstore just across Route 116 from Mount Holyoke College; it remains a reader’s paradise, with two floors of well-selected books, cards, and bibliophile paraphernalia, and a full slate of monthly author and reader events. There I, along with 11 other fortunate and avid readers who signed up, got to discuss their books with such authors as Alice McDermott, Ruth Ozeki, Jane Smiley, and others. (I coined the name “Book Club Refugees” for the “club” of two, myself and my dear friend Ellen, so that we could attend an evening event limited to book clubs only.) In those intimate conversations with authors, I learned so much about the assumptions I bring to a text, and how little those assumptions sometimes have to do with the writing decisions made by a contemporary author, among other things.

Here in Bloomington, I am a devoted member of the WWF(a)C Book Club that meets third Thursdays over tea and optional sack lunch at the Poplar Grove Schoolhouse. I cannot say enough about this ambitious, articulate, and thoughtful group of readers. We are all serious, but not humorless, about our reading, and discussion of the selections is always primary. A group of some 10 regulars, most with some connection to the WWF(a)C program, we are led by a wise and dedicated facilitator who usually reads the books at least twice and never fails to challenge us with thought-provoking questions and considerations. In recent months, we have chosen a set of three books that all bear on African American history: James McBride’s haunting “Song Yet Sung,” a tale of escaped slaves in pre-Civil War Maryland, Jon Clinch’s gorgeous and grisly imagining of Huckleberry Finn’s Pap “Finn,” and next month, Isabel Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” We are all looking forward to hearing James McBride speak in Bloomington as a guest of the Friends of the Monroe County Library on November 12.

Each of us has our own history of reading, alone, with friends and partners, as well as in groups, and surely each of us has our own experiences of the pleasures and perils of shared reading with others. Share some of yours! Or come share ours with us!

Mary for the Poplar Grove Muse

Old Friend from Far Away

I am facebook friends with a man I have known since we were 15. Jim and I came to know each other first in band camp, where we two shy sophomores (in my high school sophomore year was the first year) sat across from each other each night at a picnic table in the camp mess hall--he the lone male in a rank of clarinetists, me the only xylophone player. We ate and drank kool-aid in silence. I never knew what to say to him, and I suppose he did not know what to say to me. He was cute and most of the clarinetists had crushes on him. I don’t think I did, but maybe I would have if I could have thought of something to say.

Not long after those weeks in band camp we found ourselves part of a group that hung out in the library. For some reason we drifted toward an AFS club, and we befriended the foreign exchange students. Before we knew it, we were throwing parties and hanging out at pizza places and making googly eyes at each other in marching band. He turned out to be quite popular and had a string of girlfriends that came in and out of his life. I suppose I wouldn’t have minded being one of them, but we had so much fun just hanging out together, and we had a little gang and we laughed so much I did not give it much thought.

When we went to college we visited each other. Michigan to Chicago, Chicago to Michigan. In the era before cell phones and email we sent letters and talked on the phone. He met my college friends and I met his. Summers we met up back at home--working together at the mall or ice cream stands or at a company in Cleveland that manufactured chemicals. We commuted together and went to bars after work.

Is it any surprise to the reader that my lifelong friend came out to me toward the end of our college careers? I was lucky not to have been one of a string of girlfriend relationships that never went anywhere, but a true friend. Jim has been in my life for thirty years and though we do not see each other often, as is the way of many old friends, I know he is there.

He is fortunate that he was coming out as the era of AIDs was in full force and the beginnings of understanding about transmission were emerging. By then he knew the importance of practicing safe sex. The bell curve of gay men who contracted AIDS bloomed just before he came out. I feel thankful that my generation missed the onslaught of death that faced people just a few years older than me.

Jim left Michigan for San Francisco and grad school. I left Chicago for Indiana and grad school. I have seen him throughout the years in our home town, at weddings and friendly gatherings and now on facebook.

He just posted on my FB wall: a comment about an article I posted about I-69. I posted a comment on his photos where is is working in China. When I saw his words across the years and miles I absolutely wanted to weep. There is no friend like an old friend. I treasure them, and him.

Packing Up

My house is a mess. Newspaper shreds flutter about and I can’t find anything. Three things I’ve already packed away (at the bottom of the box) are things I want today. Moving is tough stuff.

This move was not self-initiated. The mother ship decided I needed to be a West-coast girl. I decided I needed my job. And so the hubby and I uproot ourselves again. We’ll test the soil, water and light in a new habitat. It’s hard to yank myself out of ground I thought I would never leave.

Not all about the move is sad or unwelcome. We’ll be close to oceans and mountains and great mass transit. We dream new adventures. We let stuff go. We begin again.

I’d like to say that I balance this tension of excitement and loss. Some days I do. Some days I cry privately in 30-second bursts. I resist slipping away quietly and choose, instead, to say goodbye to friends. That hurts.

To get through, I do what I can. I’m more patient with the hubby (and myself). I tie up a few newspaper-wrapped teacups with ribbon. It will make me smile in a few weeks when I unpack the box and think about the people who drank tea with me.

~Stephanie W, for the Poplar Grove Muse

50 BIRTHDAY CRANES

I was raised with unrealistic expectations for birthday celebrations. My mother made sure that each family member felt special on his or her day, offering favorite foods, thoughtfully chosen, if not extravagant, presents, and an embarrassment of attention.

I came into adulthood with a strong desire to make birthdays special for those around me, yet uncertain how best to accomplish that. As one who is terrible at imagining the perfect gift (for myself or others) and highly ambivalent about adding more stuff to anyone’s material life, I have, over the years, arrived at a labor-intensive gift I bestow upon friends and family to mark their 50^th birthdays.

This tradition began in my adolescence; I would fold the number of cranes corresponding to my closest friends’ birthdays, and mount them on their bedroom wall, flying in V-formation. I remember most vividly doing this for my best friend’s 18^th (while living in her home to finish my senior year in high school after my family moved), and for my now-husband’s 19^th (he responded by creating a treasure hunt for me the next year, with clues slipped into fortune cookies and hidden throughout my apartment building, even in the apartments of people we didn’t really know!).

In recent years, I have been stringing 50 origami paper cranes on gold thread, punctuated by beads marking groups of 10, ending with a hand-made golden tassel at the bottom. My closest friends and siblings started turning 50 a few years ago, but in the past year all my peers have turned 50, and production has been, shall we say, intense. In addition, my mother-in-law turned 80 last year, so I strung 80 for her, and my parents received a string of 50 for their golden anniversary a few years ago. I haven’t kept track, but have probably strung at least 20 strands.

I welcome the chance to think of the recipient I am stringing cranes for as I fold the bright papers, choose beads, thread the needle and then string the cranes, adding finishing touches to each strand. It is a genuine labor of love to ponder what this relationship means, allowing memories to surface, to be relived and relished anew while I work.

I turned 50 last spring (and my oldest daughter strung the tiny strand of miniature cranes you see beside my latest creations, to mark my milestone). Women friends, many from this writing community, gathered for a truly memorable evening hosted by a spectacularly gracious and generous member of our tribe. We all left with the glow I dream of inspiring in others on their special days, feeling ourselves part of a remarkable community of women. This week, the founder of Women Writing for a Change-Bloomington marks this passage as well. We all wish her the best of days and many more years of friendship and creativity, offering up our profound gratitude for the community she has created among us.