Music to my Ears

In 2001, we moved from Bethesda, Maryland, to Pacific Palisades, California, for me to head a small proprietary school for children with special needs and their siblings. The school was tiny, the students and their families appreciative and delightful, and the faculty young and very dedicated. Though the challenges were many, I loved my job and the people with whom I worked. I was delighted to be back in California, not too far from where I was raised. We were able to see my aging parents frequently. Life was good, but I missed interacting with women of my generation.

After having settled in for about a year, I was invited to join a book club. At that point, the group had been in existence for twenty-five years. Sixteen years later, I may still be the newest member — and we have been at Lake Tahoe for seven years. I vividly remember my first meeting. It was summer. The home where we met had a (normally) quiet back yard. As the friend who had invited me and I made our way through the house, I could hear the babble of women’s voices, raised in laughing familiarity. Even before I had been introduced to anyone, I was stunned by how much I was moved by their voices and how much I had missed my women friends. The sound they made was music to my ears.

In the ensuing years, I became a committed member of the group. We were (are) a diverse crew. While there are those whose social lives intertwine outside of the monthly gatherings, it’s fair to say that most of the women see each other only at book club. Their connections, however, are so much more. The fact that I still consider myself a member of this book club attests to the integrity of the women involved. We read a wide range of authors and topics. Discussions are frequently lively and sometimes exceptional. One evening, as we finished thoughtful reflections on Still Alice, one of our group shared that the book did an excellent job of portraying what life was like for her family and her younger sister, who had recently been diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s. In fact, I can recall no gathering where we didn’t take time to touch base in terms of those present and those not. If one suffers, we all feel it. In fact, the formal part of each meeting generally begins with a few minutes dedicated to joys and concerns, as it were. We range in age from somewhere in the 60s to 87. Surgeries, divorces, the loss of family members, health and job challenges for children (and grandchildren) are a part of our collective lives. So are births, travel, retirement, and whole new experiences.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending my first book club meeting in over seven years with what is ostensibly the same group of women who welcomed me in 2002. Tahoe and Southern California are a wee bit distant for weeknight attendance, though retirement may make that distance quite surmountable. We had read Improvement, which none of us loved, a couple heartily disliked, and most of us agreed was hard to follow. All of which made for a terrific, rowdy, thoughtful discussion (the books we all love often don’t engender much memorable discourse, actually). Disagreements were cheerfully fierce. No one minced words if she disliked a character. Initially rejecting the critics’praises, we ultimately had to admit that, if we could get so hot and bothered about a fictional person’s choices, the book must have been better written that we initially gave it credit. We all left feeling fulfilled intellectually and emotionally,

There were moments that evening when it was hard to hear who was saying what. I am sure that to anyone uninvolved and trying to listen, the room was more cacophony than symphony. Women can get a bad rap for the amount they talk and the volume and pitch at which they do so. Sometimes it takes careful listening to hear the complicated harmonies and the intricate chords, the caring and the sharing, the empathy and the support. Last week, after such a long abscence, I heard very special music.