Bonding over books traces stories of our own lives

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/05/2023 (882 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I’ve been a book club facilitator for about 25 years, starting with one club whose connection remains constant, adding others for measures within those 25 years.

I am such a flawed keeper of history, I don’t have exact figures. I think back to how I might have archived this experience — dates, titles, locations — but when I began, I did not really have any idea that I would have the pleasure of maintaining this effort for a quarter of a century.

I met with one club recently, in the afternoon. We are wont to meet in the day now. Aging women, most of us have retired from paid work or from hands-on parenting. When I began facilitating, on the threshold of 50, with club members in their later 60s and early 70s, I was the youngest by far.

In retrospect, that “by far” wasn’t really a reliable representation of the space between our worlds. The interval separating us seemed to me such a large expanse, but it was only 10 years or so. It felt expansive because I did not know how near I was to the intensity these book-club members had come to know, as they advanced through the life lessons of late middle age: children leaving home, marriages taking place, grandchildren introducing themselves, parents taking leave — the first edges of illnesses arriving as shadows they would come to understand more fully with the passage of time.

Over the next decade, as my own life stories unfolded in the wake of their life stories, ironies unfolded as well. I was present to facilitate the discussion of literary works often dedicated to the later-life events and experiences they were living. Even as I facilitated such discussions, they tutored me.

In that tutoring, that feminist mentoring, they mothered me, seeing my life with compassion and insight, supporting my dream-making, softening sorrows, especially in relation to the life-altering terrain loss and leave-taking began creating in my own world.

Within these circles, we did not take each other’s skills for granted. I had been trained to read books. I had some frameworks I could bring and a history of being dazzled by how a literary work composed itself.

Book-club participants had been trained by life — their own education, customs, traditions, experiences. Sometimes they had taken a literature course or two. Together, we traded knowledge and experience.

As I matured, I understood more and more completely the profound nature of the exchange a book club encourages, the depth each of us brings, the desire for enchantment and engagement a conversation with a literary text in relation to experience can yield.

Even when, after 20 pages or so, there is no hope for a developing love affair with the world being created and the book is closed and put aside, there is the hope that the next one or the next will yield the promise a book lover yearns to realize.

On one most memorable May 4 book club meeting, I arrived to facilitate just as my son called to tell me his daughter had come into the world, and I shared my first grandmothering moments within the circle of the waiting book club babas assembled.

I don’t remember the book we were reading, but I do remember basking in the measures of their beginning-baba stories even as we dipped into the pages with a heightened sense of the continuities between life and writing.

At the close of that meeting, we were further encouraged by a table laden with homemade baking, akin to the kind I remember from the long-ago Tuesday bridge delicacies crafted by my mother: a 1958 bridge group with strudel and mandelbrot; a 2015 book club with bundt cake and rugelach. Sisterhoods.

As I age, the interval shrinks even further between myself and book-club members. Now, we are all in our third act.

Most recently, before the event I was facilitating began, the hostess stood to honour a member who had died during the year, one who was to host their spring meeting. Another member raised her hand, saying that as she still bought green bananas, she would like to take over hosting duties.

Within the circle, we held this moment carefully. The book club itself had been named after a woman who had inspired the members. I looked round this circle and I thought to myself, all of us, we are members of the green-banana society. We believe in the possibility of the next book we will read, the ideas we will bring to it, the discussion round the circle we can make, the travelling to and from one another’s spaces, this late-life light lit with coffee and tea, bite-size delicacies, fruit, served on treasured pieces of china.

There are so many green-banana societies whose members engage in a range of activities sponsoring well-being, connection and community. I think of those who belong to volunteer organizations, advocate on behalf of human rights and social justice issues, and participate in life-deepening and often life-altering educational programs.

I think of the quarter-century given to me as a book club facilitator, the rich storeroom of table talk. I see my bookshelves bursting with books, themselves bursting with comments in the margin, with notepapers inserted, commentaries I’ve recorded as I try to decipher the nature of the stories revealed.

I have given away many books over my lifetime, but these books, annotated and savoured as a way of learning, well, they stay with me in my study; somehow, I know as far as I am able, that my bookshelf will stretch to hold the green-banana-society books yet to come.

debbie.schnitzer@mymts.net