The Church of the Holy Communion of the Right Book at the Right Time
Lately, I traveled to The Church of the Holy Communion of the Right Book at the Right Time. More reluctantly, I also visited its opposite, The Den of the Icky Feeling of the Wrong Book at the Wrong Time.
My book club recently read a book that was challenging for me. In another context, maybe on a vacation when all was blue skies and songbirds, I would have touted its highfalutin’ depths to friends and strangers, maybe even during a chance encounter with a celebrity at the beach. Say someone like Brené Brown.
I would meet the buzz-worthy research professor (University of Houston) in line at the portapotty, and we would exchange greetings, her in an over-sized UT t-shirt covering a flashy teal one-piece. And me in a men’s white cotton button-down that hadn’t been ironed in all the washings of its recent past, swim skirt and halter of black and white polka dots peeking through its open front. Her sporting crisp Chacos and minty nail polish, me in age-old Eccos and naked toes in need of pruning. I’d tell her about the book I held in my hand, a smallish hardbound, easy on the palm. I’d exclaim about the point of view and the bounty of characters, one in particular. Have you read it? I’d ask. And she’d shake her head at a tilt like she might have heard of it but didn’t want to interrupt. She’d tell me the last best thing she had read, which would make me laugh, and we’d say at the same time “Have a fun day!” I’d go back to my pink flamingo beach blanket for another dose of pensive reason and feel lofty with the morality tale in my hand as children built sandcastles around me.
But what happened instead was that I read the book club selection while my beloved awaited urgent and COVID-postponed hip surgery for the third month and counting. Our home had become a prison for both of us. We had demoted dinner to cereal or sandwiches. We’d relented to pre-sunset bedtimes. Finally, we anticipated an upcoming week’s worth of hospital time, the dogs’ needs, and yada yada yada. Reading the book club book had become one more thing I had to do. The least important thing. There wasn’t a chance in hell that I’d like it.
On the day of the book club Zoom (two days before my sweetie’s lonngggg-awaited surgery), my reading mates tolerated my comments, which were as bitey as the kombucha I was downing in between smirks. I held my grin steady as the other members processed the layers, the timeliness, the clever bends of the novel which I had somehow confused with “tell me something I don’t already know.”
The day after book club, I moped around like an embarrassed school girl who had spoken prematurely about the dumb movie that everybody else in her class agreed was an instant classic. Damn. I had put my foot in my mouth WITH the book and spewed. How would I get back in the group’s good graces? I had to believe something would occur to me. It hasn’t yet.
I did, however, have one idea for a novel of my own. The O.F.B.C. (Old Fogies Book Club). I imagined four couples (lesbians, of course) who read a book every season and then get together over dinner in one couple’s home to sever ties with the book. I even came up with their motto: Degradation is our goal. Repugnance is our game. Hand us a book and we’ll rip it to shreds. I considered scenes of scathing sarcasm and hideous humor. Who knows if I’ll ever write it, but it sounded good at the time, a time when I had been putting the SOUR in sourpuss somewhere under the surface in the stress of the months behind me.
The day after book club, a few holds were released to my digital audiobook shelf. Which one would I choose? Broken Open: How Difficult Times can Help Us Grow by Elizabeth Lesser appeared in the Libby library app “take action” feed along with two others. I had read Lesser’s Cassandra Speaks a few months before and recommended it to friends. I decided to reunite with Lesser, a storyteller who delivers her conceptions through lenses of personal experience, inspiring stories of others, wisdom practices, and her own good common sense. While I walked with the dogs through the neighborhood in the early morning light and again at midday, I bookmarked passages regularly and felt the kindling of kinship:
“We are continually challenged to change and grow, to breakdown and break through.”
“….[P]eople who have taken the road of self-reflection [are]…[t]wice born people…the journey from once born to twice born brings us to a crossroads where the old way of doing things are no longer working, but a better way lies somewhere at the far edge of the woods…something calls them into the woods where the straight path vanishes and there is no turning back, only going through… it is there in the shadows that we retrieve our hidden parts, learn our lessons, and give birth to the wise and mature self.”
“What must die? What wants to live? The soul tells you to root around in the dark stuff for the deeper questions and to let those questions lead you from the darkness to the light.”
“How odd that if we reject what is painful we find only more pain but if we embrace what is within us….we stumble upon the light.”
That’s when I felt it. The Church of the Holy Communion of The Right Book at the Right Time. Something told me Brené would approve.
