If it’s Thursday This Must be Book Club

Tuesday I got up, showered and dressed in my finest Red Hat Society clothing. Our new meeting place was throwing us a complimentary welcome luncheon and I didn’t want to be late. It’s a brand new place for senior citizens---one of those progressive places that starts you out with an independent living apartment then they move you along to enhanced living, assisted living and ending with memory care as we age our way down the rabbit hole on the way to the grave. We were supposed to sit down for lunch at 12:00 and at 12:05 the young chef came out to the pub where I sat all alone, wondering if the other fifteen ladies had shown up yet. Long story short, we figured out that his events planner had written down, Tuesday the 7^th instead of Wednesday the 7^th and I just showed up on the wrong day---I thought it was Wednesday! That earned me another punch in my Old Person Card; twenty punches and they'll haul me off to a memory care unit. At least I didn’t prepare and set up the entire luncheon a day too early. I told the chef, “I won’t tell if you won’t tell.” He laughed and replied. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I didn’t keep my word though because I never miss an opportunity to laugh at myself and I thought our sister in charge of reservations should confirm the dates for our future meetings there.

Following our lunch and meeting we were given a tour of the place. They have many amenities and services for hire including a pet wrangler, fitness club, beauty shop, shuttle service, happy hour music, a pub and restaurant. The cheapest one bedroom independent living apartment was tiny---the kitchen and living room would fit into my current bedroom---and its monthly rent was $2,700 to $3,000 depending on if it had a patio, balcony or neither one. Even though the rent includes one chef cooked meal a day, linen service and a twice a month cleaning service that’s more than I could afford and even if I could, I wouldn’t want to live there. I hated the long halls and the only apartments that had decent views were the ones reserved for memory care residents at the back of the building that overlooks a woods. The rest overlook an expressway exchange and the kinds of businesses that grow up around them.

This was my second tour of a senior place that steps up in care levels, if needed. The other place I called Stepfordville because all the residents looked so perfect in their little tennis and golf outfits, like gray-haired models hired to walk around. Their public rooms had walnut paneled walls that reminded me of lawyers and old-time bankers. With that place, you had to buy in for a nonrefundable fee of $300,000 and still pay a monthly fee of nearly $3,000 and then you die (or move) your family doesn’t have the right to sell your unit. I’m going on a third senior living tour next month. It seems to be a popular marketing tool to offer free lunch and a cultural event to groups willing to do a tour. Stepfordville paid for my senior hall group to go to the zoo and next month’s senior living place is paying for our tickets at the sculpture garden. Between the free meals from places like this and from the investment/estate planning people who fill up your mailbox with dinner seminar invitations, old people could eat well at least once a week. File that tidbit away in your brain in case you get to the point where you can’t stretch your grocery budget far enough.

Rounding out my social calendar this week was a meeting of my new book club where we discussed Brown Girl Dreaming. The inside cover sums up the book like this: “In vivid free verse, award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson shares what it was like to grow up in the 1960s and 1970s in both the North and South.” I was impressed that someone could write an entire memoir in free verse and we had a lively discussion about growing up in an ordinary black family. We're all white, so what the heck do we know about that topic! Still, we had a lot to say about a book we all enjoyed. Near the end of the novel Ms. Woodson wrote the following words about the Civil Rights Movement and it's the passage from Brown Girl Dreaming that chose I save to savor. 

“When I hear the word

revolution

I think of the carousel with

all those beautiful horses

going around as though they’ll never stop and me

choosing the purple one each time, climbing up onto it

and reaching for the golden ring, as soft music plays.

The revolution is always going to be happening.

I want to write this down, that the revolution is like

a merry-go-round, history always being made

somewhere. And maybe for a short time,

we’re a part of that history. And then the ride stops

and our turn is over.”

I love the line about history always being made somewhere and that we’re all a part of it. I wrote something similar back last May but Ms. Woodson did it with a rich efficiency of language that I'll never achieve.  ©