My New Book Club - Caste

Nothing like starting out a new book club with a controversy. We, of course, didn’t know it was going to turn out that way when fourteen of us here at the continuum care campus got our first book to read over the holidays. Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson was one of the few books through the library's Book Club in a Bag program that was available on short notice. Most of the clubs have their books reserved months ahead so new clubs take what they can get.

I can’t find a short synopsis of the book other than the author “…examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.” In other words it’s about origins of racism. In shocking detail. A heavy topic to be reading, especially through the holidays and our discussion was preempted by an ominous email a few days ahead from our activities director telling us that our discussion group might be “lighter in numbers because of that.” She went on to say:

“I also know that this selection will bring about big feelings and possibly some internal conflicts that some may not feel comfortable sharing at this point. Understanding that we are a new community of new friends, I ask that those who do attend the discussion do so with respect for all attendees, recognizing that we all have different backgrounds and upbringings. I’m sure it goes without saying, but please utilize the time together to encourage a civil and considerate conversation. Be willing to explain your feelings, but also open to hearing others’ perspectives. In general, please strive to make others feel respected even if you disagree.”

Don’t think that email didn’t prompt everyone to be at our first discussion meeting. Only one person was missing, but the first person to speak was visibly angry and was quick to explain why she didn’t read the book. She had read some comments about the book that said the author was blaming poor Mr. Trump for all the racial tensions in the country. Say what? It wasn’t a political book and he was bared mentioned. 

I like the woman---a lot---but I couldn’t see letting someone who hadn’t read the book hijack the discussion with junk she’d obviously picked up on a right-wing political site. So I finally spoke up. “It sounds like that comment/review you read was written by someone who only read an out-of-context excerpt from the book and not the entire book because the author barely mentioned Trump.” 

She seemed hostile through out the whole hour and a half we were there, inserting questions like, "Did she bring up the fact that blacks sold blacks into slavery?" Did she bring up that other countries had slavery?" Typical deflection stuff to divert the conversation. She couldn't have been too upset by my discussion points because the next day she used her Auntie Mame voice from across the lobby to invite me to a party at her place. That was a relief because I don't want to alienate anyone here, especially funny and fun-loving her, and I was dreading the next time I ran into her.

At one point during book club I shared a quote I’d heard on CNN recently that went: “We need to change our vocabulary because words like ‘race’ have become weaponized for unspoken propaganda.” When I started reading the book I thought the author used the word ‘caste’ as a gimmick to set her book apart from others on the topic but by the end of the book, she’d made her case that we have a caste system here…especially when she quoted many scholars from the past century who were using the label ‘caste’ when they wrote about our slavery and Jim Crow eras. 

The book was shocking in parts, full of well-documented cruelty in the three major caste systems in the world---here in America, in India and during the Nazi regime. Probably the most shocking part for me was how in-depth Hitler and his men studied the segregation and Jim Crow laws of our country to help him come up with a plan to turn the German people against the Jews and others he deemed should be outcasts. The research that went into this book was mind-blowing and extensive and over a hundred pages were devoted just to footnoting sourced material. (496 pages in all.)

The bottom line is my book club is full of interesting people and I’m excited about it. We have two retired social workers in the group, two retired teachers, my neighbor the retired psychologist, one well-read and super smart guy and the others I don't know well enough yet to know their background. The art professor I’ve been fangirling picked a seat next to me and afterward said she enjoyed sitting at my table. (She's the one who asked The Church question in my last post.) You can probably see the stars in my eyes all the way to where you live. She's living up to the myth I've had built up in my head just from viewing her art at the resident's art show. She and her husband never had children so instead they took in refugees from war-torn countries who were getting settled in America---some remained life-long friends, some didn’t. So she had some thought-provoking things to share about the challenges they faced moving here. It’s pretty clear I picked an interesting person to fangirl. And book club is going to help keep my brain from turning to mush. ©

The Dreaded Church Question

 

It finally happened. Someone asked the dread church question here at the continuum care complex. I’m surprised it took this long for one of my fellow residents to ask if I have a “church family,” which is a variation of “what church to you belong to?” or “go to?” that has plagued me my entire life, having grown up in what was once known as The City of  Churches.

When I was a kid, my parents didn't go to church but we lived within walking distance to four-five different denominations of Christian churches---yada yada yada---skip this and the next paragraph if you've heard it all before. Anyway, for a couple of years my brother and I were required to walk down to which ever church we wanted to go to on Sundays until I turned 10 or 12. We tried them all and we also went to some summer day camps sponsored by churches and I still have a silhouette of praying children I made at one of them. I'm not sure how my folks found out but there came a point when we'd often go up to the Indian mounds instead going to a church where we looked for arrowheads instead of learning about Jesus at Sunday school.

I probably wouldn’t have had that much exposure to the church if not for an incident that happened on the playground that started it all when another girl announced she couldn’t play with me anymore because I was“heathen who didn’t go to church.” That was the first time but certainly not the last time I lost friends after the dread church question came up and I was outed, so to speak, as a 'heathen.'

Having gone almost three months before the question was asked here I was starting to relax, thinking it wouldn't come up. But it did, in the fine dining restaurant on campus and I was sitting next to the college art professor when she popped the question. The two of us were sitting next to each other. Not by choice, by the way, there were place cards that night to go along with our reservations. They do that sometimes if they expect a full house and they don’t want to chance those of us with a reservation for one to tie up a table they need to set a larger group.

In past years I’ve had a variety of evasive answers I used to reply to the church question---"I’m between churches" being the one I used the most in my 20s and 30s and being that I was in the wedding floral business for those twenty-plus years I was well versed on the locations and insides of all the churches in town. I even had in-depth conversations with some of the pastors, preachers, priests and rabbis so I could talk a good game on the topic. Plus I’d taken several comparative religion classes in college, but more importantly I became an expert at changing the topic. It’s only been in the last 5-6 years that I’ve come out of the church closet, so to speak, and I’ve gotten used to the fact that the sky did not open up and I did not get extracted from earth like a SciFi space craft that zaps earthlings up to process our bodies into energy. So this time when the professor asked the church question I answered with a heart pounding, “No. Long story...” and thankfully someone from across the table asked the professor something, saving me from telling the tale of how my brother and I (and our parents) grew up without a church.

Not sure if I’ll get ostracized here or not when/if it becomes common knowledge that I’m not a Christian. And I was kind of shocked that it was the professor who asked the question but playing it over in my mind I think she asked to draw me into the general conversation because I’d been pretty quiet and her teacher instincts kicked in; I've seen her do that on several occasions try to draw the quiet ones into a conversation. (Have I mentioned I'm still fangirling her?) She and the other two at the table where having an extensive discussion about church choirs around the city. Icon Lady was at table and as nice as she is I've only found one topic of common interest between us---knitting. She’s probably the most creative knitter I’ve ever known. Each day she wears a different sweater or scarf with an intrigue pattern and she doesn't even use patterns. But you can only talk so long about various knitting stitches before the topic shifts and I have nothing to say. She talks a lot so she doesn't notice. And I'm fine with that.

The dreaded church question is how I know I’ll never form good friends here. I hold too much of myself back---the whole religion thing, the fact that I’ll read trashy romance books, the fact that I love to write, the fact that I'm a Flaming Liberal and the fact that I’m not easily offended. For example on the latter point, recently at dinner I asked the other women why they don’t like eating with one of the guys---it was pretty clear he was being ostracized from the group table---and the answer was because he calls everyone “Honey”.  Ohmygod, he calls his daughter and granddog ‘Honey’ as well. It’s nothing sexual or sexist or condescending the way he says it. At least not in my mind. I just assumed its because he’s in his mid-eighties and he can’t remember everyone’s name.

Ya, ya, I know it's 2022; I'm a feminist too but if he IS being sexist then you're not going to change a guy that age so why 'punish' him for being a product of his times? Why not just keep reminding him of your name if it bothers you that much? I thought all those things but I didn't say any of them out loud. If others want to live with bees in their bonnets over being called "honey" then who am I go full-out Pollyanna on them?

My world is full of foibles and nuances and I don't do well with people who see their world in blacks and whites. Or maybe I’m the one with tunnel vision and I can’t see my own prejudges are keeping others from getting to know the real me. I comfort myself by imagining that no one is really who or what others see, that at the core we all have our secrets and inner child's we protect from further harm. But I've got to admit there are days when I want to bitch-slap my inner child and tell her to grow up. And I'd put the F word in between the 'grow' and 'up' but I know it would offend someone out there in cyberspace. And that's another thing I do that I don't reveal to only a select few---I'm well acquainted with swear words. I even had to quit reading Military Romances because they put me at risk for having the crude language evade the filter in my aging brain and even I don't like to hear old broads swear like soldiers. ©

It’s a Brand New Year and You Know What the Means…

…Or maybe you don’t know what it means to me to be starting 2022 just as I don’t know what it means to you. Are you the type who makes New Year’s Resolutions? Most of my life I’ve been that person who makes the list and at the end of the year reviews my successes or failures at accomplishing what I committed to writing. When 2021 started I was especially happy to usher it in and I wrote a post that began with: “Goodbye 2020! In my entire life I’ve never looked more forward to a New Year’s Eve than I have this year including the years when I had fancy, dress-up events to attend. I’ll bet most of us can say that in this year of the World-Wide Pandemic, Mother Nature Gone Wild and our Bat-shit Crazy Politics. 2020 needs to be thrown on the heap of history with the hope of better things to come.”

Not much has changed in the arenas of the pandemic, Mother Nature and bat-shit crazy politics but this past year (2021) I've taken the easy way out by ignoring the greater world around me, metaphorical pulling a blanket over my head thinking what I don’t see can’t hurt or affect me. I’ve been in an almost total news blackout since October and that has never been my MO. That’s not to say that I haven’t tuned out of things in the past. I have. But never for this long before something would suck me back into keeping up with the news. 

And that's starting to worry me. Lately I’ve been asking myself if being too busy it the real reason I’m pulling inward or if it’s something that happens with age and failing brain power that explains why I don't want to keep processing what's going on outside the bubble I've created for myself. When they give an old person cognitive tests they always make a big deal out of whether or not someone knows current events and who the president is blab, blab, blab. Little green men from Mars could have taken over the world last month and I wouldn’t know about if one of my favorite bloggers didn't write about.

My dad was in a drug trial for an Alzheimer's drug and part of that trial involved me taking him in to get a comprehensive cognitive test every two months for a year. His answers to 'who is the president' were never right but often funny. Once I tried to prep him for the test and he ended up ratting me out. When asked who the president was that day he couldn’t tell the doctor and the doctor said, “It’s Bill Clinton” to which my dad said, “My daughter tried to tell me that in the parking lot but I didn’t believe her.” Once he said, “I don’t know his name but he seems like a hell of a nice guy.” One time he was a good looking guy, another time he said, “I don’t know but the vice president is Al Gore.” I’m quite sure when my time comes to take the comprehensive cognitive test that could deem me unfit to handle my own money and medical decisions I’ll proudly answer the president question with a firm, “Bill Clinton. Everyone knows that.”

At least I know I’ll get that question right the first time I take the cognitive test because I’m doing one in a few days as part of a twelve week class I signed up for here at the continuing care complex. It’s called Stronger Memory. We get a cognitive test at the beginning and the end of the course. Others at our sister campus who’ve been using the Stronger Memory workbooks claim it helps them and it’s a fun course to take. It involves committing to do twenty minutes a day to reading out loud, writing twenty minutes a day and doing a sheet of timed math problems a day. We’ll meet once a week and read some of our topic-driven essays out loud to the class. I've heard from several sources that the innovated memory care program on this and our sister campus is rated one of the highest in the state. I'd be a fool not to use the tools they offer to try to hold on to my brain power.

We’re supposed to write our essay answers out long-hand, directly into our workbooks but I’ll be cheating on that. I'll write them on another paper then copy them in the workbook. With my dyslexia I simply can’t write a decent paragraph without editing and correcting spelling and changing word order plus I’ve been practicing penmanship for the past 4-5 months so I’m not concerned with my brain renewing those connections. Mainly I signed up because it will be a good way to get to know others better---like taking a writer's workshop---and wouldn’t you know it, three of the five Jean’s on campus will be my classmates. It happens so often that its become a running joke. If your name is ‘Jean’ you automatically get enrolled in the sign-up-for-classes club.  

As for New Year’s Resolutions, I’m keeping one that has been repeated frequently since my teens to “improve my personality.” After all these years of writing that resolution it finally dawns on me that I should break that down and define what it is I think I should work on. It’s too vague. Another resolution I’m putting on my list of five is to stop talking about painting again and make a serious effort to actually do it. Everything is in place but me. To help with that I’m going to use my twenty minutes of reading out loud time to read in my art books. I think I'm afraid I'll find out that I lost whatever talent/skills I once had and I don't have enough years left to get it back.

My third resolution is to downsize again starting in the summer when I can work in my storage unit in the parking garage. If you followed my downsizing saga these past few years you’ll laugh at the fact that I just downloaded a free book called, Decluttering at the Speed of Life. I guess I'm looking for someone who can turn me into an unsentimental, minimalist who would be happy to sit on a curb with a bowl of rice and a buzz cut.

My forth and fifth resolutions have to do with coming up with a schedule that finds the sweet spot between personal time for hobbies, social time and improving body and soul. Drifting along sampling different things around here has been fun but it’s time consuming and I need to set my sails, head some place.

I know you're wondering what happened here for New Year's Eve. We had two parties. One was fully implemented by the management, a fancy buffet with jazz musicians for entertainment. I got to wear an out-dated-but-much-loved wine colored velvet jacket and everything ended at 9:00 on the 30th. For the actual the New Years Eve we residents organized another party where 20 of us each brought a tray of snacks and we played Uno. It was fun but the party started at 7:00 and ended at 10:30. 

Happy New Year, Everyone!  ©