Entry 2: Summer Women's Book Club

So, Denise and I met for lunch at the end of last week as planned.  KFC/Tace Bell.  I couldn't eat meat (Friday during Lent) and don't know why I agreed to eat there!  I had a meatless burrito and a corn on the cob.  After eating, we looked at the draft of the flyer I had made for our book club.  It helped us make some decisions.  First, I need to draw a few pictures on it (maybe a woman reading a book, an open book, a coffee cup).  We decided we won't say where we are meeting directly until we know who will be involved, but we are going to start by alternating between our two houses.  We will meet on the first and third Sundays of each month starting in June from 3:00 to 4:30 pm.  Our first book will probably be Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.  I have read it once, and there is certainly plenty in it to create discussion.  We are going to send this flyer out to our email/facebook contacts in early April and see who responds.  If that is a bust, we're going to hang flyers at the library and Barnes & Noble (maybe my church) in early May.  Denise is hoping for an even number of participants, say six or eight. 
Denise told me this weekend that she asked her mom if she was interested in being part of our book club; her mom told her no because she thinks it will never actually happen.  She told Denise we'll never get anyone to do this.  Nice, huh?

Here Is A New Poem Anyway

When I think about heaven,

 

and I do,
I tend to think big.
You see, I’m not a pearly gates, float
on clouds type of girl; I want to make quilts
with my hundreds of grandmas,
drive super fast down mountains,
star in a live Tolkien story, and
sit in God’s lap.
If these things, and more, are possible,
they will surely take place near water
(ocean, river, lake, creek),
and I suspect we’ll be naked or close to it –
certainly barefoot.

There will be too much to occupy us

to worry about
what our bodies look like. 
We’ll probably be fit and healthy,
and, as it is heaven,
either hairless or eternally unshaven.
The only thing to give pause
would be scars; I mean,
if we get to choose what we’ll carry over
on our new bodies in the afterlife,
then curiosity
toward each other’s flaps and ridges
will bring endless revelations. 
I hope I can and will decide to look like myself,
that I’ll keep this crooked cesarean streak.

Tattoos might be negotiable,

supposing they are sufficiently moral,
perhaps even signs of our death: 
the hole of a stab wound now
gallantly displayed, the woman
who was stoned not showing every cut, no,
but choosing forever to wear
the puncture point
of the first stone thrown. 
And the man who threw it – isn’t he
in a heaven as big as ours?
We don’t want him there, but I think
if they did meet,
he would put a finger to this spot
and feel pain.

Any human interaction,

even if brief or forced or incomplete,
can form a connection between two souls;
it is possible such a link
is visible in the spiritual realm,
that it leaves a mark, like a scar.
We may also be able to pick
which, if any,
of these many gleams,
or painful smears and brands,
we will continue to bear  –
those shaken off
will simply be gone.

But the bond of a full relationship

is something different and greater,
and leaves such a fixed imprint
on the two souls
it shall not be erased by choice or by space;
once joined, joined forever.
Let me believe this:
let me believe
that if there has been love between us,
even imperfectly,
and one of us goes to heaven, then
the other must follow.
Separation – impossible.

Which is why, supported by a host

of beautifully battered saints and angels,
I say, “Love, you fools; love!”

Entry 1: Summer Women's Book Club

Let's face it, I'll never be a competent blogger.  I resist almost anything that should be done daily, including but not limited to exercising, brushing my teeth, taking vitamins, charting my cycle, facebook.  However, I have had an inspiration.  Instead of throwing up random poems randomly, I am going to give reports on my attempt to create a book club.  I am doing this because I think it would be interesting and because my friend and neighbor Denise wants to do it so badly.  We've talked about it here and there for years -- years!  I guess I'm finally in a place to seriously consider it.  I have a wide reading range, but it tends toward the "high end" of literary work.  Whatever that means.  Denise wants romance and popular novels, and as I am not opposed to such things at all despite my leanings, that is where our club will go.

The Beginning:
Denise asks me to go with her for a girl's night out.  She says it has been over five years since we last did this.  That doesn't seem possible, but time is a very fluid thing for me and I cannot argue.  We leave much earlier than when the movie we are going to see starts, and decide to spend the intervening time in Barnes and Noble instead of the mall.  We stay together, and start pointing out books that might be good book club possibilities.  We have a vague idea of trying to read books that have been made into movies, and including that aspect as an option.  I get out the small journal I've been carrying recently in my purse, and start writing down authors and books.  We stay in the fiction section and eventually browse row by row.  Here is what we came up with, although I have ordered it differently from the rambling list I made in the store:

Jane Austen     Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Gilbert     Eat Pray Love, Committed
Sara Gruen     Water For Elephants, Ape House
Kathryn Stockett     The Help (everyone is talking about this book)
Jodi Picoult     My Sister's Keeper
Adriana Trigiani     Big Stone Gap, Life Lessons From My Grandmothers, Very Valentine
Alice Sebold     The Lovely Bones, The Almost Moon
Jennifer Weiner     In Her Shoes, Good In Bed
Alice Walker     The Color Purple
Anne Rice     (Vampires), Of Love and Evil
Sue Monk Kidd     The Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair
Toni Morrison     Beloved, a mercy
Charlotte Bronte     Jane Eyre
Louise Erdrich     Love Medicine, Plague of Doves
Barbara Kingsolver     Animal Dreams, Lacuna
Alice Hoffman     Here On Earth, The Red Garden, The Third Angel
Elizabeth Berg     Open House, Once Upon a Time There Was You, The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted
Ernest Hemingway     A Moveable Feast
Shakespeare
James Patterson     Sunday at Tiffany's
Elin Hilderbrand     The Castaways
Nicholas Sparks
Nora Ephron
Danielle Steele
Hester Browne
C.S. Lewis     The Chronicles of Narnia
Stephanie Myers     Twilight
J.K Rowling     Harry Potter

I have since made up a draft for a flyer advertising our club.  The heading is:  SUMMER (Women's) BOOK CLUB / Reading, Discussion, Friendship, Movies.  At the bottom I have listed a lot of the books we are considering, and on this list all of the writers are female.  Why not?  It gives us more than enough great stories to tackle.  Denise and I are supposed to meet for lunch this Friday, which should give me my next installment.  If you live anywhere near Dry Ridge, Kentucky and are interested, I can give you further details as they arise!  Or stay tuned.