Book Club Day

Of all the things I love to do, reading and eating have to be at the top of my list. When you add friends to that equation, it's almost more than I can bear. Today was Book Club Day. That's right, capital B, capital C, capital D. It's a day of honor on my calendar. I look forward to BCD like a kid looks forward to his birthday.

See, BCD transforms even the grayest, gloomiest, dullest day into a party! I know that I'm going to be with intelligent, funny, gloriously zany women who won't mention that my pants are undone because they don't fit after the holiday feeding frenzy I've been on, but will mention that my hair looks stunning. These are women who, while drinking tea from china cups, can still snort when they laugh. These are women who use words like lambrequin, prodigious and cockalorum correctly in their conversations, and yet giggle when the word titillate comes up.

We save up really good stories for each other. Today, Mary told us all about discovering that she has poison ivy on her...how shall I put this?... booty. In January, no less. Who gets poison ivy on her behind in January? And, how? Let's just say it involved pantyhose and a cat named Mr. Puss and leave it at that.

We also found out that Kay had a come-apart with her daughter-in-law, who - we all agreed - was being rather bossy about bagels. We concurred that Jill had definitely entered a moment of undistilled lunacy when she suggested her daughter have a New Year's Eve party at their house. "It was only about thirty 17-year-olds," she said. That's like saying, "only one small herd of wildebeests in the living room." And, we learned that Jean's energy medicine techniques worked wonders on Patience's dog that was once deathly afraid of thunder.

We also learned how to make crustless beet and cucumber sandwiches, such precious pink delights. We sampled a smorgasbord of tea-time goodies. Spinach and cheese scones. New potatoes stuffed with Myrick's ham salad. Buzz's egg salad on gluten-free crackers. Rum cake. Crunchy, tasty cookies. And, of course, chocolate, the dessert's dessert.

Don't get me wrong. It's not all cake and punch. We savor the books, too. Our meat. The substance of our meetings. Our raison d'etre. Books, those luscious trips of the imagination that send us to the south of France, up the side of Kilimanjaro, or to the backwoods of Montana. Books, those endless resources of characters we'd like to slap or hug or talk quietly with in a coffee shop. Books, those fantastic sources of words that roll like waves to the shore of understanding, crystallizing a thought, capturing a feeling, giving voice to that motive. Oh, the poetry of those twenty-six letters arranged in groups of threes, fives, eights and twos, undulating in starts and stops, pauses and spaces, telling their tales.

Book Club Day. Everyone should have one. Or, twelve.