’ve joined—even started—a few book clubs. Like an orphan or the misfit swan among ducks, I’m looking for my people. I want to get a conversation started, even better a heated one, about the books that I love.

Last summer I paid to join a monthly book club. Okay, it was a sort of continuing education class about books from an east coast liberal arts college. I was glad to pay several hundred for a curated booklist from educated people who were supposed to know and hopefully even have opinions. Last week was the final session.

We discussed Mark Twain’s story of theCelebrated Jumping frog.

That story!read it for yourself.

Twain tells the story as himself, and sets up a contrast right away. He introduces himself to the bartender of Angels’s Camp—a California depleted mining town–this way:

“I told him a friend of mine had commissioned me to make some inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood Leonidas W. Smiley…”

Simon Wheeler answered in this way: “ ‘Rev. Leonidas W. H’m, Reverend Le — well, there was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of ’49 — or may be it was the spring of ’50 — I don’t recollect exactly..”

Listen to those sentences! Twain inquires about a firend’s cherished boyhood companion, and Wheeler recollects a feller.

This is the start of Twain’s trademark writing in the colloquial speech patterns of his characters. He is formal and proper, but the bartender Wheeler tells it with all the little details and distractions it deserves.

Twain is a storyteller too, definitively as the author of this celebrated tale. In the story he deprecates the tale and it’s teller from the beginning:

“…he would go to work and bore me to death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and tedious as it should be useless to me.”

Twain knows this is a good story, but he wants to pshaw it to seem humble.

As he found in his life, and I know in mine, stories are valuable. The mining camp had run out of gold, but the stories are still fresh and flowing.

Now the other side is the class issue. The storyteller is not sophisticated, and Twain positions himself as superior. I am the not sophisticated one, and I agree with Wheeler that this story is important. Twain says it this way:
“all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that, ·so far from his imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men of transcendent genius”

Twain said it’s an interminable narrative, placing himself as the rightful judge

And I am in my zoom room, talking to the fancy east coast college people realizing I’m sitting in Wheeler’s seat again.

And I see that Twain’s with me and has been the whole time. Neither of us are a high class college person.

We both love stories. I guess we both know that not everyone does. I tried to point out the class issue to the zoom group, and no one saw it

Twain was right to be ambiguous about his opinion of the story.

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo

Learning to play piano as a teenager, my friends would come up to me and try to talk to me while I was playing. I would be thinking of replies so clearly that I was surprised my friend didn’t answer.

She would smack my arm and say, “Answer me!”

Didn’t I? I was thinking it.

I love words, I love reading and writing. Words and music are how I understand myself. They are not the same, though. I wouldn’t know how to make a diagram of it, but words and music don’t completely overlap. Music lives in a different plane of communication.

Music can express things and heal me in places that words cannot touch.

Many years past in the destruction of my first marriage, I played my antique piano to find my way through. I didn’t know who I was anymore. The meter of the music I created were the railroad ties measuring a path through.

Measure by measure, I was able to sort the chaos from formless and void into my first days. Those dark days in my cinderblock apartment were safe after many years. Protected and trembling from the escape.

Music moves and carries me as I find myself in a new safe place. My hands on the keys, little finger movements probe the tangles. Little strokes finding knots, lining up what allows the harmony.

The beat goes on, relentless but merciful too. No breaks to go make it perfect. And it doesn’t matter because this part can be better than the last. Sweet sounds now forgive the ones I broke before.

Words can be too heavy for the task. I only see darkly what I’m aiming for.

Music walks with me, pushes me along. My long companion and partner. Time might lie on my hands painfully but music raises it up.

I’ve been fighting for a long time. I started training to fight, and then some serious opponents came up

I stayed in the training and got my black belt

I didn’t give up on my serious cancer opponents and they are vanquished and quiet

I think about the boys

Men

Boys

Who stormed normandy beach.THey didn’t get to stop. They training. I don’t know if they volunteered, but the events landed in their lap and they had to walk through them

Up that beach

They didn’t invite the war in

I didn’t ask for cancer

but the fight was upon us

When they went home to their old rooms and their old clothes

Their shirts didn’t fit the same, I’m sure

Mine didn’t either

I don’t know how to fit into the life I previously occuppied. A lot has burned down and i carry scars

The beach

the poisons

I did not dare to stop and feel the seriousness of what I was facing

Eyes on the goal

I did it. I made it.

What do I do now? can I look around now or have I forgotten how?
I have to gently probe the spots to see if I can feel.

Twelve years after I finished high school, I earned a bachelor’s degree. Every day of those twelve years, I felt it’s lack. I wanted that BA. I deserved that BA. I should have it ALREADY!

Until I did.

The wind that pushed me my whole adult life vanished. While I was proud of the accomplishment, I looked over my shoulders for something. I didn’t know this world anymore.

This was a change I’d chased and once achieved everything went quiet.

What now?

Thomas Kuhn noticed a pattern for this “everything changed” situation. The Structure of Scientific Revolution, published in 1962, tracks how the provable and reliable shifts.

Science is definitely repeatable, and therefore reliable. It happens again and again in the same way. The sun rises, and that apple falls when I drop it. Water is wet.

Most of the time.

Don’t get too comfortable. Things are rock solid reliable until people –scientists—start to notice where it isn’t.

Once an aberration is seen, they multiply. Why? Maybe I don’t understand the rules. Maybe I need another rule that bring it all into a working system again.

Then it seems like the system is broken, and a whole new one is needed.

I’d spent time on that broken system. There is good stuff in it! Surely if I jiggle the handle and…

It’s clear it is used up. I’m going to have to learn a new map. Kuhn calls it a paradigm shift.

After my college degree, I found something else to push for. It took some time. It was a long time ago. The pattern is repeating again.

This is the part where I know I don’t know.

Yet.

Eerie silence fills the space.

I’m going to have to look around for a system to use. I know I’m going to have to figure out what is next for me, after the last several years. I was really good at a lot of things that don’t appeal to me anymore.

I’d like to fill that silence by laughing at myself. Here it is again. I’ll look in the forgotten places and make something new.

I am thinking of a wish.

This Sunday is Mother’s day, and as a mother, I am supposed to have a wish. Or maybe a demand.

Like the knights who say “Ni!” from Monty Python’s Holy Grail movie, I could demand a shrubbery. And it totally fits for me to add, “but not too expensive.”

Now that I think of it, I can do better than the knights of Ni! As the matriarch of my little family I have done the work to be granted this wish. I am reminded of The Fault in Our Stars, the John Green novel with a pair of cancer teenagers who fall in love. The cancer is horrible luck, but these kids are aware that it comes with a good choice: how will they use their Make-a-wish foundation wish.

What should I do with my with? The knights if Ni! Were thinking of themselves. Maybe I should uplevel my wish strategically. I could use this chance to turn the gift back onto the giver.

Should I ask my husband to go on a hike with me? I’d like him to do more exercise activities. We would all enjoy nature and it could remind him how much he loves it.

Or what if I chose to make our whole environment better. I could ask everyone to wash the windows and do yard work to make our house beautiful. Maybe the Knights of Ni! had a point about the shrubbery.

I’m balancing the possibilities for the pros and cons. As I think about the day, an important part of the decision comes to me.I am the mother or my family, but I still have to spend part of that day on the other mothers in the chain.

I have to share mother’s Day with the mothers that came before and are still with us. The Mother’s Make-a-Wish day is a pie that we have to slice up. I am not going to be greedy and demand the whole pie.

I think I do want to do some work around the house and go hiking with my husband, but I think I’ll have to plan that to be later.

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