I met with my Other Book Club this morning. I call them my Other Book Club because they are my second book club from a chronological standpoint– ie., the order in my life in which I became involved in them– and because I’ve written about my first book club (Vlaardinger Boeks) here before.
It is always a delight to meet with this book club, and not only because we eat well. Which we do. Especially when tworivers makes her magnificentcoffeecakeforwhichshewillabsolutelynotsharetherecipe
sodon’tevenbothertoaskbutshe’dbehappytomakeitforyouyouonlyneedask her. We had that coffeecake today. Oh My. And, as ever, we had Excellent Conversation.
Today’s discussion was on Kent Haruf’s Eventide, a book I’ve read only four chapters of and so could not properly discuss. But in the course of the discussion (the one in which I participated fully despite not having done the reading), we discussed what kind of woman picks up what kind of man in a bar. This led to (somehow) the fact that tworivers did not pick up her gentle husband Byron in a bar. And, truth be told, none of us suspected that she had. But she said that she picked him up in a library, and this we Most Definitely could believe. (I suspect that this is actually Not True. I suspect– in fact, I might be Quite Certain– that she picked up her gentle husband Byron in a choir rehearsal.) And all of this made us Laugh.
I did not pick my husband up anywhere. I don’t think I could say that I picked him up at all. Neither, I think, would he say that he picked me up. I think, rather, that we might agree that we were Trying Hard to avoid a serious relationship of Any Kind, but when it came to Each Other, we simply Couldn’t Resist.
I remember one evening of this irresistability. Or maybe it was an afternoon. Anyway, I was reading in the library. Yes I was. I was reading Wuthering Heights for my English novel class, which met Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays at 9:30 with Dr. Stansberry. I had read this book in high school, and had written a fairly stellar essay on it for my AP English class, and I was loving reading it again, walking the windswept moors with Catherine, scanning the horizon for Heathcliff’s hulking frame.
It is a beautiful book, desperate and violent, shocking and somehow hauntingly honest about how hard and real love is, how foolish we can be in the face of it. I had been spending some time with a certain Bill Stevenson and was finding him irresistible, despite what I thought was a Real Need to resist. The book was a good escape.
And then I read this line, Catherine attempting to explain to someone (who is it?) why it is she needs Heathcliff, when she might be better off just abandoning that relationship. Says Catherine, “Our souls are made of the same stuff.”
Well. I read that line. And I read it again. And I looked up and about me, in the way one does when reflecting on what one has read. And I happened to glance across the room, far across, to where someone stood at the copying machine. It was Bill Stevenson, who hadn’t attended his Constitutional Law class all semester, desperately copying somebody’s notes.
We were engaged within the next ten months, and married ten months after that. We celebrated our 15th anniversary in June, and on Monday our cruise ship sets sail for we care not where in celebration of the best decision we have ever made.
