We celebrated the holidays with a wonderful party at Lydia’s! Most of us hadn’t seen each other in person since early 2020. Marcia and her husband, Scott were there, telling us about getting back to living in their home again, after the tornado damage was mostly repaired. Ken was there on the Zoom screen of Lydia’s tablet. Those closest to the tablet were the only ones who Ken could hear, so Carla did some translating for him. It was unseasonably warm outside, but for us, it was almost as if a silent snow was falling outside Lydia’s picture windows, and we were all cozy inside the house!
We discussed Your Second Life Begins When You Realize You
Have Only One, by Raphaelle Giordano. Flo had discovered this book for us,
but Flo was having the flu, so we missed her at our discussion. I was present
at the party, and I opened my laptop and joined the Zoom meeting, partly as an
experiment with having a dual meeting, with some members on Zoom and others
meeting together at Barnes & Noble or somewhere else public. The presence
of our Zoom meeting live on two screens created a reverberation, which I wasn’t
able to stop until I turned off my laptop completely. Without my laptop, I didn’t
end up with many notes about our discussion. Here are some that I wrote while
reading the book but didn’t get to mention because I didn’t have my laptop on
to remind me:
“Claude listed a bunch of good qualities a person can have.
He listed extraverted but not introverted.” By noting this, I
meant to harken back to our discussion of Quiet, by Susan Cain. The
premise behind that book was that introversion is not as well-respected as
extraversion in our society. It might have been interesting to discuss and
compare the two books a little.
“When Camille had a fight with husband and he mentioned
divorce and she went off in the cold night to walk and called Claude, it seemed
odd that he was willing to talk with her such a long time. That kind of
attention is, at best, rare.” Who knew that this attention foreshadowed the end
of the book, when we found out about Claude’s mission with Camille?
“When Camille couldn’t get a bank loan, she stormed into
Claude’s office and was totally impolite.” I wonder whether anyone else felt
that she was out of line when she did that.
“The surprise at the end was good, that Claude was winging
the advice and lessons he was creating for Camille!” I remember that during out discussion, someone
mentioned that there was more than one surprise at the end.
“The very end was good, that Camille found someone to help.
She could do it, using the resources of Paris!”
“The Epilogue about Camille (by Camille) was interesting.
She made up the Routinology syllabus.”
Without my laptop, I also didn’t have the resources I’m
accustomed to, to take notes about the discussion. Here is what I wrote down in
ink during the discussion:
“An important effort during routinology training is to keep
using the tools one learns about, to keep from getting into the same problems
again.” If it was you who said this, let me know and I’ll change this writeup
to reflect that.
“Smiling can make you feel better,” Dennis said this and related
it to a positive self image.
Carla thought that although Camille’s new business plan
seemed like a nice idea, a big drawback would probably be that the baby clothes
would get ruined quickly, thus not really being something that could be rented very
many times by a variety of customers, as in the plan.
We covered a lot of the book in our discussion!
Thanks to Lydia for her hospitality, to everyone for the
delicious lunch, and to Flo for the book nomination!
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