A Year of Wonders

Last night, the Blue Katt bookclub met for the last time at Blue Katt Gallery. The gallery is closing, but the club will continue on.

We read A Year of Wonders by Gwendolyn Brooks. We all seemed to like the book very much.

Our book club is somewhat, well, different, in that we don't just discuss books. We meander and wander and our minds go off on many different directions. We relate the theme to our lives today. We just dive in and who knows where we'll end up. I love it because it really brings out my creativity.

Last night's book was about the plague in the 1600s in England. Somehow we went from that to the media and its impact upon everything. Don't ask me what tangent we followed to get to that point, as I have no idea.

At one point I noted how the smallest things in the media can make a difference, and spoke about this article in the Guardian (U.K.) about how the media uses "Allah" as opposed to "God" when discussing Islam and related topics. Of course I learned long ago that Allah and God are the same thing. Islamic worshippers worship the same god as the Jews and Christians, they just, like the Jews and Christians, don't agree on everything. It would be rather odd that they did, given the many sects and divisions that this monolistic religion has wrought.

The point about how the media can subconsciously manipulate was well taken with this example, the ladies agreed.

But what would a bookclub meeting be without me acting crazy? I don't know, because I always seem to bring on gales of cackles with my comments. As our discussion continued, we got onto memory and memorizing facts and data. Several of our members are school teachers, and they said they no longer have children memorize.

I suddenly had a commercial from the 1970s come to mind, and I blurted out, "I can remember a jingle from a drugstore company from my childhood." And Dreama says, can you tell us? So what do I do? I start singing:

Evans Drugstore, Evans Drugstore!

Good Prescription Service!
Intersection at Airport

and Williamson Road!

Delivery in the city, and in the county too!

For drugs, comestics, school supplies,

it's Evans Drugstore!

Of course, howls of laughter followed, and then that was added to, and my embarrassement short-lived, when someone else suddenly recited a Crest toothpaste commercial.

I think it is sad that children are not memorizing. I memorized all sorts of stuff - Patrick Henry's speech (Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace!), Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, (Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, while I nodded nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door, tis some visitor I muttered, tapping at my chamber door, only this and nothing more) and other various and sundry facts and figures and musings.

Not to mention stories. Once we had an oral tradition, and our lives were passed down through stories and tales told over campfires. We could recite a long line of begats, knowing our ancestry for generations. But we can't do this anymore (well, not most of us, anyway, I can go back seven generations if you really want me to, but we've already established I'm rather weird. Well, okay - there's me, G.H.B., my mother, C.L. Harris, my grandfather, Sally Painter, his mother, George Washington Painter, her father, John Painter, his father, Jacob Painter, his father. There you go. Seven generations, back to 1802).

I can not imagine what we've lost. All of that heritage and lore. Fizzled away and gone. Why, if someone hadn't remembered about this village in England that shut itself away to keep the plague from spreading, there would not have been a book for us to read! At least, not that story.

But I am digressing and losing my thoughts, so I had better get back to work.