Steel Lilacs

Several years ago during my madcap middle age, I edited the local weekly newspaper and in lieu of a munificent salary was given space to write an editorial column that was in many ways like this blog. That's to say, I could choose my topics and point of view; the editorial discretion exercised was mine alone. The name of the column was "I Was Just Thinking...," and usually what I wrote was about that random.

A year ago today (June 16), one of the short pieces published in the column was the following, and it's worth revisiting:

I am a charter member of a group whose meetings will never appear in The Digest [the newspaper's community events calendar]. We have no bylaws, no officers, no stated purposes.

In organization we are as amorphous as a floating crap game.

One of our number, in jest (I think), dubbed us the Worthwhile Women, probably because what we do individually is more worthwhile than anything we could do collectively.

What we do do is get together at haphazard intervals for lunch and talk, which is often enlightening, frequently absorbing, always hilarious. Essentially, we are like-minded people, who also like each other, keeping in touch.

Some of us work full time, some part time, some keep the home fires burning, one is a college student. We are all, in one way or another, involved. "Committed" sounds a trifle grim, but I guess we're that, too.

The last time we got together, one of the group came late to our lunch table at the far end of the restaurant. She excused her tardiness this way: "I asked the waitress up front if there was a group of ladies---a term I never use---having lunch here, and she said No."

Where our tardy colleague went wrong was in neglecting to ask, "Is there a bunch of women here whooping, hooting, and having a high old time?" The waitress could have pointed us out in no time.

I was reminded of that piece when, two weeks ago, I met the Worthwhiles for lunch, and our waitress seated us on the second floor of the restaurant in a far corner.

There's been a lot of water under our respective bridges in the 30-plus years since the lunch of which I wrote: one of our founding members died of lung cancer some 20 years ago; another is, as I write, gravely ill; three of us are widows; two of us are divorced and living with new partners; one is married. Some of us have divorced children; one child is transgendered. Almost all of us are grandmothers.

Since the time I wrote that "Some keep the home fires burning," all of us have been in the work force and now most of us have retired from it.

This is not to say that we have any more leisure for bridge games (which most of us never played anyway) or protracted lunches than we used to. Just getting six of us together at the same time and in the same place still takes a little doing and a lot of calendar juggling.

Louise takes frequent care of her 90-plus-year-old mother, as well as of an ageing friend who suffers from Alzheimer's. She walks everywhere in the village and is one of the few people I know who walks to the gym to do her daily workout. Her youngest is getting married next month.

Dorothy, a docent at one of the local museums, is a leading light of the historical society and served on the board of the adult daycare center. Mother of six and grandmother of 13, she and her husband take a six-week spring journey to the homes of their various offspring, most of them scattered along the Eastern Seaboard.

Nan, retired as a special-education teacher, still teaches English as a Second Language evenings and often pulls overnight duty at an inner-city food pantry. She is also the principal caregiver for her two-year-old granddaughter. Her sport of choice is kayaking in the Adirondacks.

Judy, one of our younger members, is a college library director and has no immediate plans to retire. She was, as we sometime Catholics used to say, a late vocation to librarianship and is having too much fun with it to quit. She is---surprise! surprise!---the Worthwhiles' archivist.

Kathy, our free spirit, is a certified yoga instructor and a published poet. Indeed, when we had lunch recently, ostensibly to celebrate our collective birthdays, she presented each of us with a copy of "InnerSessions," a collection of her verse and that of two other woman poets published by Aventine Press.

Then, there's Yours Truly, still writing (and still crazy) after all these years. I have a couple of pet community service projects, including fundraising for an AIDS orphanage in Kenya and for the local public library; take a weekly yoga class; garden when I can; read every chance I get. Sometimes, when I find myself hopelessly enmeshed in yet another home-improvement project, I fear that I am not the boss of me.

Yet, despite the life changes, we are all, to paraphrase The Eagles, still the same old girls we used to be, whooping and hooting included, still Worthwhile Women.

There is, in fact, an alternate history to the origin of the group's name. When we first started getting together on a more-or-less regular basis, what, if anything, we should call ourselves became a frequent topic of lunch-table banter. At length, Jeanne (now deceased) proposed Worthwhile Women because, she said, her husband had often declared that we were the only women he knew in the village who were worth the powder to blow themselves to Hell.

We still are. And the price of powder has gone up.