Real Life Clubs
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I’ve never been big on clubs. The picking and the parceling. The initiations and the rules. And yet, I’ve always been somewhat in awe of the way the walls come down when a Kappa meets a Kappa in an airport Starbucks line. Organizations of inclusion—and exclusion per definition—crisscross the striations of our society. Some have formal boxes to be checked, complete with dues and requirements and the sharing of secret handshakes, pins, and codes. But just as many co-exist organically, without any expectation of bending to become. They form from shared experience— the roads we walk together even though we’re far apart.
I’ve been in a lot of those real-life, no by-law clubs through the years. The student-athlete club was the one I first realized in real time. As collegiate athletes (pretty much regardless of sport), we were connected by weekends and summers that looked eerily the same and vastly unlike our other friends’ who were not on a team. Spring break and Christmas vacation meant quick hellos and goodbyes and days and days of ghostlike dorms. And though I didn’t complain about it then and certainly am not now, our college experience was a different one than those who didn’t play. We were all balancing and striving and aspiring, and in so doing shared an unspoken understanding of both the glitter and the grind. The club was a place where we could laugh and cry without seeming ungrateful or entitled. We had a language those who got to go on ski trips couldn’t understand.
Once my playing days ended and I embarked on a career in education, I became a member of the teachers’ club. I was a formal member of both state and national educational organizations for sure, but more importantly, I became a member of the tribe of professionals who stood daily in front of a room full of kids knowing that we didn’t know 1/10th of what we thought we should or our students assumed we did. Naked terror brought us together even if we never made the fear form words inside our mouths. Parking lot duty and painful faculty meetings gave us invisible laugh lines while attendance sheets and grading scales kept us tethered in mundanity as we fought the ever-growing bureaucracy threatening to stand between us and the doing of our jobs. We bonded over knowing how much our work mattered while also knowing that no matter how hard we stretched to reach, we’d never be able to touch all the hands. Such intimate understanding makes fast friends. When a teacher meets a teacher, the walls come tumbling down.
Not long after I became a member of the teachers’ club, I joined the working moms’ club. Then the taxi-cab parent club. Then the empty nester club. One association handed the baton to the next, as the membership of each did their best to help one another dodge the bullets and make the curves. None of us had any answers, though we all had composite knowledge of what the questions were. We just sort of quietly trudged along separately together. Through glances and waves and been-there-done-that shoulder hugs, we kept each other afloat. It’s strange the solace you can find in simply knowing someone else is also bleeding out.
Nothing binds quite like shared experience. That’s why teammates remain teammates long after jerseys have been retired. It’s also why strangers sometimes walk through gates of natural human safekeeping—because they, too, have sat in the chair, or stood by the bed, or pulled off to the shoulder of the road to cry. The moments that have no words unite them. Real life clubs have dues their members pay by living. That’s how you get in. And the kind of community found inside sustains us.
Most recently, I’ve become a member of the coveted Grandbaby Club (the only club that’s named for what you get instead of what you do, though what you do are all the things you never thought you would.) And it’s like Disneyland in here. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re doing or who you think you’re talking to, if you say, “I have a grandbaby” to somebody in the club, the member does a back flip and you join her at the hip. It’s as if a giant access line appears connecting the best parts of both of you to each other, and you each become a person you recognize but aren’t entirely sure you know. You connect in a space that has no name in a cloud of giddy joy.
Organic affiliations are like that. The companionships don’t always necessarily make sense, but differences don’t much matter because similarities are so strong. We make our way by walking through the same stuff at the same time and the walking is made better by the company we keep.
P.S. Community