It’s that little piece of peace before it all begins. I get to the library early, there are still people in the Level 6 North meeting room so I find a desk by the window and write a little. My mind is active in anticipation so my focus is shot, but it’s playful, excited, not stressful like that first meeting of this club that all of a sudden has become something solid, a twice weekly fixture for us all.

For Nasim and I it has something of the Ken school of relationships. In Alberta, I was struck by Ken wondering at the loss of those long lived connections that defy growing attachment. He offered an archetype of two men who meet weekly to play tennis and after thirty years couldn’t tell you if the other is married, or what their job is like. It isn’t something I would want to replicate generally, but where there is a focused mutual purpose it seems to liberate. It’s pure. We don’t catch-up, we don’t share our lives, we come here to draw. From time to time Nasim will say something careless or unkind, like last class where she railed against the homeless, and in any other context I would rise to that, argue it, but here we agree to disagree, we don’t wade into each other’s lives, we almost exit our lives to come here. At least in that first hour of each club, where it’s typically just Nasim and I. Later on things shift and that’s alright.

Lidia brings her whole self to the club, all of the turbulence of 24, and so she draws only little; Hansol brings the defensively cynical part of himself, so from time to time he offends people but we don’t hold it against him because he is the most talented of us, and his cynicism is simply the natural reaction of a sensitive heart that has been burned; more and more Ondrej brings more of himself to the club and I’m charmed by him, I welcome that, because I can see it as his becoming less shy with us; Mariana is more varied, she is social but she is also keen to practice, so there is balance; Chris and Ewan follow the consensus, all politeness and kindness and reserved laughs.

That little peace before hand is a blessing, a moment of contemplation that readies me to better appreciate the blessing of this group.