Meetup

Meetup

Joan found herself scanning the Meetups again, looking for another group to join. How many had she joined now? Oh, she’d lost count. Let’s see, there was the hiking group, before it was too cold, and the crochet group. Joan got tired of sitting there listening to that other woman talking about her nine children non-stop! Although there was a man tatting that came to those meetings. He was interesting.

She has forgotten all the ones she quit going to over the years. Women over a certain age, singles, card games - the list went on and on. Often the groups died out on their own but usually Joan just lost interest. That seemed to be the story of her life since her husband had died from cancer four years ago.

Joan and Tom used to join groups like that together, but they weren’t Meetup. They had been in hiking and travel groups, and music appreciation groups. Joan missed Tom. She believed that’s the real reason she originally joined Meetup. There were some nice people there but most of them were nothing like her. Joan had mostly liberal ideas and too many of those people were a little too conservative for her taste. Except of course the men who hit on her. That’s why she had to quit the singles group. Some of them just didn’t want to take no for an answer!

Once she had visited a meditation group. Joan was a person who considered herself spiritual but not religious. In other words, she didn’t attend church. She and Tom had attended a Spiritualist church many years ago but then they moved away and couldn’t find one they liked close enough. At first Joan thought the meditation group would be nice. She hated doing it, but she left shortly after it started.

The first thing she didn’t like there was the separation. There were some people who had been attending for years and others, like Joan, who were “newbies.” So, they were segregated. That did not set well with her at all! Joan had led meditation groups herself, both in the Spiritualist church and in her home. She knew that she had both the experience and the years on the twenty-something leader that she was supposed to be learning from. Joan stayed to see if the meditation went smoothly anyway.

The lead in for the meditation was different than what Joan was used to but that was alright. Then the girl was saying, “we forgive-” fill in the blank, Joan was okay with, too. Until she said, “we forgive spirit.” What? Joan couldn’t understand why on earth she would need to forgive spirit for anything. That’s when she got up and left.

There were other groups, also, that were spiritual in nature that didn’t last long. One meeting, tops. Joan always went back to the website and found something else. Finally, she gave up on the spiritual groups. Joan was pescatarian and loved Thai food so she tried to find a Meetup group that would fill that gap. She found one on the opposite side of town from where she lived, but thought, how long could it take me to get there? The GPS on her phone was certainly not accurate, given that she had to drive there in rush hour! After about an hour, Joan arrived at a small Thai restaurant in a strip mall and realized that she was early. That had always been a bad habit of hers. It used to drive Tom nuts. So, she went inside and ordered a Jack Daniels on the rocks and sat and waited for the others to arrive, a large group of people that she had never met, but of course they all knew each other.

And they were all late. Tardiness was a pet peeve of Joan’s. That always used to drive her nuts about Tom. The woman who arranged that Meetup lived close to that restaurant; that’s why they met there. Most of the members lived on that side of town. Joan was the only one who had ordered an alcoholic drink. The others barely spoke to her. She ate and left.

Joan attempted at one point to start her own Meetup group. It was a travel group for women. They had one meeting at an MCL. One person showed up. Another woman who happened to hear them talking joined their table. Joan’s idea was a group to take driving trips. The woman who showed up liked to jet around all over the world. Not only could Joan not afford that, but she had no desire to do that. Plus, the expense of hosting your own Meetup was something that she didn’t want to pay unless she had members to help.

Joan looked into joining groups of women who wanted to travel closer to home. Several issues popped up there, the first of which was weather. The first event that she signed up for was an outdoor one. There was a tornado predicted. The other big issue was carpooling. The messages went back and forth so many times it became too hard to keep track. Every time someone agreed to drive, they had to cancel altogether for some reason. Joan never took one trip with that group.

Hiking. Book clubs. Crochet. Travel. Meditation. Spiritual groups. Writing. Dining out. Cards. Parties. Women’s groups. Singles groups. Then there was the Whiskey lover’s group. Joan tried several times to join that group and the person never got back with her. They didn’t say it had closed down. They just never responded. Joan thought they were rude.

Then coronavirus hit. Joan was still in the Meetup group for women over a certain age. She had met with them twice: once in a home and one time at a bowling alley. (She swore she’d never do that again - she’d thrown her back out!) That group was active, and the women didn’t seem too stuck-up, so it seemed tolerable to be around them. By then, that was what she was stuck with, a group that was tolerable. But now she couldn’t even get together with them.

The women-over-a-certain-age group learned how to use Zoom so Joan started receiving emails from their leaders. Joan already knew how to use Zoom, but she wasn’t sure if she really wanted to do that for a Meetup group; it didn’t sound fun because she didn’t know those women very well. Just like any other group she’d been in, they all knew each other, most of them anyway. She still felt like an outsider. Joan responded to one of the emails, saying that she would attend, but she changed her mind. Those emails always went to her “social” box anyway, that made it easy to ignore them.

Joan closed her Meetup account but that didn’t stop her from receiving emails from that group. Then she started getting emails from the group that she had played cards with before COVID. Joan had enjoyed that because Tom never liked playing cards. Some of those idiots were going back to the place where they used to gather and play! Joan lived in Indiana. The numbers had dipped for a while but had gone up again after the holidays. There was no way she was going to consider that.

With her Meetup account closed, Joan was done with that once and for all. She decided the only group she would stay in contact with was the card-playing one, and she could do that on Facebook. But she would not meet with them until it was safe.

Now if only there was a group for the vaccine.