Books and adult conversation

I went to my first book club meeting at OLLI Aquinas today. I tried to reread the book, The Color of Water by James McBride, but my reserved library copy did not come in on time. I decided to go anyway and give the club a test, i.e. would I like the set up, the people, would someone dominate the conversation and just the general aura. I had a good time. The professor that was running the group was extremely friendly and warm. The people were intelligent, polite and made good points about the books and about the writing we did. The book was a memoir so we had to write about something in our life that was inspired by the sentences she gave us from the book. Dennis was the eldest and the pioneer in our family. Momma could not cook to save her life. My brothers and sisters were my friends until it came to food. I chose the first one to write about and ended up telling the story of leaving home when I was a junior in college and essentially never returning but chosing to live 3 hours away. Out of the five of us, only my second brother, Dennis, did the same--living about 3 hours north of our childhood home. I always felt like the problem child, the oddball, but when Dennis and I were talking at the hospital the night Dad died, we discovered we both felt that way. Too bad that it took 30+ years to discover that about each other.