I'm considering joining a women's drum group.
Oooh, oooh, oooh... I did this last fall!! I have a good friend who used to do this when she lived in a more suburban area and had access to lessons/circles. When she moved to a rural area, she couldn't find anything within a 90+ minute drive. 🙁 So last fall when I was looking for some way to get more involved in my community and meet some people. Our local adult education program offered West African Djembe hand drum classes, so I joined. Our adult ed has a LOT of different options and I was trying to decide between this and maybe Mahjong or Canasta. I wanted something to get my brain working, too, but not too hard. The class was listed for beginners, so imagine my anxiety when I showed up for that first class and discovered I was the only newcomer 😲. I almost walked out, but all the ladies convinced me to stay and I've been going every week (minus a few school breaks here and there) since. When I walk out of class each night, I feel like my brain has short-circuited! I've never played a musical instrument (I don't really count guitar that I last played 50 years ago), nor have had any music education. I could not believe how much cognitive discipline this took - and still does!
And if anyone had told me this would be on my BINGO card a year ago, I would have laughed, but I actually ran for my first political office earlier this month! And won by FIVE votes! It's at the local level (our town is around 30,000+) which is not partisan, and I had a huge handicap to overcome since I haven't lived here long enough to have any name recognition. Much of New England has an interesting form of local government - ours is a representational form, and harks back to the colonial days. This position is usually for a three-year term, but there were two openings for one-year terms to fill out vacated seats, so I thought it would be a great civics lesson for me and if I don't like it, I don't have to run next year.
Interesting side note about the election. My son-in-law took it upon himself to be my campaign manager, which was totally over the top - it's not that big of a deal to run for this that anyone needs a campaign manager, but he really wanted to do it. He actually took my own words about things I wanted to see in our community and put them in ChatGPT to come up with postcards and yard signs. He seemed to be having a lot of fun with it, so I went along with it all. Election day, I spent a few hours out at my polling place holding up a yard sign that I'd attached to a stake (by dinner time a weather front had moved through and the 'real-feel' temperature was 19°). My SIL shows up around dinner time, saying he wants to help me out with sign holding. When I saw him walk toward me, I said he didn't need to bring his own sign because I had some in my car attached to stakes. My daughter says, "Oh, it's a special sign." He flips it over, and it says, "Vote for Number4" on the first line, then below it says, "World's Best Mother-in-Law" with an arrow below that pointing to the side so that when people saw his sign, they'd look toward me holding my sign that says to vote for me. He had it professionally printed up at FedEx! It was probably a 3'x5' sign!! What an awfully sweet gesture, right?
So what makes this more amazing is, the election was held the day before I turned 65, and I found out on my birthday that I'd won - again, this is the first time I've ever run for anything, so it was quite the big deal. I've met some incredibly encouraging, supportive, kind people along the way, so even if I'd lost, just having my SIL there holding that sign on election day was worth it all. My D took a picture and sent to our family group text chain and my son-in-law in CA, after seeing the picture, responded back, "It's effective because it's true." Like I said, I could have never dreamt up putting this on my bucket list, but since it happened, I'm so glad I got to have the experience of running and being recognized by my SILs this way!
