So three male friends and I decided to start a Husbands’ Book Club. (I capitalized it to legitimize the concept, even though we’re not really a book club or not exactly a book club. Actually, not one at all.) It happened by accident. My wife is in two book clubs made up entirely of women, and in both cases, when the meetings rotate to various houses, husbands are not welcome. If you write a book and the women decide to read it, you get to attend that one meeting to answer questions about stuff in your book you never thought about and you’re not even sure was in your book, but that’s the only meeting you can attend. I could hang out upstairs and watch sports, I suppose, but when I talked to one of the other husbands, he said, “Let’s start our own book club.” He got two other husbands interested, and then said, “You know, Kurt, the women don’t just discuss books, they have a fancy meal.”

We decided to rotate to all the best restaurants in Madison to discuss books, drink, and eat. It would be a financially reasonable night because our wives were not invited. On the first meeting we couldn’t decide on a book, and then thought it was too much work to read a book for a stupid meeting when we’d rather talk about cars, traveling, hunting, fishing, sports, and the general state of the world going to hell in a donkey cart. Someone suggested we become a magazine club, but even then, it sounded like too much work. To pick a magazine every month and read it, when all we really wanted to do was have a meeting to drink, eat, and tell stories – seemed like such a waste of time. We decided we were much more interesting and funny than any magazine anyway. It’s true.

One member is a retired history of science professor from the University of Wisconsin who knows tons of stuff about Galileo, the Vatican library, and lots of scientists I’ve never heard of. He does original research in Latin and speaks French, Italian, German, and passable Greek. I tried to read one of his books on science, but it had math in it, so that was the end of that. The second guy is a former engineer, inventor, and businessman who sold two of his businesses and now is a semi-retired professional photographer. He did some design of an optical machine used to test eyes and refraction, but when he explained it to me, his explanation had math in it, so that was the end of that. I can’t really tell you what he invented. The third member is a naturalist who worked forever for the Wisconsin DNR, fought for years to save Wisconsin’s beautiful ecology, and just retired. He fought a good fight, although now the greedy bastards who want to bottle spring water in headwaters where trout spawn, gouge open-pit lead mines, dig sand pits and supply frackers with whatever they want – have the upper hand. He’s sad and needed a book club like ours.

Then there’s me. In my career I read half of the classics I should have, but since I was an English teacher, I can just make stuff up, so I get to be part of the conversation. Besides, I came from Waterloo, Illinois, which in my youth had maybe 3,000 people in it, so I have stories about stuff that Faulkner turned into novels. We have a great time, even before we finish a single beer or glass of wine. We laugh uproariously, but so far have not been kicked out of any restaurant.

We suggested to our wives that they should do two books a month, but they said it would be too much for them to handle. Women can be such slackers sometimes.

Here’s what it’s like to be at one of our book club meetings. It’s deer season up here in Wisconsin, so last week, that was our first topic. Our science professor told about his experience last weekend when a deer came out of the woods about 30 yards from him, turned broadside and stood there waiting to be shot. He lined up his sights even though such a point-blank shot made the deer look like the proverbial broad side of a barn, then he pulled the trigger. The deer bounded off, and my friend spent the next three hours looking for blood or some sign to track the deer before he finally had to admit he had missed. All his knowledge about trajectories, vectors, the history of science, and ohmygod – math – did not help him, and somehow he missed the broad side of a barn. Even his expert Latin and passable Greek did not help. The other three of us were sympathetically dumbfounded, which led us to a discussion of refraction, gravity, astrology, horoscope signs, Nostradamus, and the effects of eclipses on primitive societies which caused the unthinkable to happen.

Next up was our ecologist who worked for the DNR. That same weekend, he had finished cleaning his rifle and drove with his wife out to the friend’s farm to hunt for at least a couple of hours before the light faded. As soon as he got out of the car, he saw a very large buck heading very slowly along a hedgerow. As quickly as he could, he lugged his gun case along a fence to intercept the deer and make the perfect shot. When he got to his spot, he got out his ammo, took his rifle out of its case, and with a sigh that can only result from a catastrophe, looked at his clean, oiled rifle, and realized he had left the bolt on the table back home. There was no way to load a shell, nor did he have a firing pin to shoot it. He looked at the enormous buck through his scope mounted on the top of his rifle, and pretended to shoot it four times. This led to another discussion of what a rifle actually needs to fire a shell, astrology, horoscope signs, the unthinkable, etc.

Quite naturally, this led to a discussion of cars we owned, and what parts were actually necessary for any car to run. This was a discussion in which the essentials are quite different for men and women, and since this was a men’s book club meeting, I didn’t have to re-tell my story about the time my wife and I were driving through the Chicago suburbs to see a Shakespeare play on Navy Pier, and the day was so hot that our old car overheated, but I managed to keep it going until we got to the parking garage by opening all the windows and turning the heater on full-blast to lower the engine temperature. It worked fine. I would have been in the clear, except that when we got out of the car, my wife noticed that the unbearable heat had melted the glue which kept her soles attached to the bottom of her shoes and she was now walking like a clown to see Hamlet. Flop, flop. You get the idea.

I had told this story at a previous book club meeting and received the most reasonable understanding from the other husbands, who voiced the proper response, which was, “You did exactly the right thing. That’s how cars work. Why did your wife buy such cheap shoes?”

If you are a husband and you travel somewhere near Madison, Wisconsin, the last week of any month, you might want to check with me about the time and place for our next Husbands’ Book Club meeting. If you appreciate good food and know some stories about Galileo, hunting, fishing, cars, sports, astrology, refraction, ecology, Latin, or traveling, you would be welcome. If you don’t know about those things but you majored in English, you could just make stuff up, and it would be okay.