This story was published in The Daily Cuppa with a word limit 150.

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I’m new to this book club business, joining our community’s older men’s reading group about a year ago. It’s called that to distinguish us from a whippersnapper bunch who looked two decades younger when we met in a joint session last August.

When I asked our founder, Jim, why only men, he said, “Because we read different books than women.” Our geezer gang of ten consists of eighth-decade white men, including four college professors, one engineer, one banker, three small business owners, and a psychologist.

We intentionally exclude people by gender and age but not by race. However, we live in an almost all-white town in the nearly all-white state of Iowa. We asked Novian, an African-American English professor at the local college, to lead our discussion.

Two fertile hours later, Steve turned to Novian and said, “You’re the first black person I’ve gotten to know.”

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