A Monthly Booking
Did you ever wonder what people who are visiting PVE for the first time think about all the activities, athletic venues and cultural opportunities? There’s an overwhelming variety of things to do on this retirement community campus.
That’s because original residents wanted to make sure that the quality of life they had enjoyed for many years would follow them into retirement. So they set about designing a culture that would include fitness, social interaction and activities that would appeal to anyone contemplating a life-changing experience, aka retirement living.
In February 1998, Paradise Valley Estates was three months old when a group of newbies, all disenfranchised book club members, came together in the Community Center to talk about forming a book discussion group.
All of them were familiar with the general format but they wanted to promote their new club with a unique name. “Why not call it ‘Clerisy’?” asked a participant. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the British writer invented the word,” she added.
Pressed for a definition, she said: “The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, and isn’t that what we plan to do?”
And so Clerisy became the official book discussion group of Paradise Valley Estates, joining the Golf Club, the choir, the ballroom dancers, the bocce players, the Bridge group and many other formative activities.
Now called the PVE Book Discussion Group, it meets on the third Thursday of each month in our Community Center. Each month a selection is announced, a discussion leader volunteers and “Clerisy” gathers.
Presently, several book clubs function in neighborhood settings. These groups often meet in the afternoon to discuss a wide variety of fiction, biography or history in a member’s home or apartment.
There’s a group for any literary taste. This is quite a different scene from Coleridge’s, when pleasure reading was defined by poetry such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
What defines PVE is the willingness to explore avenues that lead to an enriched lifestyle that suits its residents.
