As I was finishing up Clock Dance: A Novel by Anne Tyler this week, I found complementary ideas about “community” while watching my favorite show, NBC’s This is Us. 

This book starts by narrating the most defining moments in Willa’s life: As a young girl, her mother disappears; in college, she ponders a marriage proposal; and later she is a young widow. Fast forward some years, and she feels a bit lost while living in Phoenix with her new husband.

“Willa loved saguaros. She loved their dignity, their endurance. They were the only things in Arizona she felt a deep attachment to. The first time she saw one – a whole assemblage of them, actually, looming outside the airport last summer when she and Peter came to house hunt – it was like meeting some mythical race.”

I, too, loved the saguaros I saw in Phoenix area. I had never seen anything like them and couldn’t stop looking at them.  Where the arm meets the base – this part looks so fragile and strong at the same time.

But as amazing as saguaros are, they don’t make up for personal connections. When she’s called across the country to a stranger’s aid, Willa begins to find a purpose as she becomes part of a slightly eccentric community.


A couple of chapters from finishing this book, I watched Season 2, Episode 3 “A Philadelphia Story” of This is Us, an amazing show I have previously written about here and here.

William’s speech on community

William spoke beautifully on community at his 5 year sobriety “party” :

“Community…it’s a strange word on its own. The word is not as warm as ‘family.’ But, for some people, people like myself, we don’t have family. But that’s OK because we have each other. We have this place [the community center] and that’s not nothing. That’s not nothing at all.”

And this is one of the themes of Clock Dance, that sometimes community becomes a family. After I saw this show I kept imagining Willa as older Rebecca.

Clock Dance was a pleasant, easy, and enjoyable read; it had good messages about community and about personal fulfillment. But even though this is primarily a book blog, I can’t recommend this book as much as I recommend this show!!!

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