The last session of my senior citizen art class was yesterday. The basic idea of this class is that we all meet at a different location around the city of Philadelphia every time, with our stools and tools, and spend an hour and a half sketching together.

It is the second time I’ve taken the class.

I like it very much, even though, like all the rest of the classes I have taken in the last three years since my husband died, it feels rather like a group of friends that I’m not part of. People chat with one another, but only occasionally talk to me. (The art teacher has fussed over my work, and that didn’t make people any more inclined to socialize). But the class gives me a nice excuse to get out of the house, go somewhere, and be in the company of others.

People are gradually warming up to me in French class, too. Even the second time I took it, there were still snarky remarks about my decent accent and my knowledge of grammar (I cannot help that I had decent instruction in high school and that I taught grammar). Everyone in the French class knows each other. They have been taking that class over and over, many more times than I have.

Last French class, the teacher was giving a “dictée” and read out, “Pour que honnête qu’il paraisse, il faut s’en méfier.”* Everyone in the class began to protest in confusion. He gestured me up to the board to write it out, and after I finished, he said, “Perfect.”

“I have no idea what it means, though,” I said. I’m not familiar with the “pour que” phrase, and I forgot what “se métier” means.

“That’s all right,” he said magnanimously.

“You did an excellent job,” said someone from the other side of the room, and I was absurdly delighted that someone had said something nice to me, not snarky.

Anyway, I arrived at our art class destination late and lost yesterday, without my folding stool or my glasses, because I had rushed out of the house, but I had my materials, and gamely took up a seat on a bench next to another classmate. We got to talking. It turned out she, like me, had taught for many years in one of the many exclusive private schools in the area. She, like me, had wanted to be an artist but her mother discouraged her. She, like me, had a husband who could be disagreeable, though she spoke about hers with much less affection than I do about my own impossible late spouse.

The teacher came around and I said it was one of the best classes I have taken so far and I hoped she would offer it again. She said she had put in for teaching it next fall, though she said it doubtfully. After she left, I said to my classmate, “I have taken classes at Fleisher Art Memorial, too.”

She told me she took classes there, too, and said approvingly that it was “just like a little club.”

“It is like a club,” I agreed forcefully. That’s what all of these cozy little classes have been like, little clubs. People taking the same class together, and coming back to it term after term, to see their friends. In the case of the collage class I took at Fleisher, some of them had taken it as many as six times.

In collage class, I once struck up a conversation with someone sitting near me and the teacher told us to be quiet and work.

I spend whole days sometimes being quiet and working. I don’t take classes to be silent and work. I take them to be in the company of others, and it’s not easy when everyone already knows everyone else and doesn’t particularly want to know me.

My classmate on the bench found out I had gone to a particular art school, and asked me if I knew a person who was there then, and I confessed, “I wasn’t very social in my early twenties.”

“Are you social now?” she asked.

“Oh, very social,” I said vehemently. Later, I wondered if I have somehow been giving off unsociable vibes, if I should be eagerly trying to chat with people who, when I come in and sat down, give me blank looks and go back to their conversations with each other.

But I introduced myself to someone once in French class, and she informed me that she had taken the class before, as if she was reprimanding me for assuming she was new.

I hear I can be intimidating. I have been intimidating all my life. I swear I don’t do it on purpose.

Yesterday, though I was enjoying myself, I had to leave early. I asked for the name of the woman I’d been chatting to, and gave her mine. I managed to snag the right bus just before it pulled out, had a nice talk with a lady on the bus who almost fell when the driver started up too fast, and arrived in time to have an actual conversation with my kid before I had to mind the grandchild during his kindergarten teacher conference.

Maybe the third time I take the art class, if it’s offered again, I will be part of the club. I really am rather social for an introvert, or at least I would like to have a conversation with someone besides bus drivers, fellow passengers, and my adult kid on the days I’m not hanging out with my regular friends.

Because I need to remind myself, I do have a club of my own, and people who like to talk to me, just not on the days I have class.

*No matter how honest he may appear, one must be wary of him.