Keeping in Touch

Because I want to keep in touch with you, my readers, and stay closer to the blog, here is the tiniest of updates on life since Thursday. Yesterday I took off from work so I could prepare my syllabus for the summer course I am teaching, starting Tuesday. This is my first time ever teaching summer school--it will be four nights a week, for six weeks, on top of my nine-to-five job. After that I will take a week off from everything. I am looking forward to the immersive experience even though I know it will be exhausting. Also, fewer students (only ten, I think), more continuity.

Also yesterday, I took a three-mile walk, trying out the new shoes I bought which are actually running shoes--the salesperson in the store assured me that I could use them just as well for walking. (Since they only sold running shoes in this particular store, I knew she had an angle, but I was set on getting shoes right then and there, and I decided to trust her.) Then, while scanning the magazine for retired people (!) in my doctor's office, I read that one should make sure to buy shoes specifically for walking, not running, if one is only planning to walk. Oh well. I still didn't want to take the time to return the shoes and look for others, so I took the plunge and laced them up (mixed metaphors? or mixture of metaphor and nonmetaphor?) for a walk yesterday. I think they were fine--very cushy actually.

After that, I unrolled (for the first time) the yoga mat I bought some time ago for at-home practice and popped in a yoga CD that I received as a present from my sister, did the 25-minute "power yoga" workout. I was pretty pleased with the experience--nice to have an alternative to going to class and to see that I could do most of what the soulful, half-naked practitioner was doing, despite not being seated in the middle of the desert with mountains in the background.

Now it's Saturday early afternoon and I am running off to visit my father. That's it, up to the minute.

Change of Season

Suddenly the end of the semester is here and it's summer--unofficially. Last night sure felt like summer. Eighty-eight degrees outside at 6:00 and it felt hotter inside the yoga studio, even with the fans going. I don't remember ever doing this before, but I had to leave about halfway through class--I started feeling faint and nauseated. I thought, okay, 45 minutes of yoga may be enough for me tonight.

Earlier, on the way to class, there were two young women walking ahead of me, both of them slender and strong and beautiful. The one on the left was carrying flowers wrapped in their paper cone. She had a black and white print dress on, mainly white, made of rayon or some other stretchy material, very soft, I think strapless. As I was walking behind her, I was admiring and puzzling over the the very complicated way the dress seemed to be falling around her hips--there seemed to be some darts that pulled the dress in at the sides and also made it shorter on the sides than in the middle. Then, I realized, oh, it is so hot out that she is doing that thing where you make your dress shorter by tucking a bit of it into the top of your underwear. She wore her dress that way with absolute confidence and grace. She seemed lost in the pleasure of feeling cool on the hot evening, carrying her flowers, smiling to herself a little bit, alone even though she was with her friend because her friend was talking emphatically on the phone while they walked.

This is what her friend was saying on the phone:

"I don't care what happens to that man."

Hmmm, I thought, her boyfriend? I was ready to sympathize with her, indignantly.

"I mean, there's this big oil spill . . . "

Now, I thought, maybe she is talking about our President. I started feeling a little defensive for him.

" . . . and he's going on a cruise with my mother."

Huh?