Ommmmmm

It's only taken me two months, but I finally got my sorry ass to a yoga class today. It took me half an hour in a cab to get to the studio in a really fancy neighborhood, and the class was super expensive, but it was so worth it. Needless to say, it didn't hold a candle to Bev's classes in Boston, but it will do.

But probably the best thing about the class was the other lady who was in it with me. Her name is Ita. She is a very suntanned woman who lives in Miami and whose voice sounds like she smokes a pack a day. She said about ten times before we started how happy she was to be there and at the end of class, when the teacher was leading us in this gratitude thing and said something about all the people in the world who don't get to experience the gift of yoga, Ita said "pobrecitos" (poor things).

Very generously, she offered to drive me home. So I got into her big Jeep Cherokee with two-inch thick windows and was off on what turned out to be a hilarious ride. One of the first things she said to me was that I should get a boyfriend. I tried to point out that you don't really just go out and get one, but she was not convinced. She asked how old I am and seemed to be thinking really hard after I told her I am 34. As it turned out, she was going through her mental Rolodex of anyone she knows who's my age. She came up with two married couples who don't have kids and should have some friends for me to meet. She did have a follow-up question and asked if I was Jewish. Since she had already told me that her son is studying at a yeshiva in Israel, I knew that no was kind of the wrong answer. "But Sarah is a Jewish name," she said. And then she launched into a spiel about Sarah and Abraham and Ishmael and Biblical numerology. When we pulled up at a stop light with a bunch of street vendors, she bought 2 packages of garbage bags (a very popular buy-on-the-street item here -- go figure) and insisted on giving me one. What a trip!