Its not surprising that I met Lydia at yoga. It was the only place I went regularly other than work and the farmers market. She put her mat down next to mine and we smiled at each other, the way yoga people do.
I took up practicing in the summer before the boys entered their senior year of high school. I heard it helped you sleep and if I hung around the house at the dinner hour cooking and serving, the boys and I would invariably start shrieking at each other. That year, Jules was working thirty miles away on some show shot on a horse ranch mostly at night. Wednesday night he was home and he generally spent it in bed with a tray and the remote control. Once in a while, he and the boys went out to this revolting Mexican restaurant they all love and I wont go near. Otherwise, he was gone except on the weekends when he slept, being understandably exhausted from the night shoots. Three mornings a week before dawn, Jules and I would cross paths in the kitchen: me with my commuters mug of café au lait on my way to the cable studio for Healthy Harriet. Jules on his way to the kitchen for his Irish oatmeal before hitting the sack. (The oatmeal everybody loved was made the night before in the crockpot by Healthy Harriet.) Looking back it is remarkable how often Jules landed gigs that either sent him on location or put him in an entire other stratosphere schedule-wise from the rest of us.
Once I started yoga, I was hooked almost right away and began going into down dogs in the kitchen and soon handstands against the door that led to the laundry room. When I took the boys for their college tours, I remember Googling yoga studios in the towns we visited. Like cooking, it kept me sane. And gave me something to look forward to. And it wasnt solitary like running. I liked the chanting. The bowing and the Namaste”I particularly loved the one chant we repeated three times: Loca Samasta Sukihino Bhvantu. May all beings everywhere be happy and free from suffering.
By that point I must have begun to realize subconsciously at least, that much as I loved him, I was much happier and the boys acted better when Jules wasnt around. What a revelation! For years I had been in the habit of thinking the problem was that Jules was gone most of the time and we all missed him. Granted we did miss him, especially in those first few years in LA when they were young and I didnt know a soul and I had to start all over again work-wise. Though I do remember sort of putting it together that the horrible pains that tightened my neck muscles and sent me to the chiropractor for adjustments only happened when Jules was at home. When he was around, I not only felt sort of queasy, I could literally feel the chords of my neck tightening like the reins of a workhorse. The Jules effect wasnt a whole lot more salubrious on the boys. In fact Sam started having the same neck problems I did. Maybe it was his violin, maybe not. Im not trying to say things were perfect between the boys and me. Especially Dan and me. Certainly we fought when I hung around serving them dinner and when I fussed like they were ten-year-olds. However, when I stopped doing that we were much better. I say all this because the combination of just leaving them food and not fussing over them realizing I didnt miss Jules, realizing they didnt miss Jules, doing yoga and finally when they left home and the coast was clear, meeting Lydia was like finding the essential fixings for a good stock, and the basis for what I cooked up. The spontaneous orgasm at yoga probably didnt hurt either. A little giftie from the universe, a sort of hey, look, it can happen again, maybe not in the way you think but it can happen.
Dinnertime yoga in LA and probably everywhere else too is primarily practiced by single and/or divorced women. If I were a guy on the make, thats the first place Id go. Women who do a lot of yoga have great bodies and I even stopped shouting (except in the shower) when I got hooked. But the men at yoga are usually few and far between and often gay. That or AA. It didnt take me long to discover not only was I one of the least limber in class, I was also the only woman there who actually lived with her husband and kids. Certainly my role at home was quite different than it had been before the real change had come when they got their drivers licenses. However, I still considered myself a mom. And I did what moms do everywhere whether their day jobs are over or not. I planned the meals, did the shopping, cooked what they liked, ran the house, showed up at school functions and bought them things, tried to get them to talk to me . . . and now that they were older watched for signs of drugs, though I generally avoided signs of sex. A far cry from the old days when there was all this plus driving, plus organized sports, music lessons and the rest of it. Since Im trying to tell it like it was, did I mind that I wasnt so fucking central anymore? Not really. Sometimes I felt wistful for the early years, particularly when I looked at the lines around my face. But like a lot of women, I was dead-tired from too many years of doing too much cooking/managing/scheduling. Yoga gave me a place to go and something to get good at, though Ill never be really good at it in the way I would have been had I started in my twenties.
Randy, who was teaching the night I met Lydia, was a mixed race hunk, twenty-four years old with blond dreadlocks, golden skin and shoulders that stretched from east to west.
Supta Badda Konasana. Lie flat on your back. Put the soles of your feet together and let your knees relax and sink toward the floor. Good. Bring your awareness to your groin. And breathe. Breathe!”
I suspect Randy must have had that effect on others because unless you got there early and put your mat down, you couldnt get a place. And too, after it happened to me, I figured it was probably happening at yoga centers all over the country, and was at least in part responsible for the huge surge in popularity.
It makes perfect sense, when youre lying there, soles of the feet together, thighs spread, breathing into the sex organs that once in a while someone will get off.
OMMMMMMM!
When the class rang out with the chorus of OM, Im almost sure I came forth with an AHHHM. Just for the record, the big O during the big OM has never happened since then, though I have gotten close a few times. And I still do yoga almost every day. And Ill never know whether Lydia knew what was happening on the mat next to her.
How often do you come?” she asked in her melodious English voice. Not of course what she meant, still strangely apposite for the first thing she said to me.
Every day if I can. Im hooked. How about you?”
Im a rank beginner.” Im Lydia, by the way.
Im Harriet.”
We didnt shake hands. We were schlepping our mats and navigating down the stairs and onto the street. When we hit the lit sidewalk she did a little start.
Healthy Harriet!”
I smiled.
You taught me to make brown rice with mung beans, carrots, ginger and ghee.”
Im so pleased!” I told her, and it was true. It wasnt that she recognized my dubious status as a food network host. Its the feeling that right away, this beautiful obviously highly intelligent creature with the gorgeous English accent seemed to approve of me and get me. And the feeling was mutual.
Good old mung!” I replied. Ive got that cooking at home in the rice cooker.”