I'm Not a Yoga Teacher

But I've been playing one after school on Mondays. This past Monday I had only two students, but I have had 6 or 8 in other classes. I'm doing it for free. Because I think our teachers need relaxation and because it gives me someone to practice with. It's also because I'm not a teacher and I might suck. I remind them of this. I think as long as I have at least one person coming, I'll keep doing it. It's not the numbers that really matter.

It has been a bit of a challenge writing the sets. But not overwhelming. We are meeting for 45 minutes, so I'm designing sets that are a little less than half the amount of time I usually experience in my teacher's classes. I have a wide variety of people in there...some are fairly flexible and others are not at all. I worry about the ones with physical issues. What if I can't figure out stuff for them to do? But I can't worry too much. I have a teacher I can refer them to and I do that if I need to.

I think I might enjoy doing this. I'm finding myself thinking maybe one day I'll scrabble together the $$ to take yoga teacher training. Just so I can still keep giving it away.

We'll see.

The Unimaginable

"I can't leave work to come get him. His father is all the way across town and it will take a while," the mother said when the school called her. She sounded defeated and at her wit's end. Her son had walked down the hall toward his classroom, came up to another boy and punched him. Her son's behavior in school had already earned him expulsion the previous spring and now, with school only in session four weeks, he was looking at expulsion again. And possibly assault charges.

The boy will be 16 soon and when he turns 16 he may be eligible for some other programs that are geared more for children with these kinds of issues. A regular, public high school simply does not have the resources to deal with children who are violent, unmotivated, possibly gang-affiliated or otherwise too far outside the mainstream with their behavior.  At some point the school and district have to make a decision that they can no longer serve this student. The safety of the other students has to take precedence over graduation rate.

My heart breaks for this parent. And for other parents that feel like they are at the end of their rope. When you bring home that brand new, 6 lb, 13 oz little boy, you never in a million years imagine that some day you may have to give him to someone else to get him to adulthood. You never in a million years think that you may be dealing with drug issues, violence, and abuse. You never think that your child might have severe learning issues on top of that. That you may get to the point where you no longer feel safe in your own home because you are worried this child may harm you or your other children.

Accidental Rose'

If you are going to accidentally buy rose' wine, this is a pretty good one. I do that sometimes...I'll be browsing through Harris Teeter, looking at the wines and reading the ratings, and then I'll find a white or red I want to try...and I'll accidentally get something I never would have tried on purpose. I guess I just didn't notice the clear bottle and redness of the wine?

As a rule, rose' wines frustrate me. I always feel like I'm drinking watered-down kool-aid. This one grew on me.

Yup. I Remember. But Some of it I Don't.

I remember sitting at my desk in my home office. I was working for The Cleveland Company, looking out over the back deck, listening to NPR, when I got a message from my brother-in-law.

 "Are you watching this?"
"Listening on the radio," I said. "I imagine St. Paul is a mess right now."
"Not the World Trade Center in St. Paul," he said. "The one in New York!"

Not a little Cessna. Four large, passenger-bearing planes. Boeing 757s and 767s.

I hadn't been listening closely. It was a beautiful day in my neighborhood in Minneapolis. The air was pleasant, the leaves were turning, I was thinking about walking to the precinct to vote.

This past Friday Taylor said they talked in their classes about where they were when the Twin Towers were hit. These kids are all 16. They were babies then. Kindergarten...first grade. He said he didn't have a memory of that day.

"You guys didn't tell me," he said. "Why? I didn't hear about it for a couple of years."

I had no reason. No recollection of deciding to tell or not to tell. Nate would have been 11. Did we talk about it with him? I don't remember that either. I said, "Surely you had to have known something was going on. We probably had the news on all day." He didn't remember. I don't either. All I could say to him was that I didn't remember. That we may have made a conscious decision to shelter him from it. We may have intentionally kept it down low as topic of conversation. We've never really been into hiding dark things from the kids, but we might have. I just don't remember.

I remember the moments I saw it on television after Jeff told me. I remember walking to the precinct to vote and it was so quiet. Everyone at the polling place was quiet...murmuring to each other. Quietly handling bad news like all Scandinavians do.

The quiet is probably a bigger memory for me of that day and several days that followed. We lived under the flight line of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Planes had all been grounded. So there was an eerie silence for all those days.

It was also my sister Julia's 40th birthday. My brother-in-law had planned a wonderful meal out at a nice restaurant in St. Paul. He'd made reservations for our entire family. He was in Seattle and should have flown back in time for the meal. But he was stuck there. "You have to go ahead anyway," he told us. "It's her birthday."

And so we went to this restaurant, which was very empty, and we ate a fantastic meal and we talked about the day and we wished Julia a happy 40th and commiserated with her that her birthday would probably forever be marred by this national event.

I suppose everyone born on December 7 before 1941 felt that way too.