I met R at the bus stop. A tall, big black guy in his mid-twenties with an engaging smile, offering me some of his dark chocolate/marzipan bar. Definitely a good way to pass the time waiting for the bus.
The chocolate got us talking about cocoa plants R had seen in Panama and Costa Rica and that led us to talking about traveling, and then he's asking me what I do and I answer and I ask him what he does.
"I'm in recovery," he says with his upbeat smile. "So I go to meetings and do yoga . . ."
"Yoga?" I ask. "Do you do on your own or do you go to classes?"
"On my own." He tells me how he's bought yoga DVDs on eBay and at HalfPrice Books. I tell him how I tried yoga DVDs from the library before deciding what to buy.'
There's a yoga studio just a few blocks from the bus stop where we were standing, but I guess classes there might be out of his price range. So I ask, "Do you know about the free yoga classes at Lululemon in the U Village?"
"Free yoga? No."
I tell him about the early class Saturday mornings and the not so early class Sunday mornings, how Saturday has less people but Sunday you can sleep in. How there are different instructors each month. R writes "Lululemon U Village" on a scrap of paper.Our bus arrives. We sit in different places so our conversation ends -- until R bids me good-bye when he gets off first.
I don't know how convenient the busses are to U Village on Sat. and Sun. morning. Maybe he has a bike or a car like me, I think, and he's taking the bus downtown because it's the best way to get downtown. But even if R doesn't ever make it to the class, just to know that those free classes are an option, that's a good thing while he's doing yoga on his own. But I think he will go to a class and check it out. Hope so.
