Band-Aids, as well as a miniature golf elective, we dropped the joke. We couldn’t see James Bond needing Band-Aids to protect nipple boo-boos.
So at the end of my senior year of high school, sitting on my toy soldier–themed comforter, I was preregistering for my Georgetown classes, and I wanted to round out my humanities and business courses with something similar to what Larry had taken at UVA. Georgetown is a smaller school, so fewer courses are offered. I was choosing between jazz dance, squash, step aerobics, and yoga. I selected yoga as the most exotic choice.
Five months later, on day one of yoga class, I’m sitting on a long bench outside a classroom in Georgetown’s Yates athletic building waiting for the teacher to show up. This is 1989, so as you visualize this scene, incorporate lots of very tight spandex, neon sweatbands, leg warmers, and feathered hair. It will also help if you include a few Members Only jackets and a pair of acid-washed jeans, and perhaps hum Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There for You” or Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” as a quiet sound track.
I’m waiting on the bench as woman after woman shows up. We’ve got freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and grad students, and they’re all women. No other men. At all. I am brand-new to yoga, so I have no idea what’s going on. I am seventeen years old and surrounded by thirty-one women, all wearing tight spandex. You’d think I’d feel great about this ratio, but, frankly, I’m terrified. I wonder if I am mistakenly sitting outside a woman’s gathering of some sort. Perhaps “Menstruation and You” or “A Woman’s Guide to Dating at Georgetown,” or, worst-case scenario, “Aquatic Jazzercise.”
Why were there no other men on the bench outside that yoga class? Answer: this was 1989, before many guys did yoga. Men can now hug and cry and do yoga and drink white wine and wear an apron and cook free-range chicken picatta. But in 1989 we were pretty much hemmed in between Al Bundy and Magnum P.I. — limited to watching televised sports, eating large pieces of meat, and drinking cheap beer stored in a small fridge next to the couch.
Even with the skewed demographic on the wooden benches, before long I knew I was indeed in the right place, waiting for a yoga class, because soon the yoga teacher showed up. And he was unmistakably the yoga teacher. Either that, or he was from the drama department and had come straight from Georgetown’s production of The Ten Commandments.*
Oskar even looked Indian to me (though I later found out that he was Peruvian). He had a big Alan-from-The-Hangover beard, his clothes were all white, and he was wearing leather sandals. These days, stockbrokers, accountants, and off-duty construction workers proudly wear Birkenstocks, but back then leather sandals on a man sent a very specific message, a message like, “This man and these feet are free, as God made them. And this man thinks about foot health. And he likes to close his eyes and smile placidly as he breathes deeply in the fresh air. And he does not own a TV and certainly has not seen Michael Jordan’s Nike commercials.”
Right before that first yoga class I had been at the Georgetown University debate team building. I had not been recruited to Georgetown for debate, and I had not even contacted the coach; I was planning to be a walk-on to the team. But first I showed up anonymously to check it out. Really, I think I just wanted to make a dramatic entrance when I finally announced to the coach and to the team my true identity as debate royalty (being debate champ of New Jersey is like being ice-dancing champ of Russia).
But, during my anonymous tour of the place, I was appalled. One of the debaters, who resembled Draco Malfoy in every way, showed me around and informed me, “No one walks onto the Georgetown debate team.” Then I sat with Coach Snape and learned that debate team at Georgetown was a full-time gig and that the people I met, including Severus and Draco, would be my new family.
Here’s a transcript of my thoughts as I left the meeting to rush off to my first yoga class:
“I was debate champ of New Jersey, for sobbing out loud. I have to join.”
“But I don’t want to.”
“You have to. There are expectations. And you’re very good at it. ”
Enter Oskar in his sandals, beard, and all whites.
Yoga class began with the prayer of St. Francis, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love” and ended with “Let there be peace on Earth. Let peace begin with me. Let there be peace on Earth, the peace that was meant to be.”
I imagine that these blessings were part of Georgetown’s compromise with Oskar in allowing him to teach yoga at a Jesuit school. For most of my yoga classmates, these prayers probably evoked thoughts of Easter bonnets and dusty church pews. But I had grown up Jewish and had never heard them before (I imagined they were straight from the Bhagavad Gita), so I heard them with fresh ears, and they, along with the yoga warm-ups, poses, and guided relaxation, awoke something in me. After forty minutes of breathing deeply and bending myself in all manner of new ways, I felt more relaxed and at ease than I could remember.
I felt like I was in exactly the right place. I had been faking it as a debater. Debate was work, and while I enjoyed the praise I received after winning, I had never enjoyed the actual debating. I don’t even like to argue.
Oskar’s yoga class touched the right chord and made my soul sing. I had signed up for yoga on a lark, but even in that first class, I knew what I had found.
Lying in relaxation pose at the end of class, I realized:
“This feels good.”
“I’m going to be doing this a lot.”
“Wow, I am not going to join the debate team.”
This was a telling moment of insight that describes how I have attempted to make decisions ever since. I seek not to decide but to relax and calm my mind enough to simply realize and feel the correct path before me. I know that this places me dangerously close to the decision-making behavior of an invertebrate, or even of George W. Bush, but I will clear that up later on.
I became a yoga zealot pretty quickly. I loved feeling, for the first time, the muscles between my ribs as I stretched in setu bandhasana (bridge pose). I loved the prayers — this was the first time I had taken seriously a charge to effect world peace — and I loved the relaxation. Oskar’s deep, euphonic voice soothed every muscle in my body, and when he said “relaaaax,” I melted.
One day after class I told Oskar about my colitis. He recommended that I practice “[insert deep, relaxing voice] moooola bannnda” sixty times a day. He explained, “Tense ouup and then relaaaax your anouuuse” thirty times every morning and thirty times every night.
Say again? Oskar had a pretty thick accent, and I was sure that I must have misheard him. He could not possibly have told me to tense and then relax my anus sixty times a day.
In fact, I doubt that I had ever, in my eighteen years, heard anyone speak about my anus at all before. Sure, I had heard the word used, but not in the context of my anus and certainly not by a bearded and sandaled yoga teacher dressed all in white.
Pursing my lips, squinting slightly, and bobbing my head like I was earnestly considering his wise counsel, I thanked him politely as I backed away. For days I shook my head and puzzled at what in the world he possibly could have said that sounded so much like anus.*
