Chapter 2

My wife Jude and I had recently celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary. At the time, we had one kid in college and another set to graduate high school soon. I was contemplating retirement and Jude was bored. She had been a stay-at-home mom for the past ten years and, with the kids all but gone, she was looking for something to do with her time. It should have been an occasion for us to think about our future together. Instead, It became all about Jude.

It was around that time that Jude first got into yoga. Her best friend Melissa was taking classes at a small studio in a strip mall not far from our house and raved about it every time Jude spoke to her. I have to admit, Melissa did look happier and in better shape than I’d ever seen before. So, when Jude told me she wanted to start going to class with Melissa, I was all for it or anything that kept her happy. Well, within reason, of course.

I remember how excited she was after her first class. She came home invigorated and couldn’t stop telling me all about it. I listened patiently but didn’t understand half of what she talked about. She enjoyed the physical challenge but was even more intrigued by the spiritual aspects of yoga and yogic philosophy. It sounded like claptrap to me, but I’ve never been known for my free thinking. To top it off, so she told me, the instructor was this gorgeous hunk of a Frenchman, named Marcel.

Friday morning, over breakfast, she brought him up again. That was unusual, and I started getting a slight twinge in my gut. “Should I be worried?” I asked her across the kitchen table.

“About Yogi Marcel,” she asked, not realizing how silly she sounded. I couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Yogi? Is he smarter than the average bear?” I fired back, sure that my wit would win me some Brownie points.

“Huh? Bear?” she had an angry look on her face until she figured out my joke. “Oh. Yogi Bear. Cute. He’s a yoga master, so he is known as a Yogi. It’s a title, you know, a sign of respect.”

“Yes, I know what a title is,” I replied, then went on, giving her my very best attempt at a Yogi Bear accent, “Whatever you say Boo-Boo.”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. I couldn’t help myself. I figured I’d worn out the Yogi Bear jokes, so I shifted my humor to the only other Yogi I knew.

“You know,” I said with a smirk, “when you’re in your class, you can observe a lot just by watching.”

Jude didn’t seem to get the reference. She nodded, “Well, Yogi Marcel wants us all to participate to the best of our ability. So, nobody gets to stand around and watch. You should come sometime. You might like it.”

No chance that would happen, and I was pretty sure she knew it before she suggested it. Yoga was not something I anticipated ever needing, at least not in this lifetime. I got my physical challenges in the gym and enough pseudo-spiritual mumbo jumbo from my Aikido classes.

“Well, make sure you don’t give up during class because you know what they say,” I said, trying my best to keep a straight face, pausing for dramatic effect. Jude stared at me like she had no idea what “they” say, so I continued, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

Jude squinted at me. “Wait a minute,” she said suspiciously, “are you quoting Yogi Barret?”

“Yogi Berra,” I corrected her. “He was a great spiritualist, too.”

“Ha ha ha,” my wife fired back. “Do you ever take anything I do seriously? This is important to me.”

“I’m sorry, honey, you’re right,” I said, in all sincerity. “You never answered my question?”

“What question was that?” she asked getting up from the table to freshen our coffee. I seriously doubted she didn’t know which question I was referring.

“I have deja vu, all over again,” I quipped, then with a serious face, repeated my earlier question, “Should I be worried?”

“If you keep belittling the things that are important to me, yes, you should be,” Jude said with one hand on her hip, then added, “but about Yogi Marcel, no you don’t have anything to worry about. He’s not my type.”

I grinned. “What type is he?”

She replied, raising her eyebrows as she delineated each point of comparison. “Well, he is young. He is handsome. He is very athletic, lean and limber. From what I can tell, he seems to have amazing stamina. He is brilliant and doesn’t put my interests down. And his package looks fucking huge in tights.”

“Oh, so nothing like me at all,” I replied, laughing.

“He’s about as unlike you as one man could be,” she replied with a sigh and sat down to sip her coffee, putting my cup near me. She had a dreamy, far away look in her eyes.

“He must be gay,” I snorted.

“You think every good looking guy is gay,” Jude replied.

“That’s not true. How could you say something so incorrect and uncaring? I only say that about the good looking, well-dressed, perfect teeth ones, who you seem to be routinely impressed by. And anyway, I’m always right. Tell me one time I was wrong.”