It's Wednesday morning, my sixth day of vacation. I didn’t go to the yoga class on Monday morning. I'm at the 8:00 yoga class on the grass now. It's very cloudy and looks as if it will rain any second. Alia, the yoga teacher, is happy to see me. I am her only student. She asks me if there was anything I want to focus on. I say that I like arm balances. Here we are doing them. I think we are going to go through them all. I only know of fifteen or twenty. I bet she knows arm balances that I’ve never heard of. She seems excited that I can do them. I'm just happy to be pushed a little to do things I haven't done in a while.

Since it's just the two of us, I talk to Alia during the class. I tell her how I'm doing. She offers me encouragement. There are several poses I only approach doing. Nothing as deep as she does. Then again, I'm 55 and when I was her age that I'm guessing is not much more than twenty, it would be almost ten years before I would even start a yoga practice. I'm comforted by that. I'm also a little proud as I notice people walking by the grass spot where we sweat. I notice it is the men who are looking. I entertain the idea that they are looking at me with envy because of my practice, not because of the young woman I'm sweating with.

It’s good to do things differently while you’re on vacation. I could get used to having someone tell me what to do.