My husband and I were meandering up scenic Route 1, soaking up the shoreline and coastal hills of California, when we saw a sign Dillon Beach and decided to drive there. It was quite a long way, out of cell phone contact.
The first thing we saw was a gaggle of rundown trailers with room for only a couple of a chairs and a small grill between them. Next to the trailer park was a similarly rundown general store, where Terry went in to get a map.
I was stiff and stood on the narrow cement walkway between our car and the ocean doing runner’s stretches. An automobile pulled up a couple of yards from me, lowslung with the weight of six men, two of whom went into the general store. I was concentrating on my stretches, but realized that someone was calling me from the car and turned around. “Are you talking to me?”
A man with a wide Alfred-E.-Newman smile said to me, “Excuse me, Ma’am, are you doing yoga?”
I thought I should be nice to him, so I smiled. “Nope. Just some stretches.”
“Oh. I thought it was yoga. I think yoga is very over-rated.”
“Really? Have you ever done it?”
“No.”
“Then how can you judge how good it is?”
“I prefer karate.”
“Okay.” I smiled and turned to continue my stretches.
“It sure looks like yoga.”
“If I did this –“ I pulled my leg up behind me and stretched one arm out in front of me, “—it would be yoga. But this –“ I cocked up my toes and pulled my hips back, to stretch my calf, ”– that’s plain stretching.”
I turned away. That car was a little creepy, but did it hold any danger? I pictured a headline, “Mature woman abducted from parking lot. May be body washed up on beach,” and chuckled to myself. Where was Terry anyway? What was he doing in there? As I started walking toward the general store, the two men from the car came out, the door slamming behind them.
“Oh, don’t go! Could you do some more yoga?” The young man called out.
I laughed. “No. I’m done with stretching.”
“Just one more time. Couldn’t you let me watch you just one more time? Please? Please?”
My stride lengthened and I was in the store in a second. A new fetish – watching older women do yoga, or what they might think was yoga.