Valley Girl

One of the perks of being a student at EVMS is free membership in the local YMCA. EVMS really does put an emphasis on their student's well being- they try to make sure we have support structures and things to do for stress-relief. So, today, I took advantage of the program and went to yoga.

The Norfolk Y is huge. It's shiny and new, it has two gyms for basketball and three cardio rooms that I've already found, in addition to several weight rooms and a couple of studios. They have at least one yoga class every day except for thursday, alternating mornings and evenings. They've got a variety of levels, styles, and instructors who hold classes for members without any additional charge. It's quite a change from the humble little Silver Spring YMCA, which had two nights of yoga both taught by the same instructor.

Yoga was excellent. I'd been keeping up my own practice, but I had just been running through a few of my favorite postures from the one instructor and couple of videos I'd worked with. The Y instructor had a different style and I appreciated it. Friday evening yoga should definitely become a habit- it's not like I have anything to do tomorrow!

I've been thinking about something over the past couple of days. Something, or rather, someone. She was a friend of mine in New Orleans, and a member of the first circle I ever dedicated to, Gryphon's Pride. I'll call her V. She had grown up in Baltimore and lived in SoCal for most of her life. She had a valley girl accent, which is far superior to the Baltimore one. She practiced a sort of new, reformed Voodoo: ecstatic, pantheistic and sacrifice-based, though she didn't sacrifice animals. She was vegetarian, and we used to make jokes about the tofu sacrifices. She'd worked in the film industry in CA, mostly behind the camera, but in New Orleans she was working in the Marie Laveau Voodoo shop. She almost got fired once for talking a customer out of buying a voodoo doll to put a curse on an ex-boyfriend.

V didn't own a car; she biked everywhere. She had a beautiful, classic red bicycle that had only one speed. It looked like something from the 1950's. She usually wore an exercise shirt and bike shorts, with a sarong over it. I visited her a couple of times at the apartment she rented on the first floor of an old Victorian in the Garden District. It was a bohemian place; she had a black and white TV that didn't get cable, a few books, a shrine set up on her hearth and a single mattress on the floor. She kept it scrupulously neat. She had no computer and no email address. For most of the time I knew her, I don't think she even had a telephone. I never learned how she had found out about the CUUPs group where I met her.

She was the first person I ever met who practiced yoga. She had a personal spiritual discipline that was an idiosyncratic combination of voodoo and various sorts of Eastern meditation, and she'd had a reiki attunement. She had healing hands; once, when I had a crippling headache (this is when I got migraines), she put her hands on either side of my head and did something. I saw sparks and passed out cold and, when I came to, the headache was gone. When I caught the flu that had been making the rounds of our circle, it was V who brought me the chicken soup heavily seasoned with garlic and bay leaf, and some homeopathic medicine. Our friends were home for a week or so with a fever and muscle aches. I was better in a couple of days, and I credit it largely to V's soup.

V was a very private person. She was avowedly single. In the year and a half I knew her, she never dated, and she didn't often talk about her past relationships. I don't remember that I ever found out much about her story, why she'd left CA and come to NO, why she was working in retail for shit pay when she was a beautiful, confident woman with a college degree who spoke flawless upper-class English. She was thirty when I knew her; she'd be about thirty-six now. Of all the people involved with CUUPs and Gryphon's Pride, and the messy explosions of both, she was the only one who seemed to go untouched. She did no harm and, as far as I could tell, took no harm. She just drifted into our lives and made them all richer and then, when the scene turned ugly, she drifted back out again.

I have no idea where she is now. I have no way to reach her. I don't even remember her last name. I'm confident that she got out of NO in one piece; she had friends around the country. And a person like her- she would have swam and walked out, if she missed her opportunity to take the roads or a plane. But the crisis down there got me to thinking about her and thinking about how my life is starting to resemble hers, at least on the surface. I'm going to buy myself a bike just like her old one, sometime in the next few days. I'm doing yoga and becoming a more spiritual person. I doubt I'll ever have her balance or her center; I know I'll never manage to live as simply and as happily as she seemed to. But I always saw her as something of a role model, so I am pleased when I look in the mirror and think that I can find parts of her in me.

Wherever you are, V, blessings. I know we'll meet again, in this life or in another.