A Tale of Two Yoga Mats

           

            I woke up at 5:00 on Saturday, May 21st, despite having gone to bed more than an hour earlier than usual the night before. As I got up I was looking forward to taking an afternoon nap.

            A few days ago I started using the new yoga mat that I’d gotten a few months before at the Salvation Army thrift store. I had been using the old mat for over ten years. I don’t think that they are both of the same material, unless the material goes through major changes over time. The new one is sticky and foamy while the old one allows more sliding, which was good when I did the splits four times every morning. Now I have to get off the new mat and do that exercise on the wooden floor. The old one was getting holes in it though and the edges around those holes were frayed, so I had to make the change.

            That evening I took my bike ride, but it was chilly compared to the day before, so I didn’t wear shorts. I rode to Danforth and Eaton, up to Aldwych and then down Woodcrest. The alley behind Woodcrest had more of that graffiti on garage doors that looks like it was part of a high school art project. Over the entrance to a back yard, a Jolly Roger was hanging. Inside there was the sound of raucous play. One kid was calling out, “I come in peace! I surrender! I surrender!”

On the way west on Danforth I passed a man riding his electric wheelchair on the street. I’d seen people do that before, so it didn’t strike me as that odd. At a traffic light, a guy on an electric bike turned to me and said, “That’s crazy!” I asked, “What’s crazy?” “That guy riding a wheelchair on the road!” he told me. I suggested that sometimes they find it hard to get up onto the curb. “He’s gonna get himself killed!” he argued.

Further along, I followed a motorcycle club before they turned north. The crest on their leather jackets read “Pan Hellenic”. I guess they would have gotten their asses kicked if they’d called themselves the “Hellenic Angels”. I looked them up and found that Pan Hellenic was started in 2014 in Toronto and they have expanded into southern Quebec and northern Indiana. They are not a gang.

I saw one of the best names ever for a restaurant: “Bite Me!”

            On the way down Yonge Street, I came upon a stopped taxi with a cyclist standing in front, taking down his license number. The taxi driver was very polite and he was also the first white taxi driver I’ve seen in years. He told the guy, “I’m sorry! I didn’t see you in my mirror!”

            There was a big crowd at Yonge and Dundas and the air was full of barbecue smoke.

            Going west on Queen, I had to deal with another one of those inconsiderate cyclists who jumps ahead at the red light and then drives really slow, holding me back. He did this for several lights in a row, even though I kept passing him.

            I was waiting for the light to change at Augusta when a loud woman in her seventies with a New York accent said to me as she was walking by,  “You’re taking your life in your hands riding without a helmet! The way they drive in this city?” She must have been very attracted to me to feel compelled to groom me like that.