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Heidi's Day in a Leo Tie
I don't like being late. I like it even less when I know I have to enter a room of people who are probably annoyed with me for interrupting their closed-eye bliss with squidgy barefoot steps and clacky door sounds. Maybe the tie knows about my people-pleasing nature and is trying to tweak that part of me. If it knows that, does it also know how the heat is not my friend? If it does, it would surely realize that running into my house on a late June morning, followed by five minutes in a car with iffy air conditioning, would make me sweaty and cranky. So maybe the forgetting followed by the remembering means Leo's tie wanted to make me sweat so I would smell more like it does. Though it must be said that it smells more like horse sweat than human sweat. Sorry, but it's true. When it arrived, I inspected it, briefly mourning the tiny nick I put into it when I cut the envelope open, and took a sniff. The scent was familiar, but buried. I stood in my kitchen, ignoring my happy dogs, inhaling my freshly freed artifact and hoping my housemate wouldn't catch me at it. It took three or four really good nosefuls before I got it: horse barn. Sweet like hay is sweet, musky like horses are, a little sweaty. In class, still sweaty and trying too hard to relax, I hoped for an opportunity to use the tie - the instructor doesn't always choose poses that require it, and I'm pretty flexible, so even when she does, I don't always need it. I fretted, distracted from trying to remember to breathe during a seated twist. (If you've never done yoga, it's sort of like a very slow and improbable game of Twister during which you must remember to breathe in a constant stream of deep, even, seamless inhalations and exhalations.) At least half of the point and mechanism of yoga is breathing, which can be tough to do properly, never mind with the influence of a dead poet's tie. I wondered if the tie had my yoga teacher was under its thrall. No - she moved us into a series of poses involving a single leg held straight up in the air with the aid of a strap, then moved to one side, then the other - perfect. Looped under the arch of my foot, the tie helped me ever so gently crank each leg closer to my face. It was slick and a little reluctant - I had to loop it once around each palm to get a good enough grip. Back at home, there's a karate belt left over from my brief fling with martial arts, which took place in the same studio where I practice yoga. It's been sitting patiently in a bag in my attic, waiting for a chance to be useful again. For all I know, it's in cahoots with Leo's tie. Heidi Dean is a songwriter and musician from St. Louis who contributed several vocal pieces to Crossing America.
 Last Modified: Mar 11, 2003 at 8:19PM (EST) |
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Leo's tie made me late for yoga. I suppose it's more factual to say that I was late because I forgot the tie the first week I had it, forgot it again this week, and decided to rush back inside to get it. But I prefer to think of it as exerting a benign yet willful influence over my daily life. And if we go with that theory, then perhaps the tie is opposed to yoga and used its fetching paisley blobs to hypnotize me into forgetting it. This was, after all, the second time I'd forgotten it, but I somehow tore my mind from its hypnoweb and ended up tiptoeing into the small karate studio where my favorite weekly event was already in progress.