Daily Gifts

Juggling more books books and DVD's than I can read or watch before
the due dates, someone calls out, "Are you interested in yoga?"

I turn, not sure if he is addressing me, to an old man, slightly
stooped, standing by his open car door in the handicap spot. "Uh,
yes," I respond. I am wearing my yoga pants, so perhaps the
question is not so far fectched.

"Then maybe you would like these," he takes from the top of a large
pile of books an aniquated plastic box housing a cassette set of yoga
lessons and a brown boxed Yoga Deck II. "These were my wife's. She
died a few years ago."

"I'm so sorry."

"I'm just trying to clean stuff out. She liked yoga. Here take both."

I explain I don't have a cassette player anymore to use the tapes,
but am glad to take the yoga deck. "I teach high school and so this
could be fun to have for us to pick a pose of the day." I wanted him
to feel his wife's things are going to touch the lives of many, to be
well used.

As I once again balance the library books with the yoga deck on top,
fiddling to open my mailbox, I think how I should have asked her
name. I pull out an enevelope from England. Mysterious since I
know no one in England.

I open it first. Out spills a handfull of postcards with the
beautifully sad, funny poems of Rachel Fox, whose offer to send me
some of her postcards I had forgotten.

These were tangible gifts, but really, I think, each day we are given
beauty and inspiration in ways that we cannot touch or name, but
because they come from people we already know, somehow, we take that
for granted: a phone call, a cup of coffee, a ride to/from the
airport, a shared hike. . .