Just Bob
A local guru
Just Bob is what he calls himself
he is a yoga teacher
once lived in India and now
he drives a school bus
pretty overweight,
tie dye T-shirt collection
he's in his fifties
Deepak Chopraish voice
if Chopra were born
in upstate New York.
His classes are Bob Philosophy:
wisdom, jokes, breathing.
One day he told us this story:
a woman walked into his class.
He didn't know her
had never seen her before
he could tell even the way
she parked her car in the parking lot
she had the worst possible karma not just
dark and heavy but deeply
unpleasant. She walked into
his yoga studio and Just Bob
had the Oh No thought.
She lay down on her mat
he said it was her own
dark brown mat the rest of us everyone else
on yoga purple she lay down
right next to Just Bob and he
thought to himself How Can I
Change Her Karma? We were all
in a haphazard upstate circle.
He said he contemplated
he hummed and in the end he found no
sage advice from the ancients
about bad karma in his storeroom
of sage advice. So he
came up with his own solution.
In my head I changed her name
to Bubbles, he said.