Creating Characters

I go to yoga classes in the city near my apartment on the upper Westside.  Although I’ve been taking classes there for about 5 years and recognize a lot of the people, I don’t really know any of them, but I still find them fascinating.

The class I go to most regularly is on Wednesdays at 10:30, Level One yoga. About half of the class is women like me, between 55 and 70, along with two or three guys also that age. The rest of the class is mostly women somewhere between 30 and 40 years old.  I observe them all.

It would be easy if I recognized them.  I used to see David Duchovny at my gym.  Actors are obvious.  They’re better looking than the rest of us and work out like their job depended on it—which of course it does.  But that’s not usually the case with my fellow yogis.  They’re not as handsome or as fit and not easily recognizable.  My speculation has been that they’re journalists, lesser known actors or artists, or teachers if it’s the summer or spring or winter breaks.

For several years there was a guy who came to yoga every Wednesday.  I think he was about 45 or so and lean and fit, but not super handsome so he probably wasn’t an actor.  He’d put his mat down in the first row and take off his shirt.  He’d also practice some of the harder poses until class started.  All of this annoyed me—he was, in my opinion, being a show off.  But besides being annoyed, I’d wondered who he was. Then he disappeared, leaving at the same time as our yoga teacher who went on maternity leave. I briefly wondered if he’d been her husband.  But that didn’t really work since he was, again in my opinion, too old for her.  But I decided he’d been coming to class because he had a crush on the instructor, explaining why he left when she did.  What he did for a living puzzled me.  Fast forward last week.  He shows up again. The woman I’ve designated our “class leader,” because she talks to everyone, asked him where he’d been.  “Travelling,” he said.  Hmm… Now I really don’t know what this guy does or who he is. Who travels for 18 months?

There are other interesting characters in the class.  The distinguished 60 plus man who’s all arms and legs,  shows up late every week, is totally inflexible, but keeps on coming. Then there’s the man with the therapy dog, sitting quietly in the back corner. I usually don’t notice them until the end of class when I’m leaving when I marvel at how well behaved his dog is.  There has to be a story there.  Finally there are the joggers, a band of 40-somethings, naturally fit and flexible, who head out to the park to run after our 90 minute class.  They just make me tired.

As fiction writers we create characters seemingly out of air, but maybe not so much.  Is it possible that my musings about my fellow yogis provide the blocks for building characters?  What they look like, what they wear, how they talk, and their regular attendance at yoga every Wednesday could all go to creating a believable character who will some day appear in a book. So much of what we do isn’t even conscious, but comes with being an artist.

Labor Day and the End of the Summer

                                                Labor Day/September

            Kayaking yesterday on a near by lake, I saw a man loosening the bolts on his dock to take it in for the season.  My son, visiting for the weekend, stayed up late Saturday night to watch Notre Dame football.  The leaves on the sugar maple are starting to turn.  This morning when I went outside, there was a chill in the air:  all signs that summer is over—at least in the northeast.

A lot of people make New Years’ resolutions, but how many of us still think of September as the real beginning of the year and a time for fresh starts? It also means the end of the summer.  Although summer isn’t officially over until the 21^st, for all practical purposes Labor Day is when summer ends.  That could be the reason I greet September and the Fall with a certain amount of melancholy. I even start counting down the days in early August, anticipating summer’s end. 

I’m not sure of the reason although I’m sure it has to do with the fact that September for me still means the beginning of the school year in spite of having graduated from college over 40 years ago. Although I’m a lawyer and was in school for a number of years, I never liked the rigidness.  I’m not very good at following rules—at least when it comes to the ones made by other people.  Maybe that’s why I’m a writer.

But besides school starting, September also means that official “fun” is done with until next summer.  This is not to say that there is no fun to be had during the rest of the year, but it has always seemed, except for maybe Christmas, summer is the time when the fun is scheduled in, be it trips to the beach, picnics, outdoor concerts, hikes and best of all, anything involving water. 

Living all my life in the northeast, summer is the only time we can go boating, water skiing and swimming.  Once September comes, you’re pushing it.  This past weekend I wasn’t the only one who sniffed the air and said, “Dammit, it’s starting to feel like fall.”  This sentence, mind you, is always accompanied by a sorrowful shake of the head.

There is, of course, the positive side to the arrival of Fall.  It’s a time of the fresh starts I mentioned earlier and the do-overs.  Just as in high school when I would harbor hope that the new school year would be different than the old with new teachers and new opportunities to succeed, there is still that optimism in the air every September.  Whether it’s something simple, like a resolution to go to yoga class more often—and I’m not the only one, September classes are almost as crowded as January’s—or to finally take a painting class, most of us view September as a kind of reboot or renew.  We are starting with a clean slate, with a chance to do what we’ve put off for months or even years.