06/20/2024

I am in a bizarre wormhole through the time and space continuum. All of the chapters of my life are present in this moment, and I’m seeing the patchwork all at once.  I don’t know what to make of it, but when I quiet the noise of daily life, there is a lot to hear.

My morning starts with waking up in Puerto Rico by myself, as I arrived 2 nights before the 7 of us high school friends gather in the tropical sun to celebrate our 50^th birthday’s year. I wonder why I haven’t kept in touch with them better over the years. I take advantage of the coffee and toast offered at the cozy hotel, and find an oversized tub of powdered Coffee mate. Amy, who will be arriving in 30 hours from Pennsylvania, and I used to sit on my kitchen floor heaping scoops of that stuff into our mugs until it had more of the consistency of a milkshake than coffee.

I talk with a couple of strangers from Miami in the breakfast courtyard, who clearly are exquisitely bilingual, and they even insert a few Spanish words here and there into our English conversation. I have been getting Spanish tutoring recently but am too shy to try my broken Spanish where I will only understand 60% of the conversation. It brings me back to all the Spanish and also Swahili classes I took in college in Ohio. I really love learning languages & feel more confident to try and stumble if there is a language need.

Ohio is where I met Ariana. I’ve landed in San Juan after spending 5 days with her on the east coast.

I started getting Spanish tutoring to use up some of the leftover credits my family had with Varsity Tutor, and online tutoring service that teaches all subjects and helped Miles to finish out high school 2 years ago.

I stroll the beach, just blocks from my hotel, which is a favorite thing I like to do when we visit Mexico, which we’ve done something like 15 times from living in Arizona for 20 years. I practice paragraphs in my head in Spanish, and every once in a while, a Sesotho word, the language of Lesotho, sneaks in.

While walking, I get a few work messages. Judy is flying out today to train in Olympia. Courtney is ready to contract a 360 assessment. It reminds me about my adult-y responsibilities in this life I have created.

A vacation-y thing that I love to do is read a paper book, which I do seldomly in my regular life (Audible is typically how I consume). I lay in the humid sun and read Everything Lost is Found Again: Four Seasons in Lesotho. Lesotho is the place I was a Peace Corps volunteer 27 years ago, and the stories are hilarious and heart wrenching and the most amazing thing is that each vignette is relatable.  It’s like a seasoned author was secretly with me through my 20 months there and wrote, with great skill & wit, what we experienced.

While I soak in the rays, I am reminded of the one time I used a tanning bed before prom in high school. Wearing those weird little spoon-like eye coverings & laying in what felt like an electrified coffin. It had a weird smell.

I get neck deep in the warm North Atlantic Ocean and it reminds me of summer vacations in Hilton Head, South Carolina where I would try to befriend other kids on the beach while digging up sand crabs in the wet sand. I think I was kind of shy about it, but I think my mom helped facilitate.

Returning to the hotel, I jump into the pool. I’m not really sure what to do, so I do a few handstands. A quick flashback arrives about the time I split head open in the neighborhood pool in eighth grade. Callie and I were seeing how many backspins we could do in the water without coming up for air. Dizzily, I had made my way to the ladder unawares. On my fourth underwater thrust backward, I clipped the ladder with my skull. Heads dripping with water seem to bleed a lot and need stitches.

I take a few selfies throughout the day with a little bit of self-consciousness. I am grateful that I have come a long way on this journey in my business, as 12 years when I first started to record videos for my business, I felt like an awkward teen.

Which then brings me to present-day, where I am waiting for final edits on a book chapter that should be released in August. I get a shiver of excitement, as this will be my first time being a part of something as big as this. I send an email check-in about it.

I learn that the public bus can take me to Old San Juan, and I want to check it out. The public bus is free and busses never fall short with providing a local cultural experience. The worst thing that can happen is that I end up in some random unknown place, and if that’s the case, I can call an Uber. This reminds me of the month our young family of four spent in Costa Rica just before Ruby turned two years old. Money was tight but our adventure-drive was strong, so we made the trip happen while she was still young enough for her flight to be free, and we spent the majority of the time volunteering on a farm. Getting around the country, we rode 21 busses. She is now 16. I remember many strangers on the busses loving her, and a common gift they wanted to give her was a throat lozenge. Eaten like candy.

I walk around, exploring. The best music I have found so far is playing on the radio in the air-conditioned pharmacy. I stopped in for a cold drink & a snack. This reminds me of my Arizona life, and how my daughter and I have now had 20 Latin dance lessons in Flagstaff over the last six months. I’d love to go dancing here, but I am not sure if my friends will be up for that. As I pass other shops, I find more good music streaming out of the open doors. I am excited that I can now identify which songs are salsa, bachata, cha-cha, and merengue.

While exploring, the sky opened up with a powerful downpour. I ducked into El Meson Sandwiches for an omelet sandwich and shelter. This reminds me of when Mark and I were traveling in our twenties in Mozambique and we got drenched. Only one mile between the boat ferry and the town, but the dirt trail-ish road turned into a knee-high river, and our heavy packs didn’t help our speed. We were in love and didn’t care. We finally made it to town and found the nearest bar for 2M beers (pronounced dosh-emm) while our water-logged packs sweated in the corner.

After a few hours, I wait for the bus back to take me the 3 miles back to Condado. I enter my room with the August app; it does keyless entry when I put my phone close. This reminds of the time before cell phones, back in the day, when Miles was 2 years old. He’s now 19. It also reminds me of how I had no electricity in Lesotho, and listened to things like the Monica Lewinsky scandal on a hand crank radio.

It is, I am, we are all so, so connected all at the same time.