It’s weird to consider I’m 65 years old. Because by my counting, I’m at least 100. I feel I have not lived one life time, but three or four.

On this Father’s Day, four years, seven month, and three days later, I miss my dad.

T-shirts are fun, right? As spring arrives in Lucca more of these lightweight, happy clothes, used for relaxation and play are making their way out of the drawer. Someone wearing one cannot be taken too seriously and you’d never go to a job interview in one. However as a yoga teacher in my past life, they were part of professional attire. So how come I keep getting into trouble in them? 

When I close my eyes, now that the ruckus has subsided from splitting my life onto two continents, I see my garden. The beautiful trees I called Diva’s, the three curving terraces that gave the garden it’s lyricism, the carefully manicured Leland hedge I dubbed the Werwolf of London, a reference to the Warren Zevon tune because like the hairy beast in that song, it’s ‘hair’ was perfectly combed. My mind’s eye is everywhere, checking-in, loving, planning. I miss it. 

It’s been five rollicking months of the unfamiliar, and I’m downright wonky. Whether it’s on Italian or American soil, everything has become a learning opportunity, a chance to create new neural pathways as I let go of the old and embraced the new, yada, yada yada. It’s Velveeta Cheese after it’s gone though a cheese grater in this head of mine.

There’s nothing quite like the shock of a subconjunctival hemorrhage, aka, broken blood vessel in the eye. To ‘discover’ it at 5:00am on a Sunday morning made it just that much more exciting.

The Via Fillungo is Lucca’s equivalent to Seattle’s Highway 5, only it’s a pedestrian street. The Fillungo runs through the heart of the historic walled city, means long thread, and is a major thoroughfare connecting the north end to the south end. I walk this route daily, thinking thoughty thoughts as I go from one haunt to the next. Coffee, Sephora, grocery store, home. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I’m absolutely giddy looking out the kitchen window to my garden. I’m home in Edmonds, WA. But something’s odd. ‘What? How did I get here?’ I thought. ‘Why are there rose-colored calla lilies popping up, now? I don’t recall planting them in that spot . . . there are so many of them.  And then I woke up. 

I look at the clock. It’s still Hot o’ Thirty. The heat has been stifling and I’m losing weight. I’m in Eat City, Lucca, Italy, and I look on the wrong side of slender. I miss Taco Time and the Baja Fish tacos. The knot in my stomach isn’t helping.

I sleep like a rock, but not now. For the last three nights I have woken up at 2 am, a stabbing pain in my guts as the wheels in my brain behave like the children’s art game Spiral Graph, the pen of my mind tracing over and over nearly identical pathways, each an iteration of work left to do before leaving for Italy.

This is my second sighting of the preening female archetype in a few short days. The previous one was a bleached bottle blonde with long artificial nails that she used to incessantly comb through her tousled mane.

Despite our love of the continuous show of humanity while looking down into the Anfiteatro, a well-known piazza here in Lucca, Sandy and I have moved into a new apartment. More and more I regarded the pied-à-terre as a Charming Boyfriend who was actually kind of a dick.

‘I’m a tuna!’ I shouted.

And on the 9th day she rested for her bag was delivered unto her, and she saw that it was good.

I haven’t washed my face in five days. I look fine, but I’m wondering if I should be wondering.

‘You have no clothing.’

What?

‘You have no clothing,’ the voice in my head says again.

My retirement from teaching yoga was compounded by COVID, which pounced two months after I made the announcement. Two years later, through the chaos of the pandemic and moving to Italy while still living in the US, I finally figured a way to settle-up with my students.

I know I’ve seen this feeling before. It’s personified by the face of Jean Luc Picard in “The Inner Light” from Star Trek, and I’m living that face right now.

I have my cheaters on. I’d forgotten how useful sunglasses are when pretending you are not staring.

It’s fun to see what goes on in our new backyard.