I heard the commotion before I could pinpoint the source. My daughter Kendall and I had stowed our luggage, pulled out our phones, and were sitting side-by-side, snug in our seats as we waited for the 11:30am train to depart Gare do Oriente for Porto, Portugal.
We heard the sound of the carriage door squeak open. Then, a yammering of voices talking all at once, some high, some low, pierced the peaceful silence.
The tip of the spear finally came into view: a tiny snowy-haired woman walking backwards while jabbering to the rest of her unseen but very much heard posse.
Her eyes landed on us.
“Do you speak English?” she leaned down and asked.
We nodded, stupefied.
”What is your seat number?” she said with exasperation.
Kendall stood up, now towering over her, and pointed at the numbers printed in red tucked under the overhead luggage racks.
“Here, you can see we’re in 24 and 26,” she said, drawing the woman’s gaze upward.
“Oh, everyone, this young lady just showed me where the seat numbers are!” She called out to her invisible compatriots. “Thank you, dear. We are just in front of you!” She patted Kendall’s shoulder as she sat back down.
Then luggage, coats, hats, and grey hairs piled into the row in front of us, chattering away like birds in a nest jockeying for their mother’s attention.
As the husbands groused about heavy handbags and the lateness of the train, the wives peeled off jackets and pulled out sandwiches. They settled in.
I took in the commotion, my mind whirring through its English-accent Rolodex. Definitely not American. So where were these dropped r’s and slightly flat tones coming from? Are they Australian like my nephew Matt? A Kiwi like Connor’s New Zealand pals? From the north of England like the characters I saw in that Jez Butterworth play in London a few years back?
Then one of the blokes ended his sentence with a sliding-up-the-scale ‘ey?’ and my Rolodex halted.
This scrum of oldsters was South African.
And now in this tiny train terminal in Lisbon, on a travel adventure with my daughter in 2025, I was suddenly submerged in memories of trips and friends very far south. I could see Wayne taking the kids on a hike up Cape Town’s Lion’s Head. I heard Gillian’s constant encouragement of my writing and my kid raising. It’s like I was sitting a row over from Lesley-Anne, Mike’s old coworker turned friend for life.
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I took my first flight when I was eight.
A trip with Grandma Tillie and my sister Amy to visit family in Denver. I can’t remember a single thing about the trip itself, except a feeling. A combo of awe, surprise, adventure… a ‘wow, I get to fly on an airplane!’ sort of thing. It was a big deal for a kid from Beaver Falls in 1976.
I didn’t get on a plane again for twelve years. Next destination? London.
During that trip I was infected with the travel bug (the good kind) and never looked back. In the decades since, I’ve done a bonkers criss-crossing of the globe. I’ve gone to new locales (love you, Patagonia!) and had some plays on repeat (looking at you, London). I’ve sweated through my shirt in the deserts of Middle Eastern Emirates and watched glaciers floating by in Greenland. I’ve swam in the seas of Mexico and hiked the hills of Norway.
I came. I saw. I took pictures and bought postcards.
Sometimes, I had genuinely moving experiences. Sometimes I checked “Must See While In [insert city]” boxes.
But this latest trip to Portugal feels different.
I’ve been to Portugal before, so I can’t blame the place. 25 years ago, my late husband Mike and I spent a sun-baked week in a stick shift with no A/C tooling around the country. We were fascinated by the cappuccinos at the highway rest areas (pre-Starbucks!), dazzled by the castles with their bright colors, appalled by the sunburned British tourists. We swam in a saltwater pool in Sagres with a group of Italians. We ate ourselves silly. We even enshrined the word Obidos (a lovely Portuguese city) into our Deagle lexicon as a substitute for ‘I dunno’.
In other words, it was an all-around delightful adventure. But it was more in that old vein: we came, we saw, we checked the tourist boxes. Versus these days, when I’m not as jazzed by touring another gorgeous cathedral (God bless them).
Because who cares how much of the world you’ve seen, if you can’t appreciate those memories? Who cares how much life you’ve lived, if you never slow down, look back, and bask in it all?
I saw Lisbon the way I always love to see cities: by walking.
Up and down the steep hills, I saw washing hanging out to dry against a shimmering green-tiled facade. I strolled behind tiny oldsters using canes to navigate the cobblestoned inclines. I paused a minute to listen to saxophone scales wafting from a second story window.
As my legs worked, my mind slid into an old, familiar state: noticing.
The white wires hanging from everyone’s ears: in this city the cool kids don’t wear AirPods, corded headphones are the thing. The tourist transit of choice: tuktuks and golf carts, not giant buses. The cab drivers: dapperly dressed, middle-aged men in button down shirts and Loro-Piano-style sweaters. I’d step under an awning or into a vestibule every time an ‘oh that’s cool!’ thought popped into my head, and fat finger what I saw into my notes app under the header PORTUGAL NOTICING.
I’ve written before about noticing. It’s one of my favorite ways to get out of my head — when I’m unproductively stuck planning, strategizing, catastrophizing — and back into life. But this time noticing was just step 1…
Step 2 was a little psychedelic, but I think you’ll get it.
You know in scifi movies like Interstellar when a 2D image turns on its side and suddenly stretches, revealing a third dimension? It was a little bit like that… if you took it down to 2% of it’s wormhole intensity.
It was so subtle, I might not have realized, but I was already in Noticing Mode so the pump was primed. My perception began to deepen, my synapses registering not just what I was seeing in front of me in Lisbon, but what Lisbon reminded me of. The connections Lisbon was firing in my brain. I wasn’t just here, I was also in every place that reminded me of here.
Here’s a few examples:
Lisbon makes my body feel like it’s in a distilled version of New Orleans. Buildings festooned with wrought iron balconies and bejeweled tiles. Street numbers tiled into the pavement. Trees with trunks the diameter of a two door Fiat. The sound of trolleys vibrating through me before I see their bright yellow faces coming around the bend.
On the first morning I stood at my fourth floor hotel window on the edge of Bario Alto, watching moms and dads drop off their little ones at a daycare up the block, a mysterious door opening to let them in. Babies in front-loaded papooses, toddlers in tiny strollers, the occasional mop-topped boy riding on a dad’s shoulders. All that took me back to Mike and I, and the thousands of daycare drop offs, neighborhood walks, Great Falls strolls we did we did when the kids were young. Holding tiny hands. Wiping tiny noses. Engulfing our tiny people in a big hug before rushing to work.
The iconic painting of a gorgeous Portuguese badass in my hotel lobby, oozing power, energy, and a sly cool that I used to think was beyond me. But wait, I’d just been with my badass new lady friends in London — women who are running successful business, traversing distances in fell running races, reinventing themselves. While I stared up at Ms. Baddie on the wall, I whipped out WhatsApp and pounded out ‘we are as cool as she is, no cigarette required!’
Kendall had the last of five interviews for a summer internship while I visited. She’d come to my hotel for peace and quiet. I’d go take a walk around the neighborhood, doing my regulation mom fretting. She’d eventually text ‘come back! It went great!’ and I’d race back for the debrief. It was like all those times Mike had a work call from a vacation spot — Hawaii, Vail, etc. So Business Kendall was doing her Business Mike impression. Wait, not an impression. The REAL DEAL. She snagged that internship.
It actually is more like Interstellar than I realized. Walking the streets of Lisbon, it feels almost like I just have to find the right stick-shift car or cathedral or roadside cappuccino, and I’ll be back on vacation with Mike…
It’s interesting how home doesn’t have this same effect. The rooms you’ve lived in for years, the cafes you prefer for coffee dates or slow mornings, the paths you’ve walked so many times that you know every tricky root. These places carry SO many memories. But you’ve also seen them so many times they no longer catch your attention. It’s much easier to just be in your own head, on autopilot, running through your to-do list.
While traveling, your senses are charmed, startled, intrigued into presence… but apparently not exclusively presence of the present moment.
I’ve never been so delighted to not be youthful. To have a thick case of memories (which I’m picturing kind of like retro photo slides) that I can flip through whenever an aroma, an architectural detail, an angle of light, or a gaggle of grey hairs reminds me of something… Ah, here’s the one! I pull out the slide and hold it up to light; its blurry, sepia image projects across whatever is in front of me, and for a moment I get to live in both realities.
I get to live in magical kind of 3D.
To the places that remind us where we’ve already been,
Sue
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