The young woman behind the bar directed me to the men’s room, after I assured her I would purchase a water, and the young woman sitting at the bar gave me a smile. Returning, I took a seat and ordered a sparkling mineral water. It was a pleasantly warm morning in Lisbon.
Chatting with the bartender, I learned that she was Italian, from Abruzzo, and had been in Portugal only a few months – to work in this restaurant specializing in Abruzzo cuisine. Her boyfriend was the chef. She didn’t care for Portuguese food; “too heavy” she said. She poured me a generous glass of wine to taste.
She asked what I did. I said I was a travel writer and, to prove it, I pulled out of my bookbag a postcard of The Joys of Travel.
This piqued the interest of the woman sitting at the bar, who had been listening to our conversation. She too was from Abruzzo, and was the manager of the restaurant.
“You are a writer,” she said, looking me in the eyes. “You have wisdom. Can I ask you something?”
She told me about her boyfriend, who was back in Abruzzo. She had written him that morning to tell him it was over. The distance was too great, she said. But clearly she still had feelings for him. “What should I do?” she asked me searchingly.
I was at a loss. In all my years as a travel writer, no one had ever asked me for relationship advice. Then I pointed to the wedding ring on my finger. I said that my wife was Polish and that before we married we had been separated more than once, and for long periods, by an ocean and the Iron Curtain. I told her that we have been married for 39 years.
She seemed encouraged by the information.
Taking my aisle seat on the TAP return flight from Lisbon I noticed a large book sticking out of the seat pocket of my neighbor, a young man in a baseball cap. It was God’s Playground, Norman Davies’ monumental history of Poland.
“My wife is Polish,” the young man said in explanation.
“Mine too,” I told him.
As we taxied toward the runway I thought: How clever of TAP to put together the two solo travelers with Polish wives.
The TAP Portugal airline plane had a 2-4-2 seating arrangement, and as I took my aisle seat for the seven-and-a-half hour flight to Lisbon, the man in the window seat didn’t look happy. I understood – I too would have been dreaming of an aisle and a window all to myself – but I was surprised by the gruff, unfriendly response when I asked him a question.
It was not a full flight. In fact, there was an empty aisle-and-window combo two rows in front of us. I was contemplating moving up after takeoff when a boy of about 12 sprinted past me and scored them for himself. So I transferred my desires to a middle aisle seat two rows up that appeared to have an empty seat next to it.
My excuse – in the rare event that my neighbor took offense – would be the infant behind us whose frequent squeals neither parent seemed able to silence.
The plane took off and I moved up. As I settled into my new seat, my ex-neighbor passed on his way to the restroom. On his trip back, he gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up.
Hours later I got up to use the restroom in the back. Passing my old seat, I saw sitting in it the father of the squealing child. He was large, the sort of man who, when you see him coming down the aisle, triggers the thought: I hope he doesn’t stop here. I felt some high altitude schadenfreude.
Before landing I got up to use the restroom again. My former neighbor was asleep, or at least feigning it, while next to him the heavy-set father dandled his infant on his knees.
Two weeks ago I was at a travel blogging conference in a large Boston hotel with many guests and a number of conferences. Nevertheless, attendees of ours stood out, as I discovered one evening when a group of us piled into an elevator, joining a man who, on stepping out at his floor, looked at us and said: “I envy all you travel people.”
The woman seemed surprised to hear that, when on assignment, I never travel with my wife. “I don’t like to be distracted,” I explained.
“Is she so beautiful?” the woman asked.
A friend recently posted a photo on Facebook of his New York hotel: the stunning TWA Flight Center at JFK, designed in 1962 by Eero Saarinen and saved from demolition by preservationists with deep pockets. I walked through that terminal on Mother’s Day 1973 to catch the plane that would take me to London – where I hoped to find a summer job before my senior year of college – and, ultimately, a career as a travel writer. It was the first of many solo journeys, and my mother always said she never forgot the sight of me walking unaccompanied down that long, tubular corridor.