Dispatches from Lagos: September - October Visitors

We get to see our home through the eyes of several visitors!

Walking home from the car rental office, there was a hitch in my step.  Something felt…incomplete–sort of nagging at the edge of awareness.  The price and details had flown by in a jumble of sound.  I thought it had gone fine there.  The man behind the counter seemed a little shy–almost embarrassed.  Flashed my credit card.  Almost joked that I’d send my driver to pick it up.  Nothing’s too good for our friends.  Big smiles and handshakes all around. And like that.  I put it to one side.

I felt the sunshine warming my back through my thin t-shirt.  I stopped under a tree to watch a stork. Tracing the line up his beak to a narrow head and settling into his ancient, reptilian stare, I felt a look of cold blooded ruthless survival.  He looked down at me, instinctively assessing.  A threat?  Too far away.  Food? Too big. 

His ancestors have nesteed here since long before humans came down from the trees. They’re back after months away.  I spoke to one recently, and I sensed an incredible patience.  An effortless, alert sense of calm.

–Welcome back

–Yeah, hey.

–Where’ve you been?

–Central Africa

–Whoa, that’s a long migration.  How do you do it?

–Dude, see these babies?  (spreading his wings, showing how they span wider than I am tall)  Muscle up to catch the prevailing and just soar, and then you soar some more.

–What’s it like?  

–Nothing like it.  Pure joy.  Me and the fam feel a little sorry for you stuck on the ground right here the whole time.

–Yeah, well, I can fly in a plane.

–How joyous is that for you?

–Point taken.

I watched him slowly reach down to his chest with the tip of his beak to preen one particular feather, all the while looking at me with those cold ancient eyes. 

A long silence passed between us. 

–Doing a little fixing up around the nest for now, he offered. 

I noticed that the nest was bigger than last season, a tight weave of sticks shaped into a broad bowl, 6 feet across.  

And another long, silent stare.  Nature’s awareness silently observing itself, no elaboration needed. For a moment, the world was perfect and calm. An effortless peace between two males.

Then a flash of movement hundreds of feet up.  Mrs. Stork with her wings open and her flight feathers separated.

He turned his attention to his mate, both of us watching her gracefully shedding altitude through her feathers to land weightlessly next to him.  They threw their heads way back so their beaks were pointing away from each other, and made a rapid-fire machine gun greeting.  I could hear it echoing off the concrete buildings of our neighborhood.

I turned and walked the rest of the way home.  To my own nest, my own mate. A few moments later I was dodging flying objects.  

–You did WHAT?

–Yeah, I rented a nice Mercedes 7 passenger van for us and our friends for their September visit.  

She shook her head as if to clear the remnants of a dream.

–And you paid how much?

–6300 Euros.

That’s when the first can flew by.  A quick blur of spinning metal.  I think it was coconut milk.   It bounced off the wall behind my head with a thud, rolling across the floor.  The next nearest thing was a banana.  The stem caught me on the forehead.  It had been resting on the counter, minding its own business.  Noticing that sharp objects were within reach, and with my survival instincts ignited by my encounter with the stork, I made a speedy tactical retreat from the apartment.  

Safely behind the door, I took a moment to reconsider my decision.  Shrugging off  the need for status and luxury, I found myself walking back to cancel the transaction.  Ultimately, we were able to rent for far less.  And sensibly, we added insurance.

Cornelia has helped me learn to make better purchasing decisions.  And she has, above all else, helped me learn to exercise that part of my brain that thinks concretely and sequentially.  I’ve come to admit that I’m better off for it.  In fact most of my rough edges have been polished off so that I’m smooth, round and shiny at 61 years old.  After all this time, it’s like my knuckles don’t quite drag along the ground like they used to.

October 2nd was 40 years for us.  On the day in question, We found ourselves traveling to her childhood home in Germany.  Like our lives together, this trip required that we find some patience and grace.  You lose it, you find it again.  The joy is in the journey.  

Bus to the airport at zero dark thirty; flight to Dusseldorf, bus to the train station from the outskirts, and the train into the city.  Then the next train to Hannover, and then a commuter connection that didn’t show, so we caught the next one an hour later.  It was oh so really long–about 16 hours door to door.  Much longer than it takes to fly from Seattle to Frankfurt.

Like any long migration, conditions can conspire to shake one’s grip on that sense of calm and ease; so faithfully cultivated, so easily lost. The delay in getting on the plane, the extra hot train car provided by Flix, and the comforting snacks we brought with us.  Seeing her befriend people on the crowded bus, her natural sweetness fully on display–something that used to make the kids want to hide.  Sitting across from each other in a snack shop at multiple train stations.  Sharing food. The cranky, tired helpless feeling, and a reviving cup of coffee; the relief that we’ve made the next train connection; the pain of the trip stretching far longer than we thought.  The discomfort of wearing a mask the whole way, the sight of the obviously sick teenage girl sitting too close to us; the ridiculously cute pet dog next to me in a carrier–he let out a single startled bark when the man across from him answered his phone.  And the entire claustrophobic transit, a sense of trying to make it just a tiny bit easier for each other.  Settling back into the calm and ease we thought was here for good, only to have it flit away again.

A month previous, we were visited by the man who married us.  He and his wife are a powerful force for good wherever they go, and it was good to have them close again for a few days.  

We have a long history with these two. They were there with us to watch the kids grow up.  And although he has mobility issues, and a 75 year-old woman shouldn’t be lifting the heavy scooter into the back of the rental, even with my help, they wanted to see how we lived.  And so they came.  And they were able to see this part of the world where they have never been.  We caught a glimpse of our lives through their eyes.  The view of the ocean from the cliffs.  The cheap, spartan restaurants.  The exceptionally friendly people.  The expat community.  The gelato shop.  The strange music of a foreign language.

We show up for each other in the space we manufacture with what we say, and both of them are…wonderful.  It's who they are–calling out the good in people and making them naturally want to live into their better selves–that’s so impressive.  Their kindness and inherent moral decency has always made me want to act like less of, well, a jerk.  And they’re allways praising our parenting and how the girls turned out.   

Now that we’re both reformado (retired), our molted ‘work feathers’ having been scattered to the wind’ they helped me remember how important it is to filter for kindness and compassion in people.  To reflect, with relief, that the right people are appearing at just the right time and just the right way–to feel  grateful for every single new person we’ve met.  And we are.

As we struggled with a couple of travel-related situations along with them they said that their visit was a dry run for having mom come. 

Soon after, mom did visit.  We drove the A2 to Lisbon to collect her in late September.  The road is nicely finished and it seems hardly used.  Very little traffic until we got within 20 miles of Lisbon, crossing a very long bridge over the Tejo river which is strongly linked to Portugal’s history.  Because we’ve mostly flown into Faro to arrive in Lagos, driving up this highway gave us a sense of how isolated the Algarve really is in relation to Portugal’s two big cities (Porto and Lisbon), and in turn from the rest of Europe  

To get to the A2 you’ve got to go east from here for almost an hour, and then you pick it up, pay the initial toll, and head north.  The Algarve’s isolation is sort of magical for us; with Cornelia, born in Hamburg and having spent many years in Berlin in her pre-Steve years; and me, born in Chicago before 35+ years together in Seattle; we’re both used to the big city.  So small town life provides us the refreshing simplicity we often dreamt about while sitting in traffic.

With mom riding shotgun and Cornelia chilling in the back seat, and racing home down the A2,  thoughts bubbled up about culture, and how we carry it with us when we travel.  Portuguese culture is its own unique plate of fish, if you will, and this country had much more than a moment on the world stage.  But that was centuries ago.  

Centuries.

Today, it’s neither America nor Germany.  It’s fascinating to see my own reflection of American-ism.  Why do people take so long in line?  Why do some administrative tasks take as long as they do?  Why would a business on a parade route be closed on the day of the parade?  Where is the innovation and spicy flavor?  What else could be made more efficient?  And although this is a conversation for another day it’s developmental to look in the mirror.

Although weekly Zoom meetings had helped us transit the surreal Covid interlude, we hadn’t seen Mom in person since we celebrated Sophia’s college graduation–something that feels like it happened a long time ago.  She was very brave for making the trip to Lisbon from Chicago on her own, not having traveled that far by plane in a very long time.  As a city girl herself, I think we should have made a point of exploring Lisbon for a couple of days upon her arrival.  Perhaps we’ll do that when she returns.  

In the Algarve, she got a good dose of walking exercise without overdoing it.  There was, thankfully, no face-planting on the slippery cobblestones.  For any of us.  And we managed, for the most part, to avoid loud places where it can be impossible to hear and a little disorienting.

Picture of me and mom.  I’m not that big in real life.  Well, bigger than this representation, but I don’t tower over people.  Mom’s just her own size.  To think she’s known me since I was a baby!  And she gave me her joy and silly sense of humor, along with a little cleverness.  We’re lucky to have had her here to visit and would like to bring her back again.

And then Diane.  Diane makes me feel funny.  Let me put that another way.  She’s willing to laugh at my silliness.  I think if I have a natural audience for my brand of humor, it’s ladies like Diane and our friend Yuko from our old neighborhood. They’re Cornelia’s drinking buddies and I can usually sweep in and get a good laugh out of them as they drink their wine.  The three of us walked from the apartment to Luz one day, and kept turning back to admire how far we’d come and to take in the landscape.

Diane took herself out to the beach a number of times.  And she found the Gelato places.  This is a sign of a truly adventurous traveler.  Can they occupy themselves?  Can they take themselves on a walk in a strange place and return? There’s a girl after my own heart.  She can explore AND find good desserts.  This sense of adventure will take her very far, and we expect and hope that she’ll return.  In addition to her travel sense and overall good nature, she has a fine eye for photos.  

Below is one of hers that I’m sure Ansel Adams would have admired.  I say this having taken the color out and left it with only black and white.  For me, his influence helped me to look for an image with lots of depth and the full range of shades from all black to all white.  And I think she captured it here.  You’ve got a nice stripe of horizontal black, all-white on the edges of the foam; the jagged clouds above the smooth ocean and flat beach; the eye is drawn into the far distance; there are interesting texture elements in the foreground, and the suggestion of humans walking on the beach…

Here is it in full color as she captured it.

For Mom, Diane and the Marmers before her, we yielded the guest bedroom and the second bathroom.  With the guests gone, I moved back into the guest bathroom.  (Well, let’s just say I started to use it again.) Diane has lovely long black hair.  I didn’t see a single strand left behind.  

Evenings spent watching Netflix and PBS, or just quiet reading have returned with a spacious silence and a sweetness we can appreciate in a new way.  Just curling up on the sofa with Spotify playlists coming over the one tiny Sonos speaker brings back the mellow.  Contentment is simple.

With 4 visitors here and gone, and with a trip to Germany behind us, we then moved closer to our expat neighbors, re-sorted into ‘locals’ and ‘guests’.  We’ve gathered up parallel experiences.  And can share them over dinner or hiking or at the expat meetup once weekly.  The days glide gently by.

Having done some reading, and closing in on 21 months of in-country experience, I think I’m ready to look at Portuguese culture in a different light, and I’ll do a little of that next time.

Thanks for reading!

More soon!

Steve