Story: A Perfect Discovery

Humans are not perfect - those of us not running for political office, that is - so we cannot script and execute a "perfect moment". To-wit, see me sitting in the passenger's seat of a two-door compact proposing marriage with my elbow resting in a piece of cake instead of, as planned, being 100 miles away on bended-knee beneath the mossy boughs of the Evangeline oak that Longfellow's poem made immortal. Fortunately, her grace blessed with me with a "Yes" anyway, so it was THE perfect
moment after all. But certainly not like the one I planned.

But that's okay. We don't want responsibility for perfect moments. Can't you just hear Junior or, worse, a younger version of you whining, "Mom, Dad, you ruined all my perfect moments!"

Yecccchhhh. That's the kind of responsibility we travelers are running away from in the first place.

Fortunately, perfect-moments find us. And for the unexpected gift, we are thankful. And for my money, I am particularly thankful for those out-of-the-blue perfect-moments that carry the wonder and reward of unexpected discovery, a very
welcome travel companion.

* * *

The scene is a sappy one, at the beach where an old, crusty sailor in a thick navy-blue overcoat sits on a weathered bench throwing crumbs up to gulls. Except it's obviously a crappy made-for-TV set. (The gulls are puppets bobbing on sticks, okay? Sheesh.) And the sound of the ocean isn't a recording; it's a voice-over. Think, "Whoosh! Whoosh!"

The old salt turns as the shot closes in around his pale-blue eyes,
wrinkled in crow's feet, and he starts talking. Yes, with a pipe gritted
between his teeth if you would prefer. (You have the picture.)

"I remember like it was yesterday," he rasps. "My perfect-moment all started in the Spring of '91, during the first Gulf War ..."

* * *

So let's say you began Spring Break at a feverish pace. After all, your first stop was a sexy French nude-beach. Why not haul-(bare)-ass, right? And you did, via TGV, a "very fast train", from the Brittany region of western France to the nude-beach-y region of
southwestern France where lies the normally titillating Atlantic-coastal town of Biarritz. But the nudist attraction, often a limp experience during a late snow-storm,was bare...ly enough to get you up in the morning. So you wisely opted to slow your break-neck pace and head for the land of siestas and sangria.

But finding the hectic metropolis of Madrid, Spain a plastic, commercialized version of the sleepy, inebriated Spain of your dreams, and being unable to roll your r-r-r's besides, you again wisely stepped on the brakes. We're talking the slow-overnight-train to Lisbon, Portugal. (I'll match your Spanish manana with a Portugese amanhã any
time.)

Then after you and the pickled-pork smelling Russians sharing your train-car finished swapping snorts of warm Scotch-from-the-bottle (yours) for warm Vodka-from-the-bottle (theirs), and after a very few restless, eye-burning winks through warm-pickled-pork-vodka-scotch burp-breath, you disembarked in Lisbon with not just one but TWO red-headed traveling companions.

[Did I mention that a doctor-relative of mine writes and circles "redhead" on patient-charts as a warning before their next visit? Well, he's on to something.]

Anyway, then say you quickly found your way to Lisbon's Main Square. Okay, maybe it wasn't THE main square, but it was a very large square, maybe even a double square ... let's call it rectangular. And more importantly, there were bands playing at both ends of this huge rectangular square, which was decorated with ribbons and banners, like a Portugese-version of Fourth-of-July decorations. And the Square was surrounded by graying buildings with outdoor cafes, bars and restaurants on their first floors, which were crammed full of people.

You didn't know what the heck was going on until your waiter attempted to explain something to the effect of, indeed you had arrived in Lisbon for the Portugese-version of the Fourth-of-July. Or something like that. Could your luck have been better?!

And say there were strange people about who appeared to be even more excited about this happenstance than you, including some who sat at your table. They were from Estonia. Nearly Russians! You almost knew people in common. Except they were Estonian seamen, so they REALLY liked to drink. And Glasnost was newly in the air, thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev, so they were more excited about independence than any Portugese reveler. Which explains why, after about a hundred drinks, you were in the Main Rectangular-Square of Lisbon, Portugal on something like Portugese Independence Day dancing arm-in-arm with a group of smelly Estonian seaman, like a line of poorly-dressed and out-of-shape talent-challenged Rockettes, singing,"Free Estonia! Free Estonia!"

So say it was no wonder that you forgot you had another train to catch, the 2:23 a.m., which would eventually lead you to Albufeira, Portugal, where you would rendez-vous with a dozen college-aged American women at a topless beach from which you could actually see the coast of Africa. So when at 1:58 a.m. you intuitively-realized the potential epic-tragedy of missing that train and began sprinting with your red-heads to the train station, and you actually, truly stepped on the train as it began moving away from the platform, and the three of you claimed an otherwise empty train-car and collapsed comatose into its bench seats, let's say that it would have been no surprise at all if you had slept through every stop that morning, not to mention your 4:26 a.m. stop in the middle-of-nowhere, at some other Arabic-like-spelled town in Portugal, where you would then catch the 6:53 a.m. train to the stop nearest Albufeira.

But say instead that inexplicably you awoke at the very moment the train stopped. You looked out the window and focused one squinted-eye on the station sign, and it positively identified your intended Arabic-like-spelled connecting stop. But before you could wake your red-headed traveling companions, the train pulled away ...

So say you - clearly the trip's responsible party - rode dutifully awake to the next stop and managed to get your drunk red-headed friends off the train and propped up against the exterior wall of the station-house before the train, carrying apparently the only light in a hundred miles in any direction, left the station. And let's say you were then the only living, and conscious, thing in the absolute-black of night in which you were left standing. You could hear your red-heads breathing. But that was it.

It was so dark that you began to lose your balance and had to sit. And then you left-right cheeked your way to the station-house wall, not so close to the redheads that you could smell them, and waited desperately to be able to see. Say you even wondered if you had finally drunk yourself blind! And say it was really a little chilly and scary to be possibly blinded in the complete, uncompromising dark like that.

And let's say you stared out over where you had known the train tracks to be, into an un-seeable void. And even though you couldn't see your hand in front of your face, you eventually saw small spots of orange, suspended in mid-air, quite like the old sailor's gulls but without the stupid stage-sticks. The orange spots just hung there, as if by magic. And rubbing your eyes and racking your brain for whether you had been surreptitiously drugged by the seemingly-friendly but formerly Cold-War-enemy Estonians didn't provide any answers for seeing, or imagining, the mysterious orange globes, which began grow ...

And say the dawn progressed and you weren't hallucinating. You had been looking at fruit, beautiful orange-yellow grapefruit, hanging in trees that appeared to grow straight out of the lake of fog surrounding them.

And then you saw that you were on a very small concrete platform jutting from the ground, its concrete surprisingly unlike the grass surrounding it as there were no streets. The station-house on hte platform was a quaint, old-fashioned one that looked like a large British phone booth, or perhaps a tidy, old-fashioned caboose, like the ones politicians would wave from as they left town with everyone's money. And otherwise there was not a soul or building in sight, just an orchard packed with yellow-spotted fruit trees, green grass overtaking fog, and two seriously hurting redheads sprawled out on the concrete pad, like crash-test dummies thrown aside until the next crash.

And say your head was hurting really badly too until, for the first time in your life, you picked a fresh grapefruit from a tree, peeled it with chilled fingers, and bit into its ripe, sweet, moisture-exploding, pink flesh.

* * *

"A- yep," croaks the old salt. "That were perfection, me matey. That were perfection..."