LETTER FROM PORTO: 5/30/25

My Final One - Until Next Time ...

That’s Sandra and Filipe in the garden of Casa p309, the lovely place where I have been staying for the last two months. Sandra owns the home but lives outside Porto in Braga and Filipe is a good friend of hers who helps manage the place. I had only reserved the suite I’d been in until May 28th but had booked my flight to Tangier for June 1. Luckily, I noticed the discrepancy before I arrived and even more luckily the suite down the hall from me where I have had a revolving roster of neighbors was available for these last few days so on Wednesday they helped move me down the hall. I had been in the “Main Room” for most of my stay on the second floor but I am now writing this last LETTER FROM PORTO from a new desk in the “Cozy Room” on this same floor. Sandra was kind enough - she’s more than kind enough actually, her kindness is greater than that - to let me have this room during my final days for the reduced nightly rate that comes with the monthly one I’d been paying. I highly recommend Casa p309 if you are coming to Porto and want to have a special place to stay. The garden and penthouse suites are actually apartments with their own kitchens. Only the two suites on the second floor share the main kitchen. And Sandra has both a massage practice and yoga studio in the house so if you want to book a session or take a class, you just have to walk a few steps up or down the stairs to do so. It really is a haven here at Casa p309. And it is beautiful - Sandra’s eye for design is as healing in its way as her massage and yoga practices are - and has made being here in Porto even more special. I hope a stop here will become part of my yearly sojourns in my pilgrim’s practice that began with a simplification that I continue to hone, an “n” replacing the “m” in that word, a change in one letter that has changed my lettered life.

Since I arrived here two months ago, I have seen a world-class production of Hamlet at Teatro Nacional São João; experienced during the city’s Dance Festival a deeply and oddly moving piece, Friends of Forsythe, co-produced by La Biennale di Venezia for which choreographer William Forsythe collaborated with Rauf "Rubberlegz" Yasit and others; shouted “Nunca Mais Fascismo!” with those celebrating Freedom Day on April 25th to commemorate the country’s 1974 Carnation Revolution; took part with other Americans here at our own earlier anti-fascist rally on April 5th in solidarity with all those “Hands Off” rallies back in America; found a solution finally for my MacBook Air’s screen being damaged, which wasn’t easy because there are no Apple Stores in Portugal but there is an iStore which honors Apple Care in the NorteShopping complex where I also saw a few films at its Nos Cinema, one of the nicest cinemas inside one of the nicest malls I’ve ever been in; reveled in some classical orchestral music from the city’s remarkable symphony at the Rem Koolhass designed Casa da Música: witnessed a national snap election (the third in three years) and all the marches involved leading up to it in which the country’s far-right Chega Party came in second, becoming now the leading opposition party, after the overseas votes were counted and its edging out the Socialist Party (PS) which seems to be the big news here instead of the center-right Democratic Alliance Party of its current Prime Minister Louis Montenegro winning the plurality of the vote and having to form yet again a new government but having pledged never to ally itself with Chega; hung out daily in my two favorite cafes Mesa 325 and A Certain Cafe; discovered I like pork cheek stew and how to wake with the weather that has more moods than somebody’s mama off her meds; and, most important, learned the Portuguese word for thank you: obrigado.

I am often asked about tourist suggestions in the many places I now live, but I am just as often at a loss regarding what to suggest because I don’t see myself as a tourist but someone who settles in to live my life in basically the same way no matter where I am which involves mostly sitting in a couple of those newly discovered favorite cafes and writing and reading during the day while going to theatre and concerts and dance programs at night. My one suggestion when asked is don’t make plans. Set out each day to get lost. That is one of the best things about the life I lead now. I no longer panic when I don’t know where I am because I know I’ll always end up where I’m going, where I’m supposed to be. You can make lots of discoveries about places by trusting them to take you where that is.

And yet.

I have made lots of organizational plans for my first couple of weeks in Morocco where I hope I’ll get a lot more reading and writing done this summer because my nights won’t be filled with ballet and opera and theatre and concerts like they are in European countries. It will be a calmer few months once I stop the running around I have planned coming up in the next two weeks.

I confess I had resented whoever was moving into my old room here at Casa p309 because I had loved it so and it had grown to feel like home. I felt protective of it. I had, in fact, initially booked the little garret in Paris where I had stayed last year for April and May off the Place de Clichy on the Boulevard des Batignolles but when I was snooping around on Airbnb for places in Porto in the future since so many friends had told me I had to check out this city, I saw the “Main Room” here and especially the midcentury desk and chair in it designed by renowned Portuguese architect and designer Daciano da Costa and fell in love with that desk and chair the way I once could fall in love with pieces of furniture when possessions once possessed my heart. So I cancelled the Paris place and booked this place here in Porto which was even a bit cheaper than the garret.

“I came to that desk more than I came to Porto,” I told Amanda and her daughter Hazel above when I met them yesterday out on the terrace outside the kitchen we share as second floor residents after asking them if they were the ones who had moved into my room.

“That room is like living in a fairy tale,” said Hazel, confirming that they were and are going to be here for a month.

Amanda asked me where I was from.

I told her my pilgrims’s saga. “But I grew up in Mississippi,” I said.

A shock of sho’nuff recognition registered on Amanda and Hazel’s faces. “We’re from Alabama,” said Amanda. “From outside Birmingham.”

“Shut yo’mouth,” I drawled, speakin’ southern to’em. “I wondered who had put that big slice of watermelon in the refrigerator I just spotted.” We then all laughed at this latest everything-connects coincidence in my life. “Well, you know, chile, what we say in Mississippi: thank God for Alabama,” I told’em. “And in Alabama y’all say: thank God for Mississippi.”

“Yeah, it’s all kind of the same place,” Amanda said.

And then I offered that I was going to miss being back in Mississippi for few days this summer to see my brother and sister but I just couldn’t bear being back in America right now. That’s how I let someone from there whom I meet now on my pilgrimage know that if they support You Know Who then we wouldn’t have much in common which gives them the opportunity to shut down the conversation before I have to do it. But I could sense that Amanda wasn’t one and she confirmed it. We bonded even more over that, this dedicated gardener and loveliest of art teachers from Alabama and a sissy writer from Mississippi meeting on a kitchen terrace in Porto and bemoaning the state of things back home. There’s no bond with another person quite like discovering your takes on life make you outsiders in your beloved south, a place that is your home dammit even though you so often don’t feel welcome there because you refuse to let everything that is so deeply southern about you be warped by its ugly politics - politesse, puttin’up vegetables, the love and care that goes into the cultivation of eccentricities, a taste for biscuits and reading Welty and readying your yard for picnics, pitchin’ in when somebody needs help down the road a piece and praising their pecan pie even when the crust could use a bit more Crisco, lamenting the heat and all the kudzu along the way as you drive to the first few football games of the college season, pretending somebody’s new hairdo really ain’t that high, wondering if Gulf Shores is worth the money anymore, piddlin’ about, prayer.

“I have to admit I was resenting whoever was moving into my room,” I told Amanda and Hazel after our talking a bit. “But I love that you two have moved in. It feels right to pass it on to you.”

But back on Wednesday after having moved to the other room from the one above, I was still feeling a bit sad, displeased, displaced. And I was worried about all the moving about still to come in the next couple of weeks. Sandra must have noticed it all register on my face and asked if I were okay after she and Filipe helped me move down the hall.

“Just thinking about my upcoming schedule,” I told her. “I arrive in Tangier around midnight on Sunday. So I’m staying at a hotel near the airport which I did last year when I arrived there on the same flight from Casablanca. Then I’m moving into an apartment a generous friend is letting me stay in for most of the summer in the kasbah. But since I am not leaving until September 1st, I have to reset my days not to go over the 90 allowed. I have to do it early because I’m renewing my passport and not sure how to travel because I have to give up the one I have when I set that in motion. So I'll be heading to Tarifa across the water in Spain on the ferry on the 4th. Stay there until the 6th. Spend the day in Tangier on the 7th. I then take the train to Casablanca on the 8th because I have an appointment at the US Consulate on the 9th regarding my passport renewal. Back to Tangier on the 11th. My friend needs her apartment since she's arriving for a week with her financial adviser that day to finalize her purchase of a home there so I will be in the hostel in the Medina where I stayed last year. They only had a room for one night so I’ll be moving to another little room in another Medina hostel until the 16th. That’s when I finally move back into her apartment in the kasbah for the summer.”

Sandra smiled. "I can't tell if you're complaining about that,” she said, “or whatever the word in English is for not complaining."

"You're right," I told her. "I guess in some way that's all a blessing."

And then I went back up to my new room down the hall from me and realized I am ending my time here in Porto learning how it feels to be my own neighbor, not just I was to discover Amanda and her daughter’s. Sometimes that is what we need in our lives without our knowing it. We need to feel more neighborly toward ourselves. That’s where being more than kind enough can land us - down the hall with that down-the-hall perspective with its need to be a bit quieter, congenial gentler, conversant, curious, helpful, the stranger whose strangeness can be his appeal, his strength. I’ve always struggled with how strange I feel. How different. Not just an outsider, but that: different. This pilgrimage is about a lot of things that come together in its conflation of conflicting notions of how to live one’s life. But one thing it is not is conforming to the notions that others have about the constructs within which to live it. I have been that strange little guy down the hall all my life. Now I am his neighbor. I am mine. Being neighborly to myself was not a notion I knew I needed. This Porto portion of this pilgrimage in its last few days nudged me toward it because when I am not being mindful enough and am a bit slow on the uptake, the pilgrimage itself always takes up the slack.

It is the more mindful one.

I, a pilgrim, follow along.

Obrigado, Porto.

Welcome, Amanda and Hazel.

Time to move down the road a piece where my pitchin’ in might be needed.

Onward …