The whole experience, wrapped up in this

There is a time when I travel, an unexpected moment, where I find myself soaked in the place where I’m standing. Most times, it’s a singular experience, I’ve found, the one hour or minute or even second where I feel connected to the place I’ve flown to, driven to or walked to. Sometimes it happens in familiar touristy spot, like walking across Prague’s Charles Bridge at night in the rain, huddled under an umbrella to find a stand to buy hot mulled wine. Other times, I don’t know it’s coming, like when we sat at the restaurant counter in Barcelona, talking to the owner and eating whatever he brings to us – tiny dishes of unnamable (to us) ingredients; when gondoliero (this isn’t him or his boat, but it’s a beautiful photograph) and his architect friend laughed and talked with us in a dark, subterranean restaurant in Venice, as I downed the best filet mignon ever and drank all the limoncellos they buy me; when the beautiful five-year-old girl at a restaurant in Curacao who, after dancing around the floor with her mother, climbed to our table to talk about SpongeBob SquarePants.

When I’m in these moments, I feel this soaring joy at being alive. I know it’s a sentimental thought, but I love it then.

When I was in Boston recently (which was, by the way, filled with these moments!), we wandered around the streets of Arlington on Halloween night. Little Tairou was dressed as a lion and my friends Melody and Josh pulled him along in the dark as he sat in the back of a red wagon and we tried to coax him to say “trick or treat” to perfect strangers. Early in the night, we turned a corner and saw a group of people gathered at one side of the street, so we all wandered over there, too.  A tall, muscled, red-haired, pony-tailed guy was bent over a set of tables erected on the side of his yard. A small desk lamp was propped on a music player, sending beams of light onto tubs of hot dogs and vats of chili. When he saw us, he sang out a big hello and he started dishing out bowls of chili for us, telling us he’d won awards for his slow-cook chili.

We stood around on the sidewalk, balancing bowls of warm, tomato-y chili in our hands, as he told us about growing up in this house, in this neighborhood. Every Halloween, he tries to cook something for people in the neighborhood. He and I started talking about barbecue — he’s getting a smoker built, he said — and when he told us he a musician, he ran inside to get us some CDs of his band, the Dave Sammarco Band. When I asked if I could take his picture, he said, “Hold on, let me get my glasses on.”

I could have stayed there all night talking with him about living in Arlington and his band and his burgeoning catering business. But we slid on down the sidewalk to gather more candy and head to a nearby Korean restaurant. It was the perfect night, the perfect Boston moment. Do you have these moments, too?