Albuquerque’s Marjorie Neset reminisces on a traveling life in 'Window Seat'

Albuquerque’s Marjorie Neset has been crazy about traveling from an early age. Her book “Window Seat: The Story of a Traveling Life” attests to that.

Neset has kept journals and organized thoughts of her travels around the globe.

Her preferred methods of transportations are bus and train. And her preferred passenger seat is next to the window.

So if you, gentle reader, want to join her, then grab a copy of her book and imagine yourself in the seat right next to Neset.

You’ll have the time of your life reading about Neset’s experiences and the books she’s read that informed her travels.

In the book’s preface, she writes that the tune and lyrics of the popular song from the 1940s “Far Away Places” was in her head as a child, but forgotten until she began writing “Window Seat,” which lovingly integrates travelogue with memoir.

Neset cites lines from that song that sums up her lifetime of love of travel: “I want to see for myself/Those faraway places I’ve been reading about/In a book that I took from the shelf.”

Neset’s own book is divided into four parts, each one opening with “A Big Trip Story.”

In the first part, readers follow the author growing up on a small farm near the town of Northome, Minnesota. She had the freedom to roam nearby woods, to take jaunts to neighboring communities and to be a passenger on family road trips to such faraway places as South Dakota, Montana and Oregon.

Even as a youngster, Neset’s imagination was captured by geography schoolbooks. One in particular she mentions, her mom’s 4th grade “Essentials of Geography: First Book,” published in 1916. The book still sits on a shelf next to Neset’s desk.

After high school, she writes in the preface, her world expanded. She lived in Minneapolis, traveled to Florida, married, became a mother, was an Air Force wife in the Philippines, North Carolina and New Mexico, returned to graduate school, divorced and became an arts administrator.

In the late 1970s, single-mom Neset (with her two sons) was in Albuquerque, having landed a job with the city. She created Downtown Saturday Night, an arts event that was part of a national revitalizing of downtowns.

Then Neset was named the city’s Cultural Affairs Division director, a position that included managing the KiMo Theatre, which hosted dance, theater and musical performances.

All through the book, Neset engagingly describes the weather, daily life, people, dress and food.

While living in a housing development in the town of Angeles in the Philippines, she recalls feasting at the home of the family’s housekeeper.

“The tastiest, skinniest, most golden-brown chicken I’d ever seen and my other soon-to-be favorites: eggplant grilled with pork, onion and eggs, vinegary, soy-salty pork adobo; and platters of star apples, mangoes and papaya. It was food of the gods … competing with my love of Southern-fried everything.”

Part Two has Neset (with girlfriend Sue) making her first trip to Europe, namely to Iceland, England, France and Luxembourg. Neset was enchanted with Paris.

She asks rhetorically, “Why the enchantment?” She answers, “By the end of that first brief visit to Paris, I had fallen deeply, forever in love with all things Parisian and longed to be of there. On every trip thereafter, my heart has always reexperienced the same flutters, no matter the weather, taxi strikes, or riots in the banlieues (outskirts).”

Neset next visited Scandinavia. Her destination was Byglandsfjord to connect with the Norwegian Nesets. She did, and happily.

She writes that there are 54 countries in Africa, and by 2023 she had visited 29 of them at least once. She refers to herself as an “Africanist,” not in terms of knowing any one African language or culture but rather “utterly enamored of the cadence, colors, songs, sagas, tame life and wild life of the human and animals of an infinite and injured landscape.”

Neset’s first visit to the continent was in 1989. She was invited to join a delegation of European arts managers attending a conference in the country of Zaire.

Part Three saw the beginning of Neset’s expanded connection to contemporary African dance and presenting its many iterations at Global DanceFest — a long-running festival she organized at the black-box theater at VSA Arts of New Mexico’s North Fourth Art Center in Albuquerque.

Neset’s connection wasn’t just about showing the art form, but also about making longtime friends with dancers, many of whom she had first met in Africa.

Neset also presented dancers from Europe and Asia at the KiMo Theatre and with Global DanceFest.

Part Four begins with Neset traveling to the Middle East. She used an invitation to a dance festival in Beirut, Lebanon, to anchor the trip.

She also wanted to get a better sense of the landscape that was home to “the three great monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam,” and her fascination for “the players and their effect on the entire world … And for the neighborhood at the root of so many of the world’s ills.”

The trip also brought her to Jordan, Syria and Palestine (the West Bank).

Though Global DanceFest ended in 2014, Neset’s travels continued, alone, or with friends or family. She traveled through the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. She rode the Trans-Siberian Railroad; getting on at Moscow, off in Mongolia. Then on to Beijing. And onward.

The book’s epilogue advises readers that globally there may be fewer safe spots and more angry people, though there are still places that will welcome you.

Neset, now 86, is tentatively considering one last big trip.

“I’m talking with a friend about walking, gently, through the English countryside,” she said in a phone interview.