I Met a Woman on my Flight Who Has Been to 56 Countries, All 7 Wonders, and Every Continent on Earth. And Yet, The One Thing I Couldn't Stop Asking About Was Her Bag.

I was on a flight to Lisbon last spring.

Long flight. Middle of the afternoon.

The kind of flight where you just want to seat down and watch a movie.

The woman in the seat next to me had to be in her early 60s.

Silver hair, cut short and neat. Reading glasses on a little chain. A with her purse.

She smiled at me when I sat down.

We did the small-talk dance for a couple of minutes. Where are you headed. First time. That sort of thing.

And the whole time we talked, I kept getting distracted by her bag.

There was a keychain hanging off the strap.

Nothing unusual about that. Except it had at least forthy tiny colorful charms clipped onto it that looked like flags.

I couldn't stop looking at them.

Finally I just asked. "I'm sorry — I have to know. What are all those little charms on your bag?"

She lit up like I'd handed her a gift.

She reached down, gathered the charms in her palm, and took it up so I could see them closer.

"Every one of these," she said, "is the flag of a country I've been to."

I said, "How many is that?"

She said, "Fifty-six."

I must have made a face, because she laughed.

"I know," she said. "Nobody ever believes me when I show I've been to so many countries."

She told me her name was Marguerite. "But everybody calls me Margie."

I liked her immediately.

For the next hour I got the best in-flight entertainment I've ever had.

She pulled out her phone and showed me pictures.

Machu Picchu at dawn, before the crowds, the fog still sitting in the valley.

Petra, the whole rose-colored front of it, her standing at the bottom looking tiny.

The Great Wall going off over the hills like it forgot to stop.

And then the cold one. Antarctica. Margie in an enormous red parka, grinning, surrounded by penguins that did not care about her at all.

Story after story. Photo after photo.

I sat there thinking, this woman has lived about nine lives.

But looking at her, you'd never guess a single one of them.

Silver hair, reading glasses, a soft brown designer bag on her lap. The most ordinary-looking woman on the plane.

I couldn't square it. So I asked her.

I said, "Margie — how does anyone even know you've done all this unless you bring it up?"

She got quiet for a second.

Then she said, "That's the thing, honey. They don't."

She said, "That's exactly the thing."

She told me a life of travel is the most invisible thing in the world.

She said you save for the trip. You take the trip. You do this enormous, once-in-a-lifetime thing — you stand at the bottom of the Effeil Tower in Paris, you cry a little, you can't believe you're really there.

And then you fly home.

And within about two weeks, she said, it's gone.

Nobody would know you've took that trip so you never get a change to talk about it.

She said, "You do the most extraordinary things a person can do. And you come home, and you put your bag down, and nobody around you would ever have the faintest idea. Your neighbors don't know. The girl at the supermarket doesn't know. Sometimes your own grandkids don't know."

Then she said the line I wrote down on the back of my boarding pass.

She said, "You travel to so many countries, and nobody would know."

She stopped mid-sentence. Then she said: "Unless you wear it."

She lifted the bag an inch off her lap so the charms clinked.

"So I wear it," she said.

So I asked her about the charms I could not stop looking at.

She said they were from a small brand called Exchange Life.

One charm per country. Small flags, she said, made properly — she'd had cheaper ones before that faded, and these hadn't.

She said the keychain lives on the bag she carries every single day. On her shoulder. Out in the world.

Which means it's always where someone can see it.

She said, "You would not believe how many conversations this little bunch of flags has started. Airport lines. Doctor's waiting rooms. Church."

Then she told me something that got me.

She looked at me over her reading glasses.

"You look like a woman who's been places," she said.

I told her I had, a bit. Italy on our honeymoon. A big trip to Thailand for our anniversary. A few cruises. Mexico more times than I could count.

That's when I realized — I have done beautiful things in my life. And I sat there on that plane and realized that not one single person who looks at me has any idea.

Margie patted my hand.

Her flight snack came. Mine came. We ate. She told me three more stories.

When we landed in Lisbon she gathered up her bag, and the charms clinked one more time, and she squeezed my arm and said, "Go be visible, honey."

And she was gone into the crowd before I could even get a proper goodbye.

I watched her go.

Walking through that airport like the whole world already belonged to her.

I thought about it the entire trip.

I thought about my honeymoon in Italy that my own kids barely know happened.

I thought about all my trips and how I never get the chance to talk about them.

The night I got home, I sat down with my laptop after dinner and I looked up Exchange Life.

I started counting the places I'd already been.

Italy. Thailand. Mexico. Greece from the cruise. Jamaica. Canada. The Bahamas. Spain.

I sat there and I counted them on my fingers like a kid, and I felt something I hadn't felt about my own travels in years.

I felt proud of them.

I ordered my flags that night.

Now if you've read so far into the story I want to tell you what happened, because it wasn't at all what I expected.

The box came. I clipped the keychain with my flags onto my everyday bag, all eight of them, in the order I'd visited them — and I stood in my kitchen and looked at eight countries hanging off my shoulder, and I got a little teary.

The first person to notice was the cashier at the pharmacy, maybe four days later.

She said, "Okay, I have to ask about the little flags."

And I got to say, out loud, to a stranger, "Those are all the places I've been."

Best feeling ever.

Then it was my hairdresser. Then a woman in the school pickup line for my grandson. Then my own daughter, who picked up my bag off the counter, looked at the flags, and said, "Wait — you went to Greece? When did you go to Greece?"

We ended up talking for two hours that night.

Margie was right about your travels being invisible.

I had spent years being a woman who had seen the world, but nobody would know.

Now it's the first thing people ask me about.

And every time somebody does, I think about Margie and her fifty-six flags and her red parka and her penguins, and the thing she said right before we landed.

Go be visible, honey.

Now I am.