Page 80 - NOMADS_NO4_2015

I leave Fabio at the restaurant and walk the curved street to Good Café where he and I had met. I was sitting here several years ago when workmen carried items like chairs, tables and desks from Fabio’s church across the street. They dropped them into a huge dumpster. When a workman reappeared with a brilliantly painted and life-size angel I was startled that he dropped it into the dumpster. I hurried that way. “Can I have this?” I said. “Sure,” he said, “there’s another one. Want it?”
I took both angels to my apartment and stood them against the wall at the foot of my bed. I named one of them Michael in honor of the archangel and the character that John Travolta portrayed in the movie, Michael, where he was a dying angel that lived to fight and loved to combat even a massive bull head on. Going to bed and awaking to two angels watching over me always started my day off right.
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shawls that covered their heads and fell to their ankles. Females of means, however, sometimes wore exposed blonde and red beehive wigs with long curls dangling. Some even stacked wig atop wig to transform their heads into traveling towers. This also made them look taller. The average height of a woman back then was only five foot one and if she lived much beyond forty it was the exception. The average height of a man was five foot four and he often died in his thirties.
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t’s little wonder that a woman craved to look as beautiful and sexy as possible during her very short years on earth. She painted her face, and sometimes her whole body, a faint red. She darkened her eyes with roasted ants, crushed and applied by her slave from half a seashell. Those who could afford it even dusted their breasts with gold. Men were just as vain and covered their bald heads with wigs or painted their heads with lamp-black. Every wealthy man wore a very treasured ring that sported his official seal.
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is on his break and embraces those free minutes with theatrical flair. Tall and slender and in a tight black t-shirt, he juggles four oranges as though it is as easy as me breathing perfume from the pretty and well dressed woman who strolls nearby with a poodle in her arms.
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