Page 49 - SpontaneousSuccessFINAL6

SPONTANEOUS SUCCESS
Chapter 9
She’s Not Angry
As the first hints of autumn arrived in mid-
September, so too did a sense of quiet. The crush of
summer visitors had finally subsided, the crowds
thinning with each passing day.
Two years earlier, the first passenger airport at Faro
in the Algarve was inaugurated, and what until then, was
a five-hour winding drive or train ride from Lisbon was
now a fifty-five-minute cab ride from the new airport.
Back then, though, sitting in a taverna late one
afternoon, just off the main street, I was feeling sorry for
myself and trying to figure out where my curiosity would
take me next.
I‘d polished off a bowl of caldo verde, a traditional
thick potato and cabbage soup dished up with slices of
chouriço and chunks of freshly baked bread. I was
squeezing the last drops of red plonk from a carafe into
my wine glass when a rowdy hoard of locals piled into
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