Cigars and Childhood

Note: Originally written March 2012

To me, there was always something enigmatic about cigars, my exposure almost completely relagated to the chomping teeth of Disney cartoon characters or sketches of pinstripe-suited patricians in children's stories. But there was one moment from my childhood that truly put a mystique around that odorous bundle of leaves that, I believe, has influenced my pleasure in the hobby ever since.

I was six years old, living in the quietly beautiful prairies, forests, and fields of Northwestern Illinois. My exposure to smoking was, as my parents were both militantly against the stuff, limited to the harsh realities of the "Non-Smoking" section at Pizza Hut, where my mother would sternly dictate to the server that we were to be as far removed as humanly possible from the smoking area. Of course, I dutifully followed my mother's lead in my first-grade-level exhortations and condemnations, mimicrying a nasal quarantine against the smell of cigarettes.

And to be sure, I to this day find the smell of most cigarettes to be foul and nauseating. This inculcation of anti-tobacco theology was no fortified against every test.

I often visited the local music shop in downtown (yes, there is a downtown) Sterling as a young child, almost always to obediently have my next piano theory book purchased for my lessons. As we would enter the store, my mother would always hushedly demonize the proprietor of the store for it "always smelling like dirty cigars in here". Truth be told, the place was bathed in the balm of cigars, the ceilling tiles slightly yellowed after falling prey to clouds of smoke resting atop the rows of music books and columns of woodwinds and horns. 

The odd thing about this scene was my mother had, perhaps through a puritanical premonition, always managed to take me to the music shop when the owner wasn't smoking. So, while the nasal evidence of the action was ever around me as I pawed through the stacks for yet another children's piano book or staff notebook, I never saw him actually smoke the enigmatic little things.

All this changed one wintry Illinois day. My mother had groceries to grab at the local County Market, and I, strapping and precocious youth as I was, privileged with the task of going into the music shop to snatch up a new theory book. 

Armed with nothing but a folded 5 dollar bill in my pocket, I trudged my little boots through the darkened slush to the door,  beginning the long (for me) walk down the indoor foyer to the entrance.

When I pried open the door with my mitten-clad hands, I noticed something other than the resounding clingle of the door chime as I passed the threshold. The smell was still there, of course, but it was different. Rather than the musty reminiscents of smoke soaking my nostrils, there was a fresher, more vibrant odour. It smelled leathery, almost like the smell of a walnut triumphantly cracked by my little hands on Christmas eve. It was still strong, yes, but I felt as if this was a smell that invited, not repulsed.

Slowly working my way to the beginner's section of the sheet music, I finally caught a glimpse of the culprit. Blueish smoke hung like a halo over the balded head of the Smoking Man, so familiar from every visit, yet so transformed at this moment. From a distance, the smoke around him seemed almost sarcophageal, as if his movement were wholly restricted by the wisps and curls of smoke.

Task in mind, I  tried in vain to pore through the piano section, impervious to what I was actually looking for. I was transfixed, in near rapture, as the cigar nestled comfortably in his fingers, sending a trail of meandering smoke rivulets towards the ceiling. 

Finally comprehending which book I needed, I sauntered gently, nearly reverently, towards the register. The Smoking Man turned to face me, his mouth pushing out the remnants of a puff on his cigar. For the brief moment before he spoke,  I saw what had been unrecognizable before. 

There was not only an insatiable power in his grip on the stogie, but something telling in his demeanor. For a moment I felt as if he was a Man among men, a tower with its balcony perched and observant over expanses of rubble. What I now see as rugged individualism filtered through my child's eye as a sort of canyon between he and I, a chasm that deepened with the smoke. Not a disinviting divide, but a delineating one, where I saw myself on a road to manhood, and the Smoking Man as what that may comprise. For that moment, the currents of smoke were no longer abstract, but testifers to his person, appendages of his new-found majesty.

And then it passed. Cigar went to its covey in the ash tray, and the Smoking Man made some forgetful joke about barely being able to see over the counter, and before I knew it my my purchase had been bagged and I was on my way.

As I followed my still-visible boot-tracks on the carpet back towards the door, I cast one final glance back at the Smoking Man. His back was now to me, his hands busy at work polishing a horn, and the faintest of faint smoke-curls rising above, cigar clenched in his teeth. I smiled, still quite puzzled, and left.

From that day on, there was always a stinging hesitation when my parents criticized yet another cigarette smoker, compiling their litanies and reciting them with predictable content. And every time, I would hesitantly wince, convinced that there was something different about the Smoking Man and his cigar.

Now, my childhood fading, I hold the cigar like the Smoking Man. When I am with friends, our sharing a cigar enriches not just our conversation, but our friendship. When I am alone with my thoughts, it is a gentle companion, and I relish the perfect puff, and the incomparable wisps of smoke tickling my nose and mellowing my senses. And most of all, I have become an individualist like the Smoking Man. When I look out below scores of mountain valleys on a fall excursion in God's mountains, cigar clenched with each step up a switchback, I am Man. To quote a brilliantly crazy woman, "I am the warrant and the sanction." There is nothing, not schoolwork, not politics, not any of the accoutrements of this world that dare stand in my way save myself and my Creator. Oh, and a fine cigar.