I generate large clouds of cigar smoke, curling purplish-gray churning vapor streams, and most people hate me for it. Actually, they probably hate me for other reasons and just blame it on the cigar smoke. They make faces at me, sometimes they give me the finger, they make those dismissive noises that people make when they’re disgusted at aspects of society that infringe upon their breeding and their sense of entitlement. They can handle the litterbug and the panhandler, they’ll look the other way at people who take up two parking spaces or gals who speak in high-pitched voices into their iPhones because their conversations about the PTA need to be shared with the general public, but they’ll seek out the cigar smoker ten blocks away to tell him he’s the main cause of global warming.
Sometimes people, almost always women, ask me to put my cigar out. I say, “No, but you know how steam can be used to take wrinkles out of a pair of slacks? Why don’t you come over and sit next to me and we’ll see if this cigar smoke can do something about all those old-age lines on your fuckin’ face?”
Maybe that’s a little too mean-spirited.
Not all of my smoking encounters go like that. Many, many times I get approached by total strangers, again mostly women, who say they love the smell of a cigar. They often use their hands to try to funnel the cigar smoke into their nostrils and say something like, “That cigar smells so good, it reminds me of my grandpa.”
I usually tell ’em, “He sounds like a great old dude.”
The smell of a cigar is a magical olfactory bridge to a historic place. A number of behavioral studies have demonstrated that smells trigger more vivid emotional memories and are better at inducing that feeling of “being brought back in time” than visual images or any of our other senses.
Cigar smoke isn’t melting the polar ice pack, it’s an emotional gateway to the land of our ancestors. It’s 1930 and your grandpa is walking up the sidewalk of some tiny midwestern town. As he turns the corner onto your street and passes the simple houses built by pioneer sweat and hands, you catch a whiff of his cheap cigar four houses away as you wait for him on the stoop. He wraps his arms around you that way only a grandpa can and his worn overcoat smells like cigar smoke and eucalyptus. A memory, or a remembory is made that never goes away.
Now the lady who walked through my cigar smoke passes me by with a tear in her eye. For the last six months the only thoughts she had of her grandpa, dead now some twenty-three years, were the thoughts of him when he got sick. But now the simple smell of a cigar, generated by the person who society typically vilifies, provides her with a three-block walk with her grandpa, and he’s a fine vigorous American and her a small girl who is a bundle of hope and possibilities.
People should thank me, but they don’t and they won’t. That’s okay. Most people don’t have time for a smelly grandpa. People only stop to smell the roses. But the human memory stops where it pleases and grandpa always understood that.
Photo on Best Running
