cigs

 I had an uncle who smoked.  He seemed kind of modern, kind of with-it, and nothing looked so cool as that cig hanging out of the corner of his mouth.  Well anybody's mouth, everybody looked cooler with a cig hanging out of the corner of their mouth, it made you look so sharp in a world-weary, streetwise way.

Not for the little group of nerds that I hung out with, just not something we did until a new guy came into the crowd, and coming out of the movie house one day pulled out a pack and tapped one out in that cool way that anything you do with cigs is cool.  He kind of apologized, he knew we didn't smoke but he just had to have one.  See food, you eat food when you're hungry, but you smoke a cig when you just have to have one.  

Seeing that cool, manly pack of cigs come out of Ted's shirt front pocket (nothing was so cool and made you a man of the world like a pack of cigs in that front pocket, why you could take on the world) we all asked can I have one.

And we all bummed one.  Bumming cigarettes, we were already becoming cool. But our folks did not think we were so world weary, street-wise, cool, men of the worlds that those cigs in the corner of our mouths so clearly indicated we were so there followed maybe a year of furtive smoking, getting caught, reluctantly promising not to do it again, stashing packs here and there, getting caught stashing, but oh, that glorious feeling of lighting up far from home. 

My mother had been a stay at home mom, but now that the kids were in high school she took a job selling yarn at Marshall Fields.  I got home maybe an hour before she did, and snuck up to my sister's room where I knew I would find a pack of Parliaments in her purse.  Both my sisters smoked because they were cool too.

The old coal bin had been converted into a kind of workshop for my dad who didn't do a lot of workshopping like dads were expected to do in those days, and instead of a lamp it had a bare bulb hanging from a cord, and a shard of an old mirror on the wall and I turned on the light, struck a pose in the mirror, and lit up and smoked up a storm.  The harsh light gave shadowy drama to my poses and the smoke from the cig glowed in the light and drifted into the shadows, and I was the coolest, the manliest, the most world-weary streetwise guy in all that old coal bin room.