Despite being a staunch anti-smoker, I have to admit I do love the smell of cigar smoke. Not the choking, in-your-face cloud of dusty carbon monoxide, but the wafting, old neighborhood tavern aroma of thick digits of tobacco burned and exhaled to paint the atmosphere of a memory. Since I don't hang out in old neighborhood bars, I do on occasion take to lighting up and puffing on cigars on my own and, during the most recent engagement of this pastime, I regarded my fairly slender fingers and arguably feminine wrists.
If I have — or ever had — any hangups about my self-image, it would have to be about my masculinity. Or, rather, my perception of my masculinity. Or, most rather, my perception of others' perception of my masculinity. As a teen I was fairly slender and lanky. I was non-athletic, though I was somewhat fit thanks to bicycle-riding everywhere I wanted to go around my environs. I was definitely not muscular.
My father was a physically strong man. A barber by trade, he used much of his downtime from the barber shop to offer his skills to people as a handyman, which kept his arms and hands muscular and powerful — at least compared to mine. As a child and a teen, I always marveled at how thick his fingers were, well into his fifties, so much so that, as age took him down, I marveled sadly at how delicate and slender his once powerful fingers had become.
My middle brother, the youngest before me yet nearly six years my senior, was athletic from childhood though high school. I envied his teenage physique and hoped mine would someday match his, but freshman year football tryouts revealed a lack of enough coordination to both think and move in the same moment, so the dreams of spotlights, adoring crowds, and pliant cheerleaders all evaporated at once.
Theatre, however, accepted lanky, awkward me and my ability to pretend I wasn't, and provided me with the spotlights and appreciative crowds — but, alas, no cheerleaders or chiseled physique — and a hefty dose of self-doubt outside of Theatre, out in the sea of testosterone and estrogen, where to be a boy in Theatre surely meant you were a "homo."
And so I headed off into adulthood, self-conscious of my skinny, doughy arms and my slender wrists, and my voice. Did I mention my voice? My raspy, shallow, high-register voice? Where I wanted the deep, booming voice of Fred Flintstone, I wound up with Wilma's.
I know. This is an awfully long and winding road to get to a post about cigar smoking, but it's all behind the the whole free-association coming up in the next paragraphs.
As the smoke slithers from the ashen tip of the cigar upward in a slender, grey column and dissolves into the air, I ponder my first and middle fingers with the cigar clutched between them at the knuckles. The two images don't mesh properly, the dark brown shaft of rolled tobacco against my pale, beige fingers. My mind pulls out memories from my childhood, summer afternoons killing time because I was too young to be left on my own, seated on a bar stool, sipping on a Coke at Tony's Place, the bar run by the owner of the building, the man to whom my father paid rent for the small room behind the bar that was his barber shop. I'd watch the men at the bar who, at the time, seemed so old to me but were probably all in their thirties and forties, as they smoked their cigarettes and puffed on their cigars. The smell in that room, with the cigars burning and afterward, is as present to me, now, as it ever was then. They did it idly, those men, an activity secondary to, and yet an integral part of, the social moment in which they were engaged. Their cigars smoldered as they clamped them between their fingers and sipped their beers, speaking their parts in the conversation, then puffing briefly while someone else spoke, the smoldering tip brightly glowing red as air was drawn through, then parting lips around the cigar to vent the smoke and send it wafting outward to make its contribution to the character of the room. Their fingers fit naturally around their cigars as though they were built to clutch cigars, as the cigars seemed custom fit to their fingers.
It all seemed so natural. These men were men, thought this boy, not realizing he would compare himself unendingly to them throughout his life, as well he would to his father, as if they were the example he was supposed to meet in all things, not just holding cigars.
I don't measure up, my thought says to me. The cigar mocks my dainty fingers despite how manly, how knuckly I try to get them to hold it. But it's all just pretend; I'm not a cigar smoker. I just occasionally like to smell the aroma, so I light one up and puff. Is how I hold it really of any importance? It's all a charade. It's not a social moment where it's something to do with my hands while engaging in conversation with friends and looking idly masculine; smoking the cigar is the main event: I prepare for it; the weather has to be right (I only puff outside!); and I savor it in the moment.
A new thought then comes to me: am I ever glad I made it to my thirties! Thoughts like these used to weigh me down, but my thirties represented a sea-change in my self-awareness and my self-esteem. While such thoughts still occasionally play across my mind, I'm quite comfortable and content with my masculinity, regardless of the few feminine traits present in my being.
The adage appears quite true at the view from the edge of 57: the more years you tack on, the less you care!
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