Cigar Memories

Stephan was a cigar smoker, after his dad.  From a young age, and unapologetically.

Shortly after we met, on our first actual date, we were in Baltimore.  We had dinner at Fell's Point, and I remember an old building, like a courthouse, with stairs, and Stephan doing a Gene Kelly-esque dance down the stairs.  With cigar in hand.  That may have been the night that he told me that if he had to choose between cigars and me, well, he liked me, but....

A couple of years later, we were visiting a very dear friend of Stephan's in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.  At the time Herman was a confirmed bachelor, living with his father, who was into his 80's.  Two single men enjoying the good life, Herman a great cook who could do gourmet meals but was happiest making sauerbraten and spatzle, and both dedicated to good cigars.  Stephan brought dozens of fancy cigars and Herman had cigars he had selected to share, and that's what they did the entire weekend.  By Sunday evening I was craving air that was not laden with cigar smoke, but as we drove away, Stephan could think of nothing to prolong the weekend better than lighting up.  I opened the car window and hung my head out, much as a dog enjoying the fresh air.

There was the time I was visiting my best friend in New York.  I had gotten off the train and was walking uptown on 8th Avenue.  I suddenly got a strong, urgent sense of missing Stephan.  It was a warm and loving feeling.  Then I realized there was a dirty old guy walking alongside me, smoking an old stogie.

His sister drew a sketch of Stephan that ended up on the wall in his townhouse.  At some point, I came upon a picture of a cigar and realized what the portrait lacked:

And that was how it remained, until we moved from Columbia to Long Island.

When I left Maryland to begin graduate school on Long Island, Stephan came up with me to help me get settled.  He had happened upon a great smoke shop in a neighboring town and wanted to stop there on the way home, which meant he had to leave early.  We fought and he left to get his cigars.  Three weeks later, our letters apologizing to each other crossed in the mail.

Stephan's speech, cigar firmly planted, was a variant on the English language.  Friends and family mimicked him; my sisters and I once had a Stephan look-alike/sound-alike contest.  We borrowed a cigar and passed it around, each taking a turn to propound on some topic in those melodious but incomprehensible tones.  He was good-natured about it, but he didn't seem to get what all the hilarity was about.

I think most of us have left pots on the stove and forgotten about them.  We know that smoking in bed is dangerous.  But Stephan with a cigar was always an exciting experience.  Of course, all his shirts and coats had cigar burns.  And there was the time when he was visiting for Easter and went to Ambrose Farm to pick some asparagus.  I wasn't there for the occasion, but my son reports that he lit a cigar, tossed the match and a minute later, there was a small fire developing in the field.  Fortunately, my son yelled out in time and the fire was stomped out.

Another time, as he walked into the house in his heavy white winter coat, I noticed smoke coming out of a pocket.  He didn't seem unduly upset; apparently this was just one of those things that happen when you are Stephan. 

When he had surgery for pancreatic cancer a year and a half ago, Stephan stopped smoking.  He was worried that he would be unable to quit, but he went cold turkey.  The first few times he called me I didn't recognize his voice, and once I even asked if it was him.  Stephan without the cigar was truly new and different.

When he visited us in Charleston, Stephan had always spent hours upon hours sitting on my porch, reading and smoking.  He would come inside from time to time, for a meal or a movie, but would have to take a break to go out for a smoke throughout.  When I wanted to go sit outside with him for awhile I would say, "Let's go have a smoke."  Because regardless of where we sat, the smoke always blew my way.  There were times when it was too much and I would get annoyed.  It wasn't till he stopped smoking that I realized he had also been keeping away the mosquitoes.

He seemed not to have cravings after he stopped smoking, but when he visited me that November, a year ago, Stephan was worried.  He was afraid that if he went out on the porch and sat and read, the craving would return and he would give in to his old habit.  And of course, insanely, or because he just wouldn't have felt right not carrying them here, he had brought a few cigars.  But that never happened.  He had been having a hard time reading since the surgery, which was a far greater tragedy than not smoking, as he was a voracious reader.  But during that visit, he sat on the porch and read a book or two.  Happily, a Terry Pratchett Discworld book that I was about to read, that he had somehow, amazingly missed got him back on the road to reading.  And he did it sans cigar.

It was the cruelest gift, then, when his doctor told him he could smoke again.  It was a few weeks before his death, after a year and a half of prodding and poisoning, that his comfort took precedence over finding a cure.

We talked about the smoking and the cancer.  He knew the correlation.  But we never talked about whether he wished he had never smoked.  Smoking was his identity; it was what identified him with his father, who he loved and lost when he was in his thirties.  Maybe it isn't relevant that his father died of cancer, because the quality of Stephan's life so much involved the culture of cigars and smoking.  Some medical researchers say that we are genetically predisposed to when we are going to die, and some say that if that evil cancer lurks in us there may be little we can do to thwart it.

I know the pleasure Stephan got from his cigars, from the ritual of pursuing the best smokes to that of actually lighting up.  I don't think he regretted his life of smoking, and I don't begrudge him that choice.  And I know that anytime I ever smell the smoke of a cigar, I will imagine Stephan close by.