A Father's Day Tribute

My father smoked cigars. Never in a hurry, and never many of them. A few times a year, on the kind of evening that earned it, he would bring one out, and that is how I came to them.

The first one he handed me was in the backyard, after a day worth marking. It was an Opus X. I knew what that was. I knew how hard they are to find, and that it wasn't the cigar you hand someone smoking his first. He handed me one anyway.

He showed me how to cut it. How to hold the flame back and toast the foot before I drew on it, how to turn it so it caught evenly all the way around. Not to inhale. He walked me through all of it slowly, the way you teach someone a thing you want them to keep doing right.

I could not tell you one thing that cigar tasted like. Not then, not since. No note, no flavor I could put a name to. That was not what the evening was. The evening was the backyard, and the smoke, and my father taking his time over it. The cigar itself was almost beside the point.

What I remember word for word is something he said while we sat there. He told me it was better to have a good one once in a while and make it count than to smoke cheap ones often, out of habit. Have them rarely, he said, and make them mean something.

I have done it his way ever since. A handful a year, and not one of them out of habit. I wait until there is a reason, and then I slow down and pay attention, because that is what the first one was for.

He taught me the cut, the light, the patience to not rush it. He taught me to wait for the ones worth having. I have never found a reason to do it any other way.

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