Cigars, Memories of Dad and Regret

By J. Conrad Guest

 

 

I turn fifty-three next month, and a week later my mother and father celebrate their birthdays—well, they would have had they lived. They were born on the same day but ten years apart. My dad never forgot Mom’s birthday. He’d be ninety-one, she, eighty-one.

I sit here this morning smoking a Partagas 1845—a delicious smoke—thinking about Dad. This cigar thing: it started out as an occasional indulgence, a couple times a month, often in celebration of some small publishing success. But this cigar thing, it has grown from an occasional indulgence to a habit. An addiction? I don’t think so, at least not a physical dependence. I went a couple weeks without lighting up this summer past and felt no withdrawal. Not like coffee. I go without coffee in the morning and I’m guaranteed a caffeine withdrawal headache that will go right out the top of my head.

But cigars have become an integral part of my writing routine. Coffee and a cigar on Sunday morning: my muses without whom I would sit and stare at a blank screen. It’s all about the routine.

I recall my dad smoking a cigar with Sgt. Major Bean, his lifetime friend from the Marine Corps. Bean found his métier in the Corps; Dad spent eight years as a Marine. He became a civilian at his mother’s urging. They—Bean and my father—shared something I would never know. Whatever my dad did on Okinawa, the horrors of war I saw depicted in Saving Private War, read about in Flags of Our Fathers and With the Old Breed, he never shared with me.

I met Bean a handful of times in my youth. He was larger than life, colorful. Everything they depict in Hollywood movies about World War II. He stayed with us for a few days to attend a Marine reunion in Detroit when I was nine or ten. I gave up my bed and slept on the floor in the living room. I recall my mother marveling over how well he made up the bed in the morning. Yeah. You could bounce a quarter off the top sheet.

Dad and Bean fired up cigars one night on our back patio. I have no idea what they smoked, although this was after the Cuban embargo. I imagine today they were good smokes. Bean, I don’t believe, would indulge in cheap stogies.

But I didn’t pay much heed to their cigars. My dad smoked cigarettes, so cigars weren’t such a far cry from cigarettes. I was taken more with the bottle of tequila they finished between them, and the tiny worm that floated at the bottom of the bottle; they cut it in half and ate it. Bean became livelier, louder, the more he drank. My dad, maybe wishing to set an example for his son, perhaps for other reasons I’ll never know, became more reserved.

I saw Bean maybe twice more, the last time when I was seventeen. The years went by; Bean died of AIDS the result of having been given HIV tainted blood during heart surgery; Dad passed away in 1998. Two years later a friend who is no longer a friend, and that’s a good thing, introduced me to cigars. Mom, who had preceded Dad to that other plane of existence by a year, would not have approved.

Sadly I never got to enjoy a cigar with my dad and I regret that, a minor regret compared to other, heavier regrets I carry with me. Still, I occasionally light one up thinking of him: always on Father’s Day and on the anniversary of his death, usually accompanied by a glass of scotch. The good stuff. But then, I can’t recall the last time I had a bottle of Dewar’s in the house.

I’ve been told I need to let go of him, and Mom. But really, is it so wrong to give a nod to one’s parents a few times a year? Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, are they only for parents who still walk the planet? Lamenting their loss, continuing to grieve for them is not healthy; but should we ever forget a loved one after their loss? I don’t think so. I’m not sure it’s even possible.

I’ve written non-fiction and creative non-fiction around each of them. Parts of them show up in my fiction; my effort, I suppose, to keep them alive. I find it therapeutic, writing about them, and more often than not I come away from the experience having learned something. Sometimes about them; other times about myself. That’s a good thing.