Why Do You Smoke?

Aromas reveal memories for me.
I smell a wood fire and I am eight years old, walking back & forth with my father...trying to keep warm at three in the morning.

I smell a cigar and I am six...Far Rockaway.
A Great Uncle...Yossie Savetsky always had a cigar clamped in his mouth. It had a green wrapper and was very fragrant. Harsh to the nostrils of a kid and yet there was an invitation to smell.
In his home or in his fruit stand there was always that cigar. Rarely was it actively being smoked. If he puffed once an hour that was a lot.
But it was always there.

When I was a teenager my father put me to work during summer vacation at the firm he worked. The two partners that owned Unity Electronics, Harry Holtzman & Lenny Meltzer both smoked cigars. Lenny like Yossie always had one in his mouth. They both had those bits of tobacco sticking to their lips in perpetuity.
Harry smoked when the occasion called for it or if he needed to make an impression - which was most all the time. But it was almost never lit. I think he was too cheap to consume one.

As I light a cigar I smell them more than smoke them. A little nicotine is fine but the main draw for me is the smell. The memories that flood in as I watch the smoke wafting away in the night air.
My youth gone...up in smoke?

I find I have time to think. I unplug completely. I sit and look...and think. I watch the wind and listen to the night coming in.

At the beginning of the year, I took a five day course in concentrating, single tasking, the art of not flitting about. One cigar teaches the same lesson.

Mind blown.