The Cigar Life

Saturday, September 3, 2022 Labor Day Weekend is here. School starts next week. As always it all went too fast.  I think of that first summer of cigars in 1982. Walking up to Salk Drug Store on Lyndale Avenue to buy Swisher Sweats and Dots. My cigar intake was much more sporadic and infrequent back in 1982. I would go for months and sometimes a few years.  Lighting up became a little more frequent once I moved out on my own. I'd sometime walk up to Golden Leaf in Calhoun Square for a cigar and then drive around smoking it in my Toyota Corolla. I liked how the car smelled the next day.  There's a bunch of other stuff I remember about the summer of 1982: the above album; Twilight Zone the movie seen with Mom, Dad, Sam, and Pete at the France Avenue Drive-In; my bicycle accident and the hospital stay that resulted from it; watching Brideshead Revisited on PBS; staying up late because I couldn't sleep or because I would sneak one of Dad's Swisher Sweets; watching NBC Ove...

Saturday, July 3, 2022 Smoked a Romeo y Julieta this afternoon and although I've smoked a number of these before and like them, this one, for some reason was a little bitter for my taste. It was passable but not my best experience with this brand. Had a nice Zoom call with Mom, Dale, Sam and his family. We had a really great conversation about some family history that's come out of the genealogy work I've been doing recently. I think it was interesting and meaningful for everyone which completely delights me. I'm hoping knowing and talking about our shared history will bring all of us closer together.  I'm still reminiscing about cigars during the summer of 1982 and some of the music I was listening to at the time. I remember the first time I heard "Gloria" by Laura Branigan. I had my Sony Walkman (the one Dad had given me about a month earlier during my 10-day stay in the hospital as I recovered from a bicycle accident) radio on as I was finishing mowing ...