Coda
He preferred autumn to other months: dunes of gross, sodden leaves, heavy sweaters, and the pads of his fingers turned mysteriously pruney. Humidity makes an odor stick. In autumn, he wore the scent of tobacco like a shroud.
~
His first car didn’t have an ashtray: even at terrific speeds, he could edge a tremulous half-inch into the jet stream and give the filter a gentle flick. Once, riding with the windows down, his lit cigarette — when he disposed of it — arced back inside the car, starting a small (manageable) fire.
And once, during a winter storm, he forgot to close his window. All night long, the wind worried itself into that tiny seam … and when he returned the following morning, his car was entirely full of snow. He laughed out loud in the parking lot, and clapped his gloved hands.
~
Sitting Indian-style on Mayflower Hill. Snubbing a cigarette into the rich soil, then field-stripping it: pinching the paper above the filter, and forcing flakes of tobacco (like dander, like pollen) onto the breeze. Depositing the filter in a Coke can and standing, wiping his palms clean against the seat of his pants, made damp from dew in the long shadows of the quad. Slinging a backpack over his shoulder and loafing to class.
~
It’s not impossible that, in summertime, a cigarette can raise your body temperature one whole degree. It hurts to smoke in summer: then, especially, you smoke on the go. What was it our elders decreed? That a cigarette is best enjoyed indoors. While seated, preferably. That anything else is indecorous.
Well, you can’t smoke indoors anymore — and our elders are largely dead, now, anyway. So you take a drag — with the sweat in your eyes, waiting for the light to change — and you dream of autumn. Of wool, and a bracing wind to shuffle the contents of the gutter. Of nighttime at four o’clock in the afternoon. The taste of a cigarette in your nostrils, and your entire life to live.
