Smoke and Memories

                It's interesting how the random presence of cigarette smoke can evoke a memory, an emotion, and transport you to a place in your childhood in such a quick manner.

                I left the front gate of my apartment complex headed the one block separating my home from the beach.  I take a nightly jaunt to ensure my 10,000 pledged steps on my Fitbit, so I can remain honest in my bedtime text to Ben, who asks each day, “How many steps Booboo?”  He calls me BooBoo for reasons neither of us can remember but he asks me about my steps because I told him I am naturally lazy, but can be shamed into exercise simply through a daily inquiry.  It is a promise he made and keeps.

                As I exited, I walked past the maintenance man who was finishing his cigarette, one of the few remaining Californians who continue the habit, and the smell of smoke immediately took me to a motel room in Opelousas, Louisiana, in the summer of 1979.  I assure you, it was nothing seedy; I was eight years-old at the time.  My Dad was working as a rig welder for Tiger Drilling and we (mother, sister, brother, dog) went down to visit him for the summer, back when school children actually got three full months off from school.  He had been staying at the Polka Dot Inn and it was as interesting as you would imagine something with that name would be.

                As he was, at that time, a two-pack a day smoker and, as he remains to this day, someone not known for his cleanliness, the room reeked of stale cigarettes, empty fried chicken containers and, well, loneliness.  My mother did her best to air out the room, but we spent much of the first day at the pool, like you do when you are a pre-teen with no exposure to water other than through a garden hose, a ditch or in a bathtub.  When we made it back to the room to get ready for supper, it smelled very strongly of bleach and Charlie, the fragrance I had saved my allowance to buy my mother for Mother’s Day.  I chose it because I liked the fact that the woman in the commercial was young like my mother, beautiful like my mother and wore pants like my mother.

                By the end of the week, my mother had apparently had all of the Polka Dot Inn she could handle and rented a house for the rest of the summer.  Well, not so much a house as a trailer at Thibodeaux’s Trailer Park, but a nice one with brown leather couches and a pool at the house next door.  The neighbors, with the pool, had a son named Chance and all I remember about him was he let us swim in his pool and once, when he threw a rubber snake into the pool near my sister, she made him get out of the pool and sit and watch us while we swam as she found no humor in his prank.  I don’t blame him for obeying her.  She was almost as tall as my mother even though she was only 11 years-old.  To this day, she is deathly afraid of snakes.  She’s probably mad right now that she just read the word ‘snake’ and if she is reading it on her phone, she probably just threw it.  I promise to tell you if she calls me tomorrow to complain.

                My mother is a great cook and she made meals from scratch most every night, except Fridays.  That was the only day my Dad was able to come home and eat dinner with us and we would either go to a restaurant in Lafayette that served crawfish six or seven different ways, or we would go to the Dairy Bar next to the trailer park where they served pork chop sandwiches, which were simply fried porkchops on white bread.  Delicious!

                The trailer was always happy, just like every space my mother inhabited, and it never smelled of cigarette smoke or burned welding rods as my mother would have my Dad take off his shirt and boots outside and immediately shower when he came home.  He was not allowed to smoke in the trailer, either.  Only outside.  And he never complained; he seemed happy just to have us there.  He typically worked three weeks and was home for a week.  So, seeing us every night, even if we didn’t eat supper at the same time, seemed to brighten his mood.  He wasn’t known for smiling much, but he would each time my mother walked in the room.  He’d grin really big and call her Mama, just like we used to do until she asked us to call her Mother; she liked the sound of it better, I guess.  He loved us and was happy to see us, but he never looked at us with a smile as big as the ones he had when she walked into the room.    

                My mother could usually get my father in good mood, a feat considering his normal personality was grumpy, manifesting as alternately sleepy (from 16-hour shifts), hungry (which was most of the time) and constantly searching for chores for us (mostly me as the oldest son, my younger brother a mere four years-old at the time).  Idle children are one of my Dad’s biggest pet peeves, right along with preachers who smile too much, boys who don’t play football and the smell of Green Apple Jolly Ranchers.  I can only imagine what it would be like to work for him.  I know I didn’t enjoy it, although an employee I was not, as no money was earned; indentured servant would be a more apt description.  I'm not being melodramatic.  "Did you eat?  Did you pay the light bill?", was the response from my father when I ventured to inquire about the idea of being paid for mowing the yard.

When my mother wasn’t around, and he was left to his own devices, it seems the cleanliness stopped, the home-cooked food ceased, and the smell of cigarettes returned.  I don’t know if he just didn’t care that it smelled or that he needed something to fill the space she (and we) left, but whenever I smell cigarettes, my immediate response is melancholy, with the urge to call my Dad, who is at this very minute filled with his version of loneliness, which includes living with his youngest son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren.  It seems the only thing that made him happy left us almost eighteen years ago and he wears his suffering as a badge of honor.