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.
