His ancestors would be horrified
TheBoy was born in Raleigh, but we seem to have gotten him out of North Carolina before certain unpleasant Tar Heel traits took root. How do I know? This morning, as we were leaving his sister's daycare, he sniffed the air, frowned and let out this little pearl of little guy wisdom: "I smell a cigarette. That's disgusting."Keep in mind that my parents both did a little time in the tobacco fields during their summer breaks, and that my first newspaper internship was in Winston-Salem, a place where the smell of tobacco still hangs in the air, sort of like chocolate in Hershey. A certain respect for Big Tobacco runs in his family, if not his gene pool. So I wanted to make sure I'd heard him right.
"Disgusting, really?"
"Disgusting."
"How do you know?"
"Well, Grandma smokes. And you say it's disgusting when she does it."
Yes, Mom, I do. TheBoy learns well.
posted by AnnaRay at 9:27 AM
3 Comments:
That hurts. Gramdma
The smell of a cigar takes me right to my Grandpa's side at age four, or to the end of a date, when as a teenager, I would come home and my father would be sitting there, glaring at the boy who'd had me out. The smell of dried tobacco leaves remind me of the old Cubans in Tampa, who get the clippings from the cigar factories to spread on their lawns to kill the bugs. It is an earthy, baronial smell. I love the ritual of the after dinner smoke, but only in a very relaxed setting, and only Nat Shermans or something nice. I wish it weren't so bad for you. Sigh...
I hate the smell of burning cigarettes with a passion, but Durham's smell of curing tobacco is one of the greatest smells in the world. Is that irony or is it something else?
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