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Sometimes a Cigar…

The Day My Cigar Went Out in the Rain

It was a rainy, March day in 1973 — a little like this rainy, March day.

My ex-GF was wrapped up in the ratty old full-length mink we’d bought for a few bucks at a Purple Hearts Veteran Thrift Store. When the sun started poking out from the gray clouds, she’d pulled her long, jet black hair out and now it was down, hanging across the damp and mottled fur… she couldn’t possibly have looked any cuter. As we walked the wet and puddled streets, we talked, our shoulders bumping together. I chewed a soggy, rum-soaked cigar that kept going out.

We’d been broken up for a while. She’d taken up with an old drinking buddy of mine, one of her teachers at the state university we both attended. Her new boyfriend had taken a teaching job in Germany and she was waiting to finish school (or something… damn, how fast it does all fade away) and in a few weeks, she too, would have packed up and moved to Germany.

It was the seventies, of course, and there was no such thing as a simple relationship in those days — at least not among the college hippies and disaffected bohos that formed our extended social set.

With our relationship officially over for many months, we’d drifted into a relatively easy and comfortable friendship… a complex one, to be sure… still deeply shot through with longing on my part — yet it had been my insistence on a completely open relationship (in order to pursue what I’m positive we both thought at the time was the “great lost love” of my life) that had finally heaped enough pain on that relationship that it finally shattered in a devastating explosion of raw emotion and pain… I realized for the first time that it was pain that I had caused.

It sounds, I suppose, impossibly callow, but until that moment it had never completely sunk in that I was capable of causing pain to my loved ones… it was, I suppose, my portal into adulthood… a transition I’m not sure that I’ve really completed. (And I’m sure that regular AYoS readers are nodding their heads knowingly right now.)

But on that day, the memory of the pain was submerged a little… though we were walking the same streets around the neighborhood we’d shared for several years — the same streets we walked obsessively the day some months before when she finally managed to communicate the pain I’d caused her.

Early in the relationship, she had moved across the street from the tiny bungalow I’d rented for a few years in college. It wasn’t my idea and it had made those open relationship, free love early 70s sometimes awkward and, on one pivotal night, deeply, deeply painful for her — and for me, as well, as, over the years, the memory of that night and all that flowed from it burned ever deeper into my memory… like an acid tear eating always, ever deeper into my soul.

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previous AYoS versions
Monday, December 05, 2005
Saturday, February 04, 2006

The Day My Cigar Went Out in the Rain

You were wrapped up that day
in an old fur coat
we were splashing in puddles
in the lane

That was one day
I won’t ever forget
the day my
cigar went out
in the rain

I was going to send
for the letters I wrote
to see what life
was like in the past

The times that we laughed
and the times that we cried
fall away from the light
so fast

(C)1974, TK Major

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The Day My Cigar Went Out in the Rain (v.2)

The Day My Cigar Went Out in the Rain (v.2)

T
he puddle had been there so long there were polliwogs in it.

She squatted above it, her muddy hiking boots perched on the cement culvert. She looked directly down into the puddle, where she was gently probing with a long, leafless twig.

The ragged 60 year old full length mink she’d found in a thrift store was muddy on the hem. Her waist length, heavy black hair disappeared under it, but her bare arms poked out the sleeves, rolled back in bulky cuffs to just below her elbows.

Her eyes were narrowed in concentration and for once he respected that, moving quietly down next to her.

The cigar he’d been lighting on and off the whole afternoon, a nastily sweet index finger sized liquor store special, was clamped unlit and soggy in his mouth and he thought compulsively about lighting it. Instead he put it back in the pocket tobacco tin he often carried and followed her gaze into the puddle.

Finally he saw why she was transfixed.

Beneath a large clump of trash and leaves, in a dark and muddy crevice, was what appeared to be a crawfish. It stumbled around a bit and receded into the muddy darkness that was evidently its home.

She pushed the twig tentatively toward the opening but didn’t push it into the hole. She often seemed to him to be cautiously balancing her aggressive scientific curiosity with a self-conscious respect for other entities’ destinies (as he imagined she might say it).

“Did I see a crawfish? In a winter puddle on a city street? That’s weird.”

“Crayfish,” she said almost silently.

previous AYoS version

The Day My Cigar Went Out in the Rain

You were wrapped up that day
in an old fur coat
we were splashing in puddles
in the lane

that was one day
I won’t never forget
the day my
cigar went out
in the rain

I was going to send
for the letters I wrote
to see what life
was like in the past

The times that we laughed
and the times that we cried
fall away from the light
so fast

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The Day My Cigar Went Out in the Rain

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A rainy day toward the end of winter, 1973.

A radiant young girl in an ancient, raggedy mink coat and a pair of jeans and hiking boots splashing in leafy gutters…

The Day My Cigar Went Out in the Rain

You were wrapped up that day
in an old fur coat
we were splashing in puddles
in the lane

That was one day
I won’t ever forget
the day my
cigar went out
in the rain

I was going to send
for the letters I wrote
to see what life
was like in the past

The times that we laughed
and the times that we cried
fall away from the light
so fast

(C)1974, TK Major

[A note on the photo above: I took this last winter not far from where I first kissed the girl in this song, But actually, I just wanted an excuse to put it up. Nice sky, huh?]

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