All Things Go

My father smoked Camel cigarettes.  I was the oldest of three sons, and one of my Christmas joys was that, after I was admitted to the mysteries of Santa Claus, Daddy would let me stay up with him until the younger brothers were asleep and it would be safe carefully to arrange the presents under the tree.  We would drink black coffee and smoke Camels together.  These days the Department of Human Services would probably come and take me away, but those were wilder times.

For many years after I left home I continued to smoke Camels.  Other cigarettes just don' taste nearly so good, and besides, the others didn't have the same provenance.  After a long while, I have more or less quit smoking  but I have for many years continued to buy Camels for the big eight festivals of the Christian Year.  Camels have had a role in my celebration as the incense  of Psalm 141.   I have occasionally not had  Camels for some of the feasts, but I have not skipped a Christmas in a very long time, because of the tradition of smoking with my long dead father.

This year, however, I am skipping the Camels.  I have not heeded the warnings of the State of California nor have the memories of those few Christmases when I was no longer a child but not yet an adult faded.  It's just that I no longer feel the need for prompt for those memories.  Perhaps I will buy frankincense for the Nativity Feast this year.

Wondering about my Christmas Camels as I wandered  out under the sky today, I was both overwhelmed by the richness of the memories and surprised by how many of them were from times in winter and linked to sharing cigarettes.   And always they featured people who were immensely important in my life.  It seems that what is said about the sense of smell's provoking memories is true.  There have been other smells in my past, but smoking with someone makes a literal conspiracy, often a quite intimate conspiracy..  And  today's  smoking memories all involve lovers,  men with whom I had become, either briefly for extended periods, one body.  I mean, Jesus did rather suggest that that was the purpose of leaving one's father and mother, right?

The first big memory chronologically is of a deeply cold and clear night in Memphis after the first Christ Mass shared with a wonderful man who was my lover for several years.  We had gone to St. James Episcopal Church on Central Avenue and were walking home to a little apartment we were 'gentrifying' in the Cooper-Young neighborhood.  It had not felt like gentrification to remodel the crumbling structure in which we occupied the top floor.  It had felt like the dust of old plaster and of things one would rather not name.  But now we had everything more or less in place for our second Christmas together and our first Christmas in our new home.  We stopped somewhere along the way and looked at the stars and smoked Camels, which made a particularly wonderful incense in the crisp winter air.

The next July we moved to Santa Fe.  It was a sort of liberation for both of us. He stopped smoking. I tried to be supportive but I cheated sometimes by smoking with other people.  One January night , I came back from dancing at a lesbian night at a club where I was friends with the owner/dj .  She let me be an honorary lesbian so I could enjoy the beats, and I  bummed a Camel from one of the women there.  People could still smoke in public then.  He was offended and that became the ultimate reason for us to pursue different paths. We still see each other from time to time, but there are no more intimate cigarettes.

Santa Fe was, well, a self-proclaimed center of 'spirituality' whatever that is, and therefore the cigarettes made there were called American Spirits.  I was blessed to have series of lovers with whom I smoked American Spirits.  Most of them were rather wonderful artists of some sort or another.  (Santa Fe was like that.)  One was a quite talented painter who had intrigued me for some time.  He and I were at the same club where I had smoked the lesbian's Camel.  It was a cold night, again, and I offered him a ride home.  He invited me in and offered me an American Spirit.  We were not together long, but I still remember the smell of his house, a mixture of American Spirits and nag champa.

With the exception of one very dear friend with whom I lived several times over the years, whom I believe may still smoke Camels in Berlin, the co-conspirators of the years to follow all seemed to have smoked American Spirits.  One of my briefest conspiracies was with a Mohawk--a steelworker Mohawk-- who was visiting Santa Fe for Christmas from New York.  We had flirted at a club, and I had invited him to an after party at my house, which was often rather crowded in those days.  We left the main party so I could show him my room, and afterwards we went out under the winter stars and shared an American Spirit.

Thinking about those days keeps bring back more memories of manylovers, many conspiracies, but I don't want this essay to be so much about the objects of memory as abut the triggers of memory, so I will pass over an architect and a monk and a deacon and such to share one particular memory of another painter, because that memory involves both winter and American Spirits and also music.  

I first saw Stephan at a Japanese bath house.  He was a magical sprite.  We met again at a Halloween party, and danced together.  We did not share cigarettes then. He left the party early because he had glued horns to his head with super glue, and one had come loose and was hurting his eyes.  I went by his apartment a few days later to check on him, and he invited me to spend the night. It was a very cold November.   He cooked, and we had coffee and cigarettes afterwards--American Spirits--and the next morning I lay in bed watching him cook breakfast. He put on a tape or disc or whatever we used in those days, of the Indigo Girls singing Secure Yourself--'Fasten off your earthly burdens; you have just begun.

Music remains the other big door of memories for me, and that song remains very meaningful even if I seldom listen to it these days. So, when winter's cold and the memory of conspiratory smoking is linked with music, I am carried away.  One of my dearest past lovers was Tom, who wanderer only briefly through this world.  He came over a hill one Holy Innocents' evening as I was preparing for a service at Saint Bede's Episcopal Church, and  he was living with me in a few weeks.  We would lie in bed on cold winter nights and listen to Therese Schroeder Sheker singing as the wind made counter-melodies around the corners of the old adobe.  

Time like an ever-moving stream has born all these people from my lives . whether by age or aids or aireplanes.  The only one I even occasionally see now is the first Camel smoker.  I am friends on Facebook with one of the American Spiriters.  

A much younger friend with whom I  have an occasional cigarette asked me not long ago how I get over the separations in life.  I said that I don't.  Although the separations are painful, I try to rejoice in the conjunctions.   I am a rather promiscuous lover.  I never stop loving someone, even when I also love others.  The truth is that if I had stayed 'faithful' to only one person my whole life, if I had stayed at the home of my parents or at the home of my first lover, my life might have been less painful,, but it would have been less rich. For a while I would keep mementos of past lovers, even if the memento were as vaporous as the smoke of a cigarette. But now I find that I am rather like the old woman, Rose, from The Titanic.

I am myself becoming more and more vaporous, perhaps, but I no longer need to hang on to the necklace.  I am beginning to understand my mother's fullness in her old age.  I would invite her to some adventure or another, and she would say that she had had adventures enough.  I am not so adverse to a new adventure as she was, but I also feel quite full.My big holiday memory with her is of drinking eggnog.  I don't really like it very much because it makes my teeth feel furry, but it's a memento of our holidays together.  This year, I will just ponder those holidays and the wonderful cold winter nights with so many wonderfully, lovely people, in my heart.  I hope those same people who are still alive get some pleasure from remembering me as well.