I should be having a cigar right now.
It's a snow day, and there's always been something wonderful about that. It isn't that I'm overjoyed at not going to class: today isn't my heavy day. I only have one class on Tuesday (Creative Nonfiction). I like this class. Still, hearing that the responsibility of going to class has been called off seems to herald in a magic moment where possibilities suddenly pop like champagne, and all other responsibilities seem lessened. Days off are a cause for celebration. In fact, in the moment when Pat burst in my room to trumpet the arrival of the famed (and, in college, superbly rare) Snow Day, my mind ran wild.
I should go have a cigar. This was my first instinct. It seems like the thing to do when congratulating oneself on good fortune. Right now in my lacquered humidor I have: 1 Astral Grand Reserve 96, 1 Rocky Patel Sun Grown, 2 small box pressed Fonseca, 1 Macanudo Maduro, 3 Acid Krush Morado Maduro, and 2 Acid Krush Blue Connecticut.
The Rocky Patel Sun Grown is the only one I haven't tried yet. However, if it's anything like the consistent, delicious, carefully crafted Rocky Patels I've had in the past, I won't be disappointed. But it doesn't matter which one I want: I really can't have one right now.
It's snowing like fuck. Before I got even halfway through a Churchill sized smoke I'd be frozen dead and blue. A Saint Bernard would paw uselessly at my klondike flesh, trying to live up to its name of beatification. I wouldn't risk ruining a cigar today by having to stub it out in order to escape the bitter Cortland weather.
So instead I have taken to rearranging my cigars. I line them in the humidor according to size. The Rocky dominates its space, dark brown, wrapped in the simple crimson and gold banner. The light tan Blue Connecticuts, the color of warm sand, sit at the opposite of the spectrum: small, friendly, familiar. And suddenly I miss summer.
*This is how Romans wrote their numbers in an effort to be impossible.
