MY FATHER’S CIGAR

I smelled my father’s cigar in the car today, even though he died three years before I bought it. And none of my friends smoke anymore, so there was no confusing the odor.

This day is nothing special. No birthday or anniversary that I am aware of. Just a bright day, the first day of summer. Work is slow and I am running errands in our newly adopted city, listening to a CD of 30-year-old music, singing along: here comes the sun, and here comes the sweet but acrid smell of my father’s cigar. A memory at once welcome and not, a memory itself sweet and acrid. 

Last night I had a dream about him. Or about his cufflinks, at any rate. I ran across them in a pawn shop. Saw them in the case for $49.99, with a note on them in his hand that said, “Frankie’s.” They were my favorite ones, the little agate ones, like a smooth marble, half maroon, half pearly grey, in a gold-tone setting. I remember being a little girl, carefully lifting them out of his jewelry case, spinning them around and around. I wanted to buy them back for him in the dream. I told the saleswoman that they were my father’s and she sold them to me for $9.99. When I woke up, I remembered that he was dead.

Today, I smell his cigar. 

I drive along on my weekday errand run, air conditioner on, the oldies station blasting one of my favorites, “Spirit in the Sky.” I could get used to this: the sun, the open road, my father’s presence in a new place. I will find those cufflinks when I get home. I will find the right kind of shirt and I will wear them someday soon to something special. 

Airing the Clean Linen 

A few years ago, my friend Vicky and I invited some Italian friends to come to the States to do a few authentic Italian cooking demonstrations. They were wildly successful, and people still talk about them.

After the week of classes, we decided to walk them around our historic Salem, Massachusetts neighborhood. They were amused by the fact that these buildings we were calling old — dating as far back as 1660 — were practically new housing stock where they come from (our house in Abruzzo dates back more than 1,000 years). They noticed other things as well, but the thing that literally stopped them in their tracks was the absence of laundry hanging out the windows.

My head reeled with the thought of these once-Brahmin Yankees flinging their wet sheets out of the second story windows of their brick mansions. Unthinkable. It was likely not on to even admit that there was anything resembling “dirt” in their lives.  And yet . . . that’s exactly what we do when we’re in Italy.

The t-shirts hang next to the underpants which hang next to the socks . . . the clothes-pinned dress shirts billow out by the jeans, which are next to the pillowcases. Our nod to modernity is to take the sheets and big towels across the street to the lavanderia (laundromat) to dry. 

Electricity is expensive in Italy, and most homes do not have clothes dryers. But the combination of wind and solar power does the trick every time, and the laundry smells great, besides. While it will never make a comeback on tony Chestnut Street (the servants no doubt once hung the household laundry in the backyards, out of sight of prying eyes), it is something I wish we would see more of here. Everything comes out better in the sunshine.

Bio:

Linda Dini Jenkins is the author of Becoming Italian: Chapter and Verse from an Italian American girl, Up at the Villa: Travels with my Husband, and Journey of aReturning Christian: Writing into God. Her poetry has been published in Voices in Italian Americana, Ovunque Siamo, and Poeti italo-americani e italo-canadesi. She lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire and Sulmona (Abruzzo), Italy.