The Task Force on Bias-Free Language shall be our salvation, truth, and light. If you close your eyes, if you open your heart, if you empty your mind—especially if you empty your mind—you can see the task force members. There they are in a stuffy seminar room in some inconvenient corner of the campus, with unwashed hair, in Kmart blue jeans, batik-print tent dresses, and off-brand running shoes, the synthetic fibers from their fake Aran Islands sweaters pilling at the elbows while they dance in circles around the conference table, shouting affirmations.
“Yes! Tremble at our inclusiveness! Bow down before our sensitivity! Culturalism in all its multi-ness is ours! No more shall the pejorative go to and fro in the earth! Woe to the invidious! Behold Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, ye Eurocentric male-dominated power structure, and despair!”
The nurse (either a man or a woman, since it is no longer proper to use the word as a “gender-marked” term) is coming from the university infirmary with their medications.
Max, I shouted to my young assistant, will you put something on my web area?
“Web site,” said Max.
10
JUNE 2001
Congratulations!” said my young assistant, Max. “How are Mrs. O and the new baby?”
Howling lustily, I said. The baby, that is. My wife is aglow with the joy of motherhood. Or so she was good enough to tell me.
“I got the kid a Sony PlayStation Two,” said my godson, Nick. “I beat the toy-store shortage by fiddling around on my computer.”
“This is so cool,” said the teenage baby-sitter. “You’ll have to reconfigure all your estate planning. The pertinent tax law is right here in my backpack.”
“I like it when Mommy has babies,” said Muffin, munching on the chocolate cake that Muffin tells me is what my wife always gives her for breakfast.
“Nick and I are going to take Muffin to the Biting and Scratching Zoo in Rock Creek Park,” said the teenage baby-sitter.
Biting and Scratching Zoo? I said.
“Like a petting zoo,” said the baby-sitter, “except it teaches kids about real life.”
It’s a person! I suppose that’s the modern thing to say, I said, as I doled out a cigar to the Political Nut, to celebrate the birth of my beautiful—and intelligent, capable, and fiercely independent—daughter. I can accept, I said, a few linguistic modifications. But I am a traditionalist at heart. I’ve bought the requisite box of stogies.
However, as a traditionalist, I’m beginning to wonder about this tradition. None of my relatives, business associates, or barroom pals has given away a corona on the occasion of nativity that I can recall. Everybody’s familiar with the custom, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the customary gesture made. In fact, I believe my entire knowledge of the convention is based on old comic strips, gags from the Pleistocene era of TV comedy, and a couple of dusty boxes of cheroots with pink and blue cigar bands that were in the display case at the drugstore where I had an after-school job in 1964.
I’ve consulted libraries, etiquette books, and friends who are replete with arcane knowledge. The only thing I’ve learned for certain is that, at the christening, I should not give a cigar to Father O’Malley. Urban VIII (reigned 1623–1644) wrote a papal bull forbidding priests to smoke cigars.
I called Cigar Aficionado—the Vogue magazine of the fashion for big smokes—and asked George Brightman, director of business development, why I should be dispensing gaspers. He said he thought it was “rooted in something British—a naval officers’ tradition, maybe.” Mr. Brightman suggested I call Simon Chase at Hunters & Frankau, Great Britain’s most prestigious firm of cigar importers. Mr. Chase said he thought it was “something the English do to imitate Americans. I believe it comes from your side rather than our side.” I called Molly E. Waldron at the Tobacco Institute in Washington. No one there knew the answer so Ms. Waldron called Norm Sharp at the Cigar Association of America. The only information Mr. Sharp had was from a seventeen-year-old newspaper clipping saying, “Cigars were so rare and treasured in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that…they were used as expression of deep emotional appreciation,” and “the birth of a boy was considered a most important event…so fathers who could afford to celebrated by giving their friends cigars as a way of expressing happiness.” The source named in this clipping was the Tobacco Institute in Washington.
A certain interrogational circularity was setting in. Why do I give a guy a cigar because my wife had a baby? As the most knowledgeable salesman at that best of cigar stores, Georgetown Tobacco, said, “You’re not going to give him a lollipop.”
I’m probably better off making things up. As I’ve found out from years of journalism, this is often the case. Perhaps I’m offering cigars to drive away evil. The cigar does seem to be an anathema to ideological types whom I don’t want bothering my little darling. Although smoke is not an infallible charm against them. V. Lenin bought cigars at Zino Davidoff’s father’s store in Geneva. A bill still exists—marked Not paid, of course.
Anyway, that theory does not explain why I’m bestowing the gifts. The flow of presents should run in the other direction at blessed-event time—as per three wise men and a newborn babe no doubt almost as adorable as mine. And my wife and I have made quite a haul. In fact, if I see one more bootie, blankie, snugglie, jammie, hatsie, pantsie, or shirtsie covered in twee, cloying, dwarfish bears, I’m going to need a bottle myself. Preferably Dewar’s. I understand bunnies and chicks, but why bears? Bears are not cute. Bears are bad-tempered predators. Bears eat garbage. Bears smell.
And so do cigars. Maybe the association of cigars with paternity has to do with masking diaper odor. Not that anyone would smoke a cigar anywhere near Daddy’s little precious. But maybe cigars are an excuse for fathers to go stand in the garage when diapers need to be changed. A cigar can buy you a whole hour, as opposed to the ten minutes you get from a Camel. Or maybe cigars are a Planned Parenthood policy, a method of spacing births. As long as Dad has cigar breath, the next child is not likely to be conceived soon.
This still doesn’t tell me why I’m doing the giving instead of the receiving. There’s the obvious Freudian thing. Freud is supposed to have said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But that leaves what a cigar is the rest of the time open to Freudian interpretation. By proffering cigars I’m saying, “I made a baby. Here is an object symbolizing how the deed was done. Let me know if your wife needs a baby, too.” Then there’s the potlatch aspect. To show what big men they were, Indians of the Pacific Northwest used to give away or burn valuable goods. With cigars you can do both.
A new father is a very big man. He feels like one of those bond moguls of the 1980s. That is, he feels lucky to get out on parole, even if it’s only to the garage. But he also feels important and powerful. Cigars are indicators of power and importance. Although I don’t know why. Where I grew up they were indicators of old men playing gin rummy. Perhaps it’s because a cigar is such a good theatrical device. Light a big one and puff on it, and you’re immediately doing an excellent impression of pompous, portly middle age. And when the puffing is done by one of us who actually is pompous, portly, and middle-aged, the impression is particularly good.
The cigar as a stage prop to signify plutocracy has been in use at least since Charlie Chaplin’s silent films City Lights and The Gold Rush. And various propped-up stagy plutocrats—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Douglas, Jack Nicholson—are still making good use of it. As did Bill Clinton, who—I have seen photographs that prove it—leaves the band on his cigar. I think this says everything that needs saying about the late Clinton presidency.
But I’ve gotten off the subject. We may never know why a man presents cigars with a birth announcement. But we will know what kind of cigars he’s presenting. And here comes the cigar-bore monologue: “The El Fumigatore Malodoro Grande is a big, noisy, wide-bodied smoke. It has an earthy, dirty flavor of wadded-up plant leaves with an undertone of cedar chips from the bottom of the hampster ca
ge and a loud, stupid finish when the exploding device inside goes off.” Actually, I don’t know how to talk that kind of talk. I’m one of those people who, as I’ve mentioned before, can’t figure out why wine-tasting columns don’t mention getting drunk. That is the point. Nobody would pay $300 for a bottle of ’89 Château Cheval-Blanc if it didn’t pack a wallop. And nobody would inhale the fumes of smoldering vegetable matter from a Cohiba Esplendido if the smoke didn’t contain nicotine.
The fact of the matter is, I’m distributing drugs to commemorate the arrival of my daughter. This would make more sense if nicotine were a drug that produced uncontrollable impulses to set up trust funds for infants or immunized guests against the noises caused by colic. Nonetheless, the alkaloid C10H14N2 does provide a nice little buzz, the kind of high that allows you to keep your wits about you, so you know just how long to linger in the garage until the nappies are clean and the burping has been administered.
Cigars are a mere narcotic. And I am a democrat—in the small d sense—about getting stoned. And yet I confess to a measure of snobbery concerning distinctions among cigars. I can’t buy a box of Phillie Blunts. The kind of people who hollow out their cigars and fill them with marijuana are not a presence in my social set. And I can’t buy any of the good Dominican and Honduran imports because they’re all gone—purchased by au courant types trying to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Douglas, or, more realistically, Ronald Perlman. Besides, I have the most wonderful baby on earth. Only the best will do. And Cuba still makes the best cigars.
Maybe it’s the soil or the climate. Maybe it’s the comely Cuban maidens rolling the cigars on their…actually, they roll them on tables. Maybe it’s just more C10H14N2. But importing Cuban cigars is illegal. There’s a cautionary tale about cigar smuggling in the December 1997 issue of Cigar Aficionado, although a possible dodge is mentioned. A customs agent interviewed at New York’s JFK airport gives his opinion that body-cavity concealment is “still too extreme for cigars.” The mind, however, boggles and so do other parts of the anatomy. This certainly would be a bad way to smuggle lit cigars.
So I didn’t get any Cubans. Specifically, I didn’t get a box of Montecristo No. 4 coronas. And where I didn’t get them—which I can’t tell because then I’d not only be committing a crime but engaging in a criminal conspiracy—was from a certain well-known foreign country. An outfit there will ship cigars in a container labeled MADE IN MEXICO, and no lies are being told because the container is indeed Mexican-made.
Finally I possessed some cigars worthy of my fabulous kid. At $13 apiece, they’d better be. And then I faced another problem. To whom should I give them? Although tobacco is very stylish now, many of my friends are still stuck in the outmoded nineties health fad and haven’t resumed smoking. As for the chic new breed of puffers I know, I sincerely approve of them. A shared vice is a pleasure. It’s also a pleasure to watch a thirty-five-year-old financial hotshot turn pea green as he pretends to enjoy a Romeo Y Julieta Belicosos. And, concerning halitosis among the increasing number of my female acquaintances who indulge, I’m a husband and father and shouldn’t be kissing around anyway. But, all that said, giving really scarce, really good cigars to modish neophytes is like casting pearls before debutantes. They’ll enjoy it, but I will not.
I can’t help suspecting that the trendsetters don’t know an El Rey Del Mundo from a White Owl. And seeing four inches of an Havana H. Upmann stubbed out in the ashtray at a martini bar is enough to make a real addict cry (or steal the butt). This leaves, as recipients of my cigar largesse, men with palates as blackened, clothes as smelly, and suit lapels as full of little singe holes as my own. Most of these fellows are older and richer than myself. They already have cigars, they already have children, too, and grandchildren to boot. I’ve thought it over and decided to hell with them.
I am parting with my cigars very slowly, parceling out just one per day, right after dinner. And every evening, for the next twenty-five nights, you’ll find me with a demitasse of good coffee, a snifter of fine brandy, and a celebratory smoke, in the garage.
Hello! I said, as my godson Nick pulled into that garage. [Nick had insisted on driving the teenage baby-sitter home, even though she lives next door. Oh, to be sixteen again and have the ten-minute loan of a car key bring the joy and sense of liberation that could hardly be produced in a man my age by a gift of a month at the Ritz in Paris.]
“The baby-sitter says I should be planning my 401k retirement account now,” said Nick, looking a bit deflated. “She says it’s important if I’m going to get the kind of surfing and snowboarding opportunities that I want at sixty-five.”
Well, I said, I think you can probably let it wait until the end of summer vacation.
“Yeah, summer vacation,” said Nick, looking more deflated. “I’ve got to go to Joy Counseling.”
Huh? I said.
“Remember when my football team won the championship? Our headmaster believes that all strong emotions can be deeply psychologically disturbing. Not just grief or fear but happiness, too. The whole team has to go to Joy Counseling. It kind of wrecks summer.”
Something always does, I said. For nine long months the memory of summer lays its hold upon me, Nick. Lolling days of sun. Cares brushed away by gentle zephyrs. Pellucid twilights. Sultry evenings—especially when the window AC unit goes out. Madras and poplin and white after Memorial Day. Specifically, white thighs and calves. There’s cruising the islands: Mykonos, Ibiza, Staten. That night in Monte Carlo? A Chevy Monte Carlo. I didn’t break the bank, but I did back into an ATM machine. What about those merry golf outings? Always bogeyed the eighth hole, the one with the spiral ramp and the windmill. Long walks on the beach. Soft sands, soft promises, and a soft roll of flab spilling over my swim-trunk waistband. Mornings on horseback, or on Lawnboy anyway. The scent of fresh grass clippings. And the smell the electric weed whacker makes when its nylon cord gets snarled. Summer, the fragrant time: flowers, new-mown hay, musk, and whatever else was in that aftershave my high school girlfriend gave me. More long walks on the beach—we never did find the car keys. And, best of all, the famous summer moon. That old lady walking her dog was sure surprised when I stuck my butt out the passenger-side window.
But throw nostalgia aside, Nick. Another summer is here. How did a twenty-five-pound dead raccoon get under the cover of the aboveground pool? The living is easy. The charcoal is damp. We’re out of lighter fluid. And we’re going to get this summer off to a great start as soon as we get home from the emergency room and the gasoline blaze in the Weber dies down. Summer is for adventure. Summer is the season of sights and sounds. Did Aerosmith always sound this bad? And what a sight they’re getting to be.
This summer I’m going to do the things I’ve always meant to do. Plant a topiary garden. Learn Italian. Read Middlemarch. Use the nine mandated days of paid vacation before August or lose 60 percent of accumulated holiday time in the subsequent calendar year. And visit my wife’s parents in Des Moines.
I’m going to spend more time with the kids this summer. Like I’ve got a choice. Muffin has to be taken to tennis lessons at 9, swim lessons at 10, tai kwan do lessons at 11, soccer practice at 1, gymnastics at 2, play date at 3, and a birthday party at a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in a suburb on the other side of the moon at 4. Don’t let me forget to stop and buy a gift. Also, I’ll have plenty of time with the kids on the way to Des Moines while they spill grape juice, break the Gameboy, and throw up in the SUV. And, by the time we get back…. Gosh, where did the summer go?
More to the point, why are we sad when it’s gone? Everybody claims to love this time of the year and yet consider:
Summer school
Summer camp
Summer job
Summer love
Summer rental
Summer reruns
Summer soldiers and sunshine patriots
Summer stock performances of Annie Get Your Gun
As an adjective, “summer” is no compliment.
The second-rate, the unimportant, the flimsy, and the stupid predominate from June to September.
Summer is the season of big dumb movies and big dumb books and big dumb me turning crab-boil red at the shore. Nature tricks us with its benign looks, and we wander around outdoors unwary as we’d never be in December. Nobody gets chandelier stroke, coat-and-hat-burn, or cool rash. Summer is when we’re not paying attention. We get confused about things. Daylight savings versus that 401k of yours. You think you’ll retire on a bank account full of extra sunshine after dinner. Temperatures go up, IQs go down. Ghettos do not burn in January and neither do large overfertilized patches of rye grass in my front yard.
The very bliss adults feel at the advent of summer is half-witted. We’re forgetting that we’re not ten. There comes no lovely day in spring when the doors of America’s businesses fly open and employees rush away singing:
Office is out! Office is out!
Management let the monkeys out!
No more faxes! No more phones!
No more taking laptops home!
And, come autumn, adults do not move to a different and perhaps more interesting cubicle where a new and maybe more lackadaisical quality team supervisor will be in charge. Adult life doesn’t even have a proper summer. It just has a period of hot weather with more house-guests, more houseflies, and no fewer house payments. Summer is a sham. Summer is a hoax. Summer, if we think about it, is…