Something said at my father's funeral comes to mind.
And it's enough to make a guy consider taking up smoking.
My older brother and my father built a boat down in the basement of our big old drafty three-story house west of Chicago. (It was quite a house. The basement had a shooting range, and a darkroom, right next to my dad's wonderful old workshop, chock full of tools.)
My father was a civil engineer, and my brother, in his teens at the time, would go on to become a mechanical engineer. Both were way too smart to build a boat they couldn't get out the basement door when it was finished.
But, it was close.
My brother painted our old house (one day stepping off a ladder into a bucket full of paint) to earn the money for the plans and the lumber to build the little speedboat he'd take out on the nearby DesPlaines River.
In a nod to the Nautilus submarine cruise under the North Pole at the time, they named their boat the “Naughty Lass.” It had wings painted on both sides. (My father never did anything half-way.)
At our father's funeral in 1996, my brother said the two of them would work on the boat in the evenings and on weekends, meticulously completing each task, step by step. My dad's old Craftsman table saw – integral to the project - just SANG when you switched it on.
They boiled long pieces of lumber to form the curved gunwales of the boat, in an old piece of gutter out on the driveway, heated by piles of charcoal.
They'd complete one step in the project as perfectly as they could, then move on to the next. And every couple of hours, our dad would step back, light up a cigarette, lean against his cluttered workbench, squint his eyes a little, and think. (He came from an era when cigarettes were considered OK, and they even put them in c-rations in WWII.)
My brother noticed that smoking that cigarette – they were Camels – was somehow integral to the thinking process.
Time to take a break. Time to think. Light up. Plan the next step.
I was thinking about this as I sat out on our back porch the other day, enjoying the nice weather, the prairie, the blue sky, and watching the world go by on I-80 and the railroad.
And missing a frosty can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Just like those relaxing few minutes smoking a Camel, a can of Pabst out on the porch in the late afternoon was a favorite time to sit back and take stock.
I had to cut back on the Pabst, though, just like my dad ultimately had to give up his Camels. But I feel like an important step in the process is somehow missing.
In Nebraska, I worked at a paper where none of the department heads smoked, except one – the press foreman.
Couple times a day he would go out on the loading dock for a smoke, joining smokers from throughout the building.
As a result, that guy knew every bit of juicy gossip there was to know at that paper. If one of your key people was getting ready to quit, the press foreman probably heard all about it a week earlier, and why.
It was a strange little fraternity of damaged lungs, out there on the smoky loading dock, where secrets weren't so secret.
About the last thing a guy should be writing about is the virtues of tobacco in these health conscious times.
And I'm sure sorry about it.
But, for guys like my dad, it afforded an essential opportunity to stop working for a moment, take a skeptical look at whatever they were building, and plan the next step.
Not a bad thing.
By the way, that little boat my dad and my brother built in the basement turned out to be one sweet little runabout, plying the DesPlaines River and pulling water skiers on Lake Michigan.
The Naughty Lass.
And, like it or not, I gotta give some of the credit to those Camel cigarettes.
Dave Simpson can be contacted at DaveSimpson145@hotmail.com
