Despite all that is going on with the Andiamo project, I found myself in a weird funk all of today. It’s now 3 years to the day since losing Pop, and the pain and loss is still fresh. No matter how well I deal with them in a relative sense throughout the years, I still find these milestones a bit hard to deal with. They always hit me in a weird way.
New Year’s has also been a bit tough for me, because I reflect on flying back to LA on new year’s eve in 2004 to see Pop for the last time. I was lucky to yet again have good people around me who took some of the edge off. This includes a new person, who despite just meeting up that night at a disco in Old Town Cartagena (very drunk I might add). She and her friends made the night really fun for me. She listened and cared as I talked about what I was going through on new year’s morning.
For today’s particular milestone, an old friend had just arrived for a visit to collaborate on a project. So again I was in good company. She noticed I was preoccupied with the project I was involved in, and frustrated at some of the issues happening with it. she asked me how I was doing on this particular day, knowing what had happened three years before.
The night before, I had a strange dream about Pop. We were in some unnamed Latin American locale, just him and me, walking through an outdoor mercado. we were looking for a good deal on Cuban cigars. Pop always loved Cubans, but had a really hard time getting them (and affording them) in the states. They were always a bit elusive to him, and he usually had to make do with the best Dominican or Puerto Rican cigars he can get his hands on.
Anyway, here we were walking around this marketplace. It looked much like Masaya’s market in Nicaragua. We were haggling with various cigar vendors. Bouncing from stall to stall, we looked for the best deal on Cubans. We finally found some Cohiba Especiales and Macanudos that were a really good deal. After the deal was done, we went over to a small outdoor cafe’, ordered a couple of cervezas and lit up, joking and laughing at our good fortune. It felt so real.
The funny thing about all this, was that I used to consider Pop’s cigar smoking an annoyance most times. That cigar smell got everywhere. It was in our cars, in the basement, Pop’s clothes, you name it. Anywhere he was more than five minutes while puffing on his stogie, that smell would remain. When he’d come visit us, I’d ask him to smoke them outside the house, because I didn’t want the smell lingering around. He’d go along most times, but sometimes he didn’t. And it would drive me crazy. Despite him asking me if I wanted to have a cigar with him a few times, I can’t remember ever smoking a whole cigar with Pop, ever.
These days, I’m known to puff on a good Cuban, particularly since I can get them at a pretty nice price in these parts. Not very often, usually at parties or other social gatherings. Sometimes though, I’ll smoke one by myself on deck. I do it just enough for it to remind me of Pop. And maybe to somehow try to make him feel like he got a good deal on Cubans too.