I was out early this morning in the woods out back. The weather was fine, 58 degrees, sunny and low humidity. The birds were singing and the weedy flowers were starting to bloom. After working for hours, I had shed my jacket, scarf and sweatshirt and was feeling somewhat tired. The winter has been so harsh I haven’t been out working for months. I realized I had forgotten to have breakfast, so I walked back to the house, sat down and popped the top on a cold one and sat down to plan my next move. I have found out that drinking a beer or two helps make those tough decisions a lot easier.
I lit up my smoke and thought back some sixty years ago. In those days cigarette loads were popular. Guys would buy them and insert them into the end of a cigarette and then cover them with tobacco removed earlier. They would save the smokes with the loads in them for their mooching friends. When the mooch would ask to borrow a cigarette, they would hand him the one with the load in it and then light it for the borrower. After two or three puffs the load would explode, blowing the end off the smoke and scaring the mooch half to death. Thus ended the mooch borrowing of one’s smoking materials.
That reminded me of one of Grandma Mickey’s (Joyce’s mother) stories. She bought some cigarette loads back in the late thirties. She stuffed one of the loads in her Father’s pipe. The old man lit up and started puffing on it when the load exploded. Because it was a pipe the bowl was pointed up instead of a smoke pointed away from the person. The exploding pipe blasted fiery tobacco clumps up and they landed on the old man’s head, burning his hair and scalp. The kids laughed, but pop saw no humor in it at all. Practical jokes are always funny, unless you are the victim.
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