Smoke gets in my dreams

It’s almost twenty years since I stopped smoking, but I still dream about cigarettes once in a while. It happened last night:

I walked into Jon’s Pipe Shop, where for three years or so I bought tobacco and cigarette papers. Lorraine, Jon’s mother, was still there working. Did they still have Old Holborn tobacco? Yes, of course. But the packages were skinny little versions of the real thing, and each contained nothing more than a ballpoint-pen refill. And Abadie papers? Yes, of course, but they could only be had from “the warehouse.” So I walked out into an empty cityscape, something like the opening scene in The Asphalt Jungle. I found the warehouse door and knocked. No answer. End of dream.

My family will be happy to know that even in dreams I still haven’t smoked the dang things. And they will attest that the ballpoint refills make sense. When I stopped smoking, pens and pencils became for me the new cigarettes, new objects of consolation.

I learned this morning that Lorraine Callaghan died last year at the age of ninety-three. She was a lovely lady.

A related post
Nineteen years later