A Tribute to the Cigar Box

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Tribute to the Cigar Box

Cigar boxes are no longer a part of childhood. In an office supply store last week I saw a display of plastic boxes for children for use in school, for storing pens and pencils and glue and scissors and all the other easily-misplaced little impedimenta of very young artists.

Once upon a time, children employed wooden cigars boxes for such purposes; if one’s father didn’t smoke cigars then someone else’s did, and so nice little wooden boxes were as common as 1943 steel pennies. I suppose that if now a child were to carry his art supplies to school in a cigar box he would be sent for therapy and his parents filed on with some state agency for Not Thinking Correctly.

The plastic boxes for sale now contain only air, and to a father that’s disappointing; wooden cigar boxes came filled with, well, cigars, so everyone was happy. Contemporary boxes are filled with nothing more than the chemical aromas of Shanghai, and no one ever celebrated an accomplishment or a birth by lighting up a victory Chinese air molecule.

In another time-space dimension, the birth of a child was celebrated by the proud father handing out cigars to his pals. Upon retrospect one realizes that the young mother probably needed a cigar more than anyone, but such an image would not make an appropriately-sentimental greeting card. One wonders if somewhere there is at least one mother who smokes cigars while holding her infant, in Newton County, perhaps.

For children, though, a cigar box was not about stinky rolls of vegetation being ignited, but rather about creativity. The good old wooden cigar box had two purposes: (1) storage of treasures and (2) as a quarry for building projects.

Childhood is even now manifested in little treasures: a Christmas pocket knife, a rock from the beach, a few illicit firecrackers, coins, marbles, an old watch that doesn’t work. The best pirate’s treasure chest for these valuables is a cigar box, carefully hidden under the bed or in the back of a closet, away from snoopy siblings.

A wooden cigar box was equally useful in its parts for construction projects – wood and those tiny little brass nails. The sides suggested airplane wings, and often became such. The top and bottom could, with care, be split into spans useful for the cabins of aircraft, hulls of boats, or the bodies of cars. With glue and rubber bands and the tiny nails a child could cobble together something that, well, it looked like an airplane to the kid, and no other audience got a voice in the matter.

Children now carry bottled water and little plastic thingies that light up and make noise. If they want to make an airplane they call up a program on one of their little plastic thingies that light up and make noise, tap on its screen, and look passively at a flat image of an airplane. The computer program will even make the “Zoom! Zoom!” noises for them. Oh, well, at least they won’t prick their little fingers with little brass nails.

Last week I had occasion to visit a little storefront on Decatur Street in New Orleans, and inside the store men were rolling cigars and smoking cigars. I bought a few stogies, and the nice young man included with my purchase a real cigar box, made of wood, made in the Dominican Republic. I’m going to have to find a boy to give the box to, maybe around Christmas (“Gee, thanks, Mr. H, a box. Wow. Just what I asked Santa for.”).

And as for the cigars that came in little wooden boxes in the long ago: those of us of a certain generation remember our fathers, strong and lean, young survivors of the Depression and World War II, work-stained in overalls or khakis after a long day on the farm or in the refinery, leaning on the pasture fence and looking over the cows grazing, celebrating life with a gasper, far happier than we can imagine at the joy of simply being alive, of being able to raise a family, of being able to feed their children. No longer rationed by desperate poverty or by whatever supplies survived the trip to the battlefront, they could enjoy more than three cigarettes a week; they could even splurge on that glorious, for-the-silk-hat-set-only luxury, a box of cigars. The cigars weren’t very good, but that wasn’t important. That there were cigars at all was the hard-won celebration for men who had not known much in the way of food or clothes or shoes in boyhood. To them, every cigar was a victory cigar.

They were men – may their eternities include their cigars; God knows they deserve them.

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