Yesterday was a day for disappointment for some Canadian Olympic fans.  The U.S beat our hockey team by a score of 5-3. The last goal went into our Canadian open net…..  Nooooooooooo !!!!!  Well, the fat lady hasn’t sung yet and so we still have to wait to see what will happen as far as medals are concerned.  I, along with millions of Canadians, am feeling optimistic that we’ll get the gold.

Last night my brother and I, along with my nephew watched the Canadian Women get beat by the women’s rink form China.  Curling is be a sport that Canadian players should rule, but last night we watched 4 very capable Chinese curlers outplay and outscore our women by a score of 6-5 in the 11th (extra) end.  Something is amiss and I believe I have the answer……..

Yesterday I met up with members of my family and smoked NON-COHIBA cigars…… Yes, I know I know….. What was I thinking?????   Well, from now on, where pivotal games are concerned, I’m going to be bringing Cohiba cigars of all varieties and sizes.  Maybe the results of the Olympic games DON’T rely of what cigar I choose to smoke……But……. From now on I’m not taking any chances!!!!!! Cohiba Cigars ARE luckier!!!!!!!!!

Today will be a fine day to see if there are any Steelhead in the Chilliwack river.  The sun is shining, it hasn’t rained in days and the river’s clarity will probably be impressive.  Problem is….. Sun, clarity and low levels of water are the worst conditions you can look for when going after Steelhead. You may wonder why I’m so excited about packing up my waders, boots, equipment and real smelly bait so I can probably get skunked… Well….. I think its time to sit by a river and smoke another Cohiba piramides EL 2006.

I have a lot of confidence that the Canadian Olympic hockey team will do just fine on the ice against the U.S. and so maybe sitting on the side of the river with an awesome cigar will somehow channel confidence into the universe to help our guys kick some butt!! There is another reason why I want to get out of Dodge this afternoon.  My neighbor is a recent transplant from the good ol’ USA and I don’t want to be in the neighborhood on the off chance that we DON’t win……. I highly doubt it though….

Tell ya what….. I’ll let you know what happens to me on the river and give all of you a report on the kind of day I’ll end up having.  Will there be a fish in my future?????  Will the Canadian men’s hockey team be victorious??  How will my Cohiba taste out in the sun on the side of a river??  I think that as you read this you’ll only be able to answer the third!!!!  Wish us all luck!

Last night my neighbor drove home after work and so I thought I’d walk over and see how his feelings were towards me since the day my outboard motor was catapulted over the hedge dividing our pieces of property and landed on his new Lexus causing both gas driven pieces of machinery to go up in flames.  Through the years we’ve spent a lot of time together on our back decks, smoking cigars, discussing world affairs and complaining about the government.  We are both cigar smokers and I felt that a good idea would be to present him with a gift of 10 aged Cohiba Robustos as a bit of an olive branch.

This guy is a bit of a volatile character who pushes the boundaries of anyone’s patience whenever dealing with him.  He is one of these guys that never really listens to you when you speak but merely waits for his chance to blurt out the first thing that comes into his mind, regardless of whether or not your feelings get destroyed in the process.  I’ve met his father a few times and when they say that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, I guess they ( whoever they are ) were, pretty much, describing this guy to a tee.  Like everything else, if you put in enough time to get to know someone, or something, you’ll eventually see the good side of people.

These cigars are favorites of his and mine, we’ve smoked quite a few over the years and these particular cigars were worth their weight in gold.  In other words, I didn’t want to part with them but sometimes peace in the neighborhood is invaluable.  All lawsuits are off and all ill feelings are eliminated.. Women will sometimes give flowers, wine, pieces of jewelry  as gifts to their friends but men will always be able to conquer any battle with a gift of quality tobacco.  Its been that way for centuries!!!!!

Last night an old friend dropped by and we took an old TV out on to the back deck and watched Olympic highlights and smoked a few cigars.  Once again I am reminded that Oban single malt Scotch whiskey pairs so nicely with Cohiba cigars.  Last night we broke into my supply of Cohiba Siglo II’s… Having bought them at the Vancouver Cigar Company 4 years ago, the rest allowed them to age nicely and revealed that the mellower side of Cohiba cigars is as intoxicating and pleasing as some of the more powerful members of the Cohiba family.

This little mareva has a length of 5 inches and a 42 ring gauge which can take up an hour and a half of your time if you are a slow smoker with bit of patience.  A very surprising fact about this smaller cigar is that it often reveals a lot of the same flavors that it’s big brothers have to offer: grass, chocolate, coffee and cocoa mixed in with wood and if you have a delicate palate, even a slight note of cinnamon.  It almost sounds like the description one would hear about the Cohiba Robusto but a lot milder and even sweeter at times.

The one joy I have in life ( I have quite a few ) is noticing how a burst of caramel can come rushing on to the scene after swallowing a mouthful of fine Scotch and then taking a puff of a good cigar.  The taste buds can reveal a lot of secrets that are hidden in Cuba’s soil and the fantastic tobacco that is produced on that Island.

I guess I have a lot on my plate today and any thoughts of taking advantage of this nice weather and hitting a few balls around a golf course may have to be postponed for a day or two.  This is still February and we have a long season ahead of us golfers…… Season???? Actually, we golf 12 months a year so the season never really ends. My recent road trip to visit western Canadian friends resulted in one nightmare after another and to tell you the truth I’m feeling a bit tentative when the thought of leaving the safety of my home occurs to me.  Why don’t I start off small by opening the sliding door that leads out to the back deck, reaching out with one hand holding a small mirror tilted upward to make sure no lurking raptors are perched on an eavestrough over my head.

If you are visiting this site for the first time, scroll down to ” Cohiba Road Trip” and follow my travels into the unknown, then all this will make more sense…..

My neighbor is at work and I felt safe to sit out back with something that would be perfect for an early afternoon smoke.  My humidor yielded one final Cohiba Coronas Especiales that had been with me for a few years.  I was given a gift of 5 of these smaller ring gauge ( 38 ) cigars a few years back and they have been mellowing nicely in their own corner of the humidor.  Cohiba has seemed to have blended a real beanfest with this one, tons of vanilla moving towards chocolate but finishing off the final third tasting woody and peppery.

I sat quietly smoking, listening to songbirds and contemplating a trip down to Cuba in the next few months.  April/May seem to be perfect months to go down and I need to stock up on hard to find Cuban cigars for summer golf and fishing!

Getting out of Regina, just in time, and starting my trek home to the west coast would take a few days if I took it easy and tried not to get any speeding tickets.  I wanted to soak in the scenery through the Rocky Mountains and try to forget the countless mishaps I had experienced since I left home, besides, why was I in such a hurry to face my neighbor and hear all about the law suit and the war he would wage on me after seeing his new Lexus go up in flames.  For the time being, all I wanted to do was watch the sky change colors in my rear view mirror as the sun rose in the east which was all very inspiring and made me wonder how many colors would be needed to accurately paint that scene on canvas.  We’ve all sat in restaurants and shopped in stores that have ceilings someone has painted in a ham handed fashion with blue and white paint, depicting wispy cirrus clouds, low to the ground stratus clouds or the big Kahuna of all clouds, the mighty and picturesque Cumulus.  I’ve often looked upward to these tacky ceilings and always felt that there was something missing….. How about 16 more colors!!!!  In every sky where clouds and sunlight are present you will be able to locate purples, reds, yellows, grays, pinks and I don’t know how many shades of blue.  I was able to see all of these colors in my rear view mirror plus an oscillating black dot that was growing in diameter and starting to block out the full spectrum of color behind me in the east.

Like many times in this road trip, I started to feel extreme discomfort when I realized that this wasn’t a vehicle on the road behind me but something flying in the air and gaining on me by the second.  I sped up to 70 miles per hour on the Trans-Canada Highway but the dot, which now I could detect was no longer a dot but some type of bird, kept closing in on the back of the car.  At 90 miles per hour the bird, which I could now identify as being a hawk, passed me, appeared in my vision a few feet away from the windshield and dropped a little bloody rodent on the hood of my car.  The bloody, sandy colored carcass of a perforated gopher slid up the hood towards me and got one of it’s hind legs snagged in the driver’s side windshield wiper.  After an unsuccessful attempt at trying to free this mottled crimson prairie dog with the wipers at high speed, I was left with a perfect arc of pink on the windshield in my line of vision and a lifeless prairie cadaver staring at me as it quivered in the wind all the way to the next gas stop.

I was in no mood to play the role of ” Roadkill Funeral Director” so I decided to pay the few cents extra for fuel when I pulled into the full serve stall at the Chevron station on the outskirts of Swift Current.  I politely asked the pimple faced kid who came up to my car if he’d take care of the crime scene, check the oil and squeegee the red streak from the hood ornament to the driver’s side wiper, then I made my way inside to get a coffee and some Rolaids.  After paying for the gas I decided against the slow paced drive to a sleepy hotel on the other side of the Alberta border, it was time to make tracks for the coast.

Alberta came and went without any incident, as did the majority of British Columbia.  As I was driving into Kamloops, I guess I  must have been going over the speed limit after I noticed the dazzling red and blue flashing lights in my rear view mirror.   The rather good natured RCMP asked me why I was in such a hurry, as I handed him my driver’s license and insurance papers.  I told him that I was on my way back to Vancouver after attending a funeral in Saskatchewan for my uncle who was a retired cop.  The youngish rookie proudly announced that he was from Saskatchewan and used to drive tractors and shoot gophers ( Hey, I like this guy ) on a small farm where he grew up, just outside of Oxbow. He told me to slow down, handed me my papers and walked back to the patrol car.

After four and a half more hours of driving in the dark through the mountains, then into the Fraser valley, I finally got to see the lawn damage in my front yard and heard the cracking of fiberglass under my tires as I crept into the driveway up to what used to be a sea worthy vessel.  I was in no mood to survey any other damage to my hedge or peer into my neighbor’s yard so I unlocked the front door and made a beeline to my humidor. The first cigar I had smoked on this unholy journey was a Cohiba Magicos and I felt that it was time to set fire of the foot of my last one.

There are those who love to experience the unknown in life and will get into their cars and drive into the night to destinations that are new and exciting and there are those who love to curl up into a fetal position on the floor with a tumbler of Scotch and a good cigar.  I was now firmly rooted into the second category.

Walking into a kitchen in the morning with the smell of bacon in the air will automatically cleanse your soul, wake you up and bring you back to those days of your youth when your mother made the type of feel good breakfast that stuck to your ribs until noon.  The dentist’s wife set a steaming cup of coffee in front of me and said, “Mama has just what you need to start the day off right.”  I saw that there was an elaborate art deco decanter of amber maple syrup in front of my plate which told me that pancakes and bacon would be just around the corner. I mentioned that I was really hungry and all I heard was, “Quit your squeaking, you’ll be eaten in a second!”  A moment later a two foot high stack of golden pancakes surrounded by strips of bacon appeared on my plate.

Although Canadian Maple syrup is very sweet, I know that it contains manganese and is a good source of zinc so instead of being shy, because I know real maple syrup CAN be expensive, I poured almost 3 cups of the miraculous reduced tree sap on my stack of pancakes.  With all of the healthy qualities the syrup contains, I felt no guilt about stuffing 4 slices of fatty bacon into my mouth and swallowed them in one gulp. The smoky flavor of the bacon had an almost hypnotic effect on me so I snatched 4 more slices off my plate and gulped them back.  For some unknown reason I knew I needed to be alone in the room so got up out of my chair, walked to the front closet and picked out a pretty blue umbrella, brought it back into the kitchen and opened it up at the table over my head…. No one could see me now… I was safe and alone..

Just as I was going to start the demolition of the enormous pancake tower, little rivers of syrup formed along the tower walls and flowed down, causing quite a moat around the edge of the plate. A swelling formed inside the top pancake, growing bigger and more bulbous which forced a crack, big enough for a small head with an immaculate hairstyle to push through revealing that I now was in the presence of a very tiny David Bowie dressed in a gopher suit pulling himself up and standing on this mountain of fried dough.  I was Goliath and he was David, the future king of Israel and I knew that unless I did something fast, history would repeat itself and I’d be just another smoted chump from the Old Testament.  I thought of maybe stabbing him in the forehead with my fork when he reached into one of his gopher pockets and revealed that he was in possession of  a miniature golden, scale model of the Cuban mansion, El Laguito, the birthplace and factory of Cohiba cigars. He held it with both hands in display over his head to give it some fresh air which gave me the moment I needed to go for the fork.  As I made the attempt to seize my stainless steel trident, he slipped the miniature golden architectural marvel into a small leather sling, swung it three times in a circular motion and let it fly in a bright golden beam towards my temple.  My torso fell forward and the last thing I remembered was that my lungs were filling up with maple syrup.

Too much Scotch and two hours of cigar smoke just before hitting the sack will do it every time.  I turned on the lamp beside the bed and looked at my watch which told me that it was only 5:30 AM….. The fact that I was in a cold sweat and felt my heart pounding told me that I wasn’t about to get back to sleep any time soon, so maybe if I looked around in the bedroom for something to read I’d settle down enough to get a few more hours of shuteye before breakfast. Well…..Maybe I’d just have coffee and skip breakfast. I got up and saw a few Cosmo magazines in a pile but…. well….. you know…… I opened up the closet and saw a small set of shelves which held a stack of National Geographic magazines so I reached for the one that promised to reveal the secrets of the Pyramids.  After getting back into bed and propping up a few pillows, I opened the magazine and a small manilla envelope dropped out and landed on my chest.

People use envelopes all the time for bookmarks so nothing seemed out of the ordinary and I flipped through the magazine until I located the egyptian special.  I’ve always been interested in the different theories relating to the building of the pyramids. Talk about the unbelievable determination required to complete a task of that magnitude with the simple tools they had at their disposal.  I read a few more paragraphs and then skimmed over a few pages with amazing photographs of the interior of King Tut’s burial chamber filled with so many priceless artifacts that have since gone missing.  I think I was ready to go back to sleep when I saw a section at the back of the magazine with a special on prairie dogs…. That was all I needed.. I set the magazine down and decided to take a peek inside the envelope.

I instantly knew I was in over my head when I saw that these were photographs of my dentist friend’s wife and what appeared to be a happy family on vacation in Disney World.. This was not just a bunch of strangers’ faces posing with Mickey and Minnie Mouse in front of the castle.  There was Mickey, there was the dentist’s wife, there was Minnie, there was a happy little girl eating ice cream, there was a crying young boy  and holding his hand was the Giant Gopher cult leader.  All desire to sleep was now gone and I felt my heart race again as I leafed through the rest of the photos in the envelope and started to notice a real resemblance between the children in the pictures and the woman that was sleeping upstairs with my friend, the dentist. The young girl in the Disney World pics was a miniature version of the woman holding her hand as they are buying balloons, as they are posing in wild west costumes and as they are standing in line for ice cream. These were the same children I saw being dragged through the shopping Mall a few days ago in Calgary.

The last picture I looked at before stuffing them back into the envelope, back into the National Geographic and back into the closet told me that it was time to pack my bags and leave Regina before the sun came up. Leave Regina before my host and hostess noticed I was gone. The last picture was taken in front of the Universal Studios sign in Orlando.  Standing in the picture was my friend’s wife, a young girl who I was now convinced was her daughter, a serious faced young boy, the Giant Gopher Head cult leader and.. My friend the Dentist !!!

The roads were clear of all traffic as I made my way out of Regina at that time of morning.. My cel phone was turned off, the car windows were half open and the only sound I wanted to hear was the rushing fresh prairie morning air to clear my head of all memories of my road trip…… Well, maybe not the Cohiba Double Corona EL 2003… I would do my very best to hold on to that flavorful experience…….

After walking blindly into one of the biggest nightmares of my life with the giant gopher and the room full of pyramid power gopher roadkill devotees, I thought I’d stick around Regina for an extra day or two so I could get some background on the leader of this misguided cult.  I needed to find out his name.. I needed to find out where he lived….. I needed to put my brain to work and have a little fun, the kind of fun that Saint Peter shakes his head and questions you about when you show up at the pearly gates… THAT kind of fun… This wasn’t over….. Not by a long shot!!!

I made a promise to myself that I’d say nothing to my dentist buddy about his wife’s new group of friends, she was a nice person and all but, at this point in her life, maybe a bit lost.  I was going to tell him that, in my opinion, he needed to simply give her a bit of space…. Hey, I didn’t marry her, let the buyer beware! I knew that if I was supportive and understanding about Squeaky’s horrible trip to meet his maker, my friend’s wife would probably tell me what I needed to know about the cult leader, I’d pry it out of her.  She’d start singing like a meadowlark and give me his home phone number and address, where he worked and his boss’s name and number too…… For the next day or so I made it my life’s purpose to find out EVERYTHING !!! I think it was time to turn on the recording app in the new cel phone I picked up that morning, hide it in my shirt pocket and help her make dinner.. ooooo, I’m such a sensitive guy, ooooooo I love helping out in the kitchen….. oooooo I love gophers…….. ooooooo I love chopping up carrots…… What is the giant gopher’s first name???? ………. That’s right, nice and easy see, one name at a time, see.. One little bit of information at a time………….. This would take a day or two, but I’m a patient man….. Reeeeeeal patient!!!!!

Being a dentist is a vocation in life that requires a whole lot of compassion tempered with a thick skin which comes in handy whenever the 10 year old patient’s blood curdling screams echo through the clinic.  You have to continue scraping, gouging, needling, hacking and stabbing at those nasty rotting gums and molars so little junior can go back home and survive another 6 months on a strict diet of caramel, sucrose, dextrose, corn syrup, fudge, taffy, fructose, sugar cookies, icing, brownies, cotton candy, bubble gum, Colas, chocolate bars, ice cream, gummy bears, gummy worms, gummy cola bottles, licorice ( both red and black), angel food cake, halloween candies, peanut brittle and pie……… But you know for sure that the next time the poor little fellow gets dragged into your dentist’s office he’ll take one look at your grinning face and shrivel up in horror because he knows the scraping, gouging and hacking is going to start all over again……….. I can’t help but think that dentists must go home at night and reach for the Scotch bottle before dropping the car keys on the kitchen counter…… I know I would, and thats just what my dentist friend did when he came home that night..

After dinner we sat on his back deck and started the evening off right with a few ounces of 30 year old Whyte and Mackay.  This is a blended Scotch which is a bright golden mahogany in color and smoother than a 10 dollar vanilla milkshake. Now I am a fairly stubborn, uppity, single malt drinker but the first sip told me to shut up, sit back and learn something for a change.  What came next was maybe the most memorable part of my trip so far, and if you’ve been paying any attention to this blog you’ll know that there will probably be a few of this trip’s memories that will cause me to scream in my sleep until the day my heart finally blows up.  My friend brought out a table top humidor, placed it on the small cedar table between our chairs and I swear I heard a chorus of Hallelujahs sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir when he opened the lid.  He had been aging a box of Cohiba Double Coronas EL 2003 and said that tonight was the night to finally taste one with his oldest and dearest friend…. Me…  I felt a lump form in my throat when I inhaled the beautiful barnyard aroma wafting out of the humidor and I think I had a tear in my eye when he asked me to pick one.

There are reasons why aged cigars taste the way they do.  The time spent in the humidor allows the leaves to further ferment and go through many evolutions of flavor and if you’ve started out with the best quality tobacco possible, you’ll end up with priceless cigars after a few years of aging. A few more years and you’ll end up with what we were smoking that night on the back deck. This incredible double corona had all of the usual Cohiba traits but the grassiness was mellower, the pepper was sweeter, and the bean flavors were simply perfect.  Three or four drinks later and I felt that I was happier than I had ever been in my life and my dentist buddy said the same, there we were, two of the best friends that ever sat on a back deck drinking aged Scotch whiskey and smoking pricey, aged, limited edition cigars.  I loved this guy maybe more than I ever loved my brothers, parents or even Dave Ridgway, of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the day he kicked the winning field-goal to take the Grey Cup away from the Hamilton Tiger-Cats with 9 seconds left on the clock, back in ‘89.

With love in my heart, Scotch in my glass and a priceless Cohiba in my hand I thought that maybe now would be the time to tell my dentist buddy about his wife’s gopher cult.  He was my best friend and the kind-hearted part of me knew that he needed to understand why she was acting so strange but as I looked over to the telephone pole in his neighbor’s yard, I imagined Squeaky’s final muted scream as his throat was torn away by one of nature’s powerful raptors and my own need for revenge on the Giant Gopher Cult leader was far too strong.

My Calgary buddy was a great host but after giving him the cursed Esplendido and hearing about his company’s comptroller cleaning him out I felt that maybe I should move on to the next stop in my “quickly becoming a total disaster” road trip…. REGINA….. The Queen city of the Plains… Home of the Saskatchewan ” Roughriders”…

My dentist buddy was really happy to hear that I was on my way to his town since his household was getting a bit tense between him and his wife after the demise of her pet gopher “Squeaky”.  Seems Squeaky was catching a few rays in the back yard a few weeks ago and was carried off by a hawk that came screaming down from the clouds like a supersonic F-18.  What made matters worse is that my friend’s wife was in the kitchen and saw the whole thing unfold.  She ran into the back yard and heard her little gopher squeaking as it’s captor flew into their neighbor’s yard and sat perched on a telephone pole.   She stood there and stared in horror as the hawk grasped the little gopher in its talons and tore it to shreds leaving tufts of hide and fur to come wafting to the ground for the crows to carry away.

The poor woman then joined a support group that helped give her closure but my buddy said that since that day she had been acting a little weird.

What was I walking into???

When I pulled up to their house my buddy was at work and his wife met me at the door, gave me a hug, and asked me if I would go with her to the church to help her pick up some boxes.  She jumped into my car and we had a few laughs as we drove along but I could sense that something wasn’t quite right with how she kept staring at me.  She seemed to look through me with this blank stare and kept saying that everything in her life is now complete ever since she met a group of new friends that really want to help her become all that she can be.  Huh??  We drove up to the church and she led me down stairs into the church basement.

I noticed a musky smell in the church basement as we walked down a narrow dark hallway to a door that had a white paper sign saying, ” Power of our Galaxy “.  My friends wife reached down to a cardboard box at the foot of the door and pulled out what looked like a pyramid fashioned out of a coat hanger which she put on her head.  She knocked three times and then closed her eyes and started to howl like a tortured coyote.  The door opened and the next thing I noticed was a very foul smell coming out of the dimly candle lit room we were walking into.  Approximately 20 people, all wearing coat-hanger pyramid hats were standing in the room and as soon as we entered they all started howling like coyotes, making it official…. I had walked into a nightmare !

I was led to a chair in the middle of the room and told to have a seat.  Everyone else dragged chairs into a circle surrounding me and it started to become apparent, I was the guest of honor.   After sitting down I was handed a small shoe box and told to keep it closed until, “the moment of my cleansing”…. Huh???  I was also handed my own coat-hanger pyramid hat but when I refused to put it on my head the mood in the room changed for the worse.  Almost on cue half the people were either barking and growling like rabid dogs and the rest started cawing like crows which finally ended when I put the pyramid on my head. After everyone in the room was seated and things settled down I heard a door open and some shuffling as someone dressed in a furry costume with a gigantic gopher head hopped into the circle of chairs and kept hopping up and down as it sprayed me with ketchup from a squeezable bottle.  This lasted for about 30 seconds and I felt paralyzed until the stuff he was spraying on me started burning my skin and eyes.  I jumped up and started tearing at my clothes, ripping them off so I could get this evil bloody burning sensation to come to an end when the barking, growling and cawing began again.

Now I’m totally naked and exposed to a bunch of strangers, and I mean strange, when the giant gopher yelled something about me being dirty which got the crowd chanting, “Dirty Dirty Dirty”.  The giant gopher saw that I had dropped the taped up shoe box and motioned for me to pick it up and sit back down which seemed to relax the rest of the pyramid heads… The chanting stopped….  My friend’s wife stood up, walked over to me and asked me why I had made so many mistakes in my life and why I wanted the animals to suffer.. This seemed funny to me so I broke out in a nervous laughter….,.  more barking, growling and cawing….. I stopped laughing…….

The mood in the room became more relaxed when the giant gopher asked everyone in the room to pick up the boxes under their chairs and put them on their laps.  People started smiling and caressing their boxes, a few people were kissing them when I heard the giant gopher say, “Music…” and Joe Cocker’s ” You Are So Beautiful” started playing from a tinny sounding stereo somewhere in the back of the room.  Everyone except the big gopher, who was still hopping up and down, stood up and danced around with their shoe boxes held over their heads until the song stopped and thats when the gopher asked me if I was clean….. Dead silence in the room………. This time a little louder, “ARE YOU CLEAN ? “….. I whimpered that yes, I WAS clean just so I could shut him up and thats when the door flew open and two smaller gophers ran into the room and soaked me with 2 pails of warm soapy water.  I was given a stack of paper towels and told to dry myself off, which was the best thing that happened to me all day until I was told to get dressed after being handed a shopping bag that contained my own fuzzy gopher costume !  I was cold… The costume looked warm and fuzzy…… I put on the gopher costume…

If I thought that my day had been a bit weird so far, I was really in for a treat when I was told to open my shoe box. I wasn’t about to encourage any of the pyramid people to start barking, growling and cawing so after I sat back down I managed to get the top off the shoe box and almost lost my lunch. Inside my own personal shoe box I saw 3 or 4 ( I couldn’t tell) dead rotting gophers which appeared to have been scraped off a highway with a putty knife.  The giant hopping gopher then asked me if I would pray over my gophers, love my gophers and give him $500 to be a part of the “Movement for the Advancement of Gopher Awareness in our Galaxy”.. I reached down to my red stained clothes on the floor beside me and found my wallet which had a few personal cheques inside and started writing ………. He stopped hopping and said that I’d have to stay at the church overnight until the cheque cleared which was a situation, I don’t mind saying, that just wasn’t working for me.  I asked him if he’d settle for $160 cash and he seemed good with that and removed his giant gopher head and revealed who he was.  No way…… It couldn’t be……….

I stopped dead in my tracks when the Joseph Stalinesque man stood before me.  You know, the guy who was being mean to his kid at the mall….. You know, the guy who left his cigars beside me as he berated his kid………. You know…. THE CIGAR GUY FROM CALGARY !!!!!!  This couldn’t be……. Did he just fly into town?  He smiled, came over and looked me straight in the eye and said that I was family.. I was loved… I now  belong….. I wanted to kill him……..

Someone announced that coffee and cake was being served upstairs in the church and, to be honest, I couldn’t wait to get out of that foul smelling chamber of road kill. I didn’t have much of an appetite but I wasn’t about to start irritating anyone, so cake it was……. I noticed that a few pyramid people were standing outside on the front steps of the church when I got an idea. I walked over to my car in the gopher suit and found the cursed Cohiba Esplendido, I knew that there was one cigar smoker in the congregation of pyramid weirdos and I knew it was HIS turn to take a walk into the darkness.  I lit up a Siglo I and offered the Esplendido to Mr. Joseph Stalin Gopher-head.  I didn’t care that I was the only one on the steps dressed like a gopher, I didn’t care that I was being sugary sweet to one of the biggest jerks I’d ever seen, I only wanted him to experience some catastrophe….. any catastrophe….. I’d kneel down and pray to a shoe box full of rotting gophers if I knew that he’d experience some sort of Catastrophe.. After a few minutes of smoking together he said that it was the best tasting cigar he had ever had the pleasure to smoke and I nodded and smiled and kept my fingers crossed.

He was very grateful that I offered him the Esplendido and started to tell me something about losing a few cigars yesterday when he looked over into the street and remarked on the number of crows that just landed on his car.

After leaving Lethbirdge and my misguided friend who was setting out on a journey to nowhere with his standup comedy career, I drove through the night to Calgary to see my oil and gas workaholic buddy and maybe settle in for some R&R in that little cow-town in the foothills.  I was feeling exhausted by the time I pulled into his driveway and was very grateful that he left the back door open for me, I let myself in, found one of the spare bedrooms on the ground floor of his house and drifted off to sleep until 3:00 PM the next day.  I woke up to find a beautiful sunny day almost over and decided to go pick up some Cuban rum at one of the many liquor stores in his neighborhood in southwest Calgary.

I needed a coffee before my shopping trip and stopped in to one of the many malls in that town to find one.  Aaaaahh, there’s nothing like a double espresso in the morning, well afternoon in this case, and as I sat down to do some people watching I heard a bit of a commotion coming my way.  There was a small family walking towards the bench I was sitting on and the loudest sound echoing down the hall was coming from this crying 4 or 5 year old boy who had just fallen down and was yanked back to his feet by his father who had an irritated demeanor  and an even louder voice as he set his bags down on my bench, shook his son and told him that trouble was in his future when they got to the car.  The fuming man picked up his bags and then directed his frightened family to the nearest exit.

I was speechless and felt disgusted at this man’s behavior towards his young son when I looked over beside me and saw that a bag had been left behind.  When I looked at the writing on the bag and then looked inside I found myself at a moral crossroads because of it’s contents.  The bag was from a cigar store and what I found inside were 3 lovely, longer length cigars with Cohiba bands in a sturdy zip-lock bag and a small box of wooden matches.  There was a receipt in the bag saying that these were Esplendidos and I felt that if I didn’t hurry to return these cigars to their rightful owner I’d be too late.  This was where I took a wrong turn down one of life’s many highways and instead of chasing after this Joseph Stalinesque despot I sat there and re-lived all of the moments in my youth  when authoritative figures had been unfair and heavy handed towards me.

With a few bottles of dark rum and my new found 7 inch freebie cigars I returned back to my friend’s expansive home for a great dinner, some beautiful red wine and stories of some of the more foolish moments of our youth before settling into his smoke-friendly den.  I thought I detected the subtle stench of sulfur enter the room and you could see and feel things rapidly change as soon as the flames from our torches licked the feet of these Cohibas.  We continued to laugh and reminisce, and I have to say, these were very tasty cigars but, in no time, the hair on the back of my neck started to rise and my skin went cold.  The phone rang….

I watched the color drain from my friend’s face as spoke into the phone and blankly stare at me as he kept repeating, ” I’ll kill him…… I’m going to kill him!”  I continued to hear this mantra when my own cel phone vibrated in my shirt pocket, I hit the green button and strained to make sense out of the screaming on the other end of the line saying something about a flying outboard boat motor and lawyers surgically removing my scalp with some rusty garden shears. After a moment or two I recognized that I was talking to my next door neighbor telling me about some runaway dump-truck careening  across my lawn, smashing into  my “uninsured” boat in my driveway and launching my brand new 90 horse outboard engine over our hedge and through the windshield of his Lexus which was now on fire. I tried to explain that I wasn’t hiding upstairs with my curtains closed but out of town and that maybe instead of calling the law firm of Damian, Beelzebub and Lucifer, the fire department should be contacted.  I told him that I’d be home in a few days and that there was no need to exact any revenge, we were bigger than that and could settle this like adults.

My host hung up his phone about the same time I hit the red button on mine and for the next few moments we sat in silence smoking what could be the best Cohibas we’d ever run across.  He then stood up , carefully set his cigar into the ashtray without knocking off the ash, took a sip from his rock glass of rum then hurled it past my head into the shattering mirror on the wall behind the leather chair I was sitting in.  I sat without moving while my friend took another puff all the while being mindful of the ash which was still intact then told me that the comptroller of his company went into the safe, removed about $900,000 in cash and stock certificates then left town. My phone rang again and this time I was speaking to a very angry dump truck driver saying that my lawn was overly wet and slick and that I owed him for a new dump truck.

I hung up my cel phone, turned it off, put it back into it’s leather case, went over to the wet bar and opened a can of cola.  I found a beautiful fresh lime in the small refrigerator under the bar, cut a generous wedge, squeezed it and dropped it into a tall glass then reached for the rum.  This was a rather expensive 15 year old Metusalem Gran Reserva and maybe should be consumed without any mix but this was a special occasion and I was in a special mood, I thought 3 ounces would be just about perfect.  After dropping 3 or 4 ice cubes into the rum I reached for the cola and poured almost half the can into the glass.  I took my cel phone and placed it into the glass of rum, lime and ice then topped up the drink with a bit more cola.

I wondered what would have happened if I would have hurried out the door of the mall to return the forgotten cigars to the tyrant and his family.  Would this evening’s events been a little less memorable?  Perhaps I unknowingly opened the gates of hell and unleashed demons into my Calgarian friend’s den and life would never be the same for the both of us. I sat down with my drink and finished the final third of the best cigar I have ever smoked and will probably ever smoke in my life…. Well I did have 1 left………..