Crispy Leg-Pulling

I’ve always found something comforting in the crackle of tobacco and the hiss of burning rolling paper. With the springboard of a striking match or a clicking lighter, the sound is practically music. Breathing adds originality to the composition, with short, quick inhalations and exhalations sounding a bit like a series of staccatos, and those with long deep expresses reminiscent of a fortissimo.

My dad, or papa, as we called him, would always roll his own cigarettes. He claimed the rolling was therapeutic. He’d come home, weary from work, grab a Bud, and sit to the right of our thick-threaded tan plaid couch. There was a coffee table on the right and on it a reddish tobacco can, a small book of rolling papers, a ceramic blue ashtray, and a wooden pipe-set. My younger sister and I would climb up on his lap and watch him as he placed the tobacco in the paper, lick the edge, secure the tips, and light.

As he smoked he’d tell us stories. He’d always begin the story with something familiar: people we knew of or his childhood home. The stories were always in first person with him being the explorer or the troublemaker or the miracle worker. He’d blow smoke rings and French inhale while he spoke, and we would hang on every word he said. I wanted his stories to be real, and they were, as long as they continued. But, more often than not, he'd finish his stories with a line about how he was pulling somebody's leg, which of course was usually ours.

When we got older, we realized that most of his life was a bit like fiction, but also that most of what we had thought was his real- life was truly fiction. Papa had always been a bit of a fibber and an extremist. He still tells stories these days, but with the presidence that they are real. We know that they are not, but we also know that he just wants more than anything to still be able to sit on that old couch, that has since burned away, and tell his two youngest daughters a tale or two.

These days he smokes pre-packed Marlboro’s and sips on dirty vodka Martini’s. It’s not the same, but then again nothing is. Life changes, and the fiction that may be our lives will always evolve and pull our legs at some point or another.