In which we discuss fathers, sons, tobacco and God

Someone gave me (what I think is) a high quality cigar recently. It smells great, but I know that if I smoke it, I will be able to taste tobacco in my mouth for the next 48 hours, regardless of teeth-brushing and Listerine. Yes, non smokers have sensitive taste buds. (Or maybe that is more a function of cheaper cigars? The 10 or so that I probably had over my entire life were almost certainly lower quality.) I don't think I have ever tried a cigarette, as far as I can recall. Cigars are mainly smoked for mouth taste anyway, not for lung burning ingestion of nicotine. And they do go well with port. All I need to complete the picture is a smoking jacket, hey.

I don't like the long lingering after taste, but it's got to be smoked sometime. Or I could just let it sit near my desk for the next 12 months and smell it a few times a day. Nah, I don't think so.

I dare not let my 7 year old son see me smoking it: he seems strongly attracted to the idea of trying smoking, in a way I don't ever recall sharing, even though my father smoked well into his 50's. (Cause of death in his early 60's: lung cancer.) Yes, dammit, he is showing signs of an independent personality after all, despite my attempts at brainwashing by showing him Lewis & Martin movies and other popular entertainment from my childhood.

In other signs of independent thought, despite attending a Christian school, and church, he seems much more inherently skeptical of the concept of God than I ever was. I don't quite understand what part of a personality seems to predispose some people towards easy acceptance of religious belief, and others to be doubters from childhood. This was an interesting feature of Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs. Despite being an active member of a church as a teenager, and obviously being able to have an easy intellectual grasp of the Bible, it just seems that he was never capable of having it mean much to him.

I suspect that having one parent as a non-believer (and hence a stay-at-home while the kids go to church with the other parent) may simply be enough to cause children to never "get" religion; I suppose someone has done some research on that. Also in my son's case, it seems he has seen the obvious parallel between pretend Santa and (potentially) pretend God. We actually never spent a lot of time playing up Santa as a figure with our kids, yet obviously it was still enough for him to see the implications.

Unfortunately, there is probably not a scary nun left in Brisbane who could take over my son's indoctrination, like I had for the first couple of years in primary school. (Actually, despite being good at terror, she was pretty lousy at teaching anything; but I can remember how impressive some other nuns were in their free wheeling talks on religion for 30 minutes every day. Then again, maybe that was just me and everyone else in the class was bored.)

Anyway, the mind-molding project must be continued, even while I sneak outside one night to smoke that cigar. Maybe the smoke rising past my son's window will be interpreted as a ghost, and at least he'll believe in the supernatural.