Montecristo Cigars

       I was never much of a cowboy but grew up on a ranch on the prairies in Canada.  I always thought that cows tasted great but that was as far as it went when it came to my passion for that creature.  As a kid I noticed that all winter you had a real docile creature on your hands but as soon as they had their calves in the spring, they wanted to kill anything in sight in order to keep their young safe… Well, that little detail was all I needed to know in order to make up my mind to get as far as I could away from cows and do anything else in life to make a living… I’ve had a lot of different jobs in my life from selling stuff to making stuff to doing stuff…. My feelings are that maybe I like doing stuff with my hands and breathing fresh air as I do it.This little cigar has inspired me to take a lot of photographs and it also made me remember all of the cigar smokers I met when I was younger… There was one cowboy in our home town that I’ll never forget… He was the village idiot and town drunk who owned a ranch beside one of my uncle’s farms… My uncle noticed one day that he had been missing a couple of calves in the spring and mentioned it to his cigar smoking cowboy neighbor. The neighbor told my uncle that he thought he saw me in my uncle’s pasture a week before… Now this is a bit of a weird and inaccurate fact because I was attending a private school a few hundred  miles away when the cows were being rustled.. Next day I was pulled out of social studies class at 10:00 AM in the morning and told to walk into a room where a couple of RCMP were waiting to question me..  At the age of 15 I was a small, baby faced kid and as I look back at that day I can’t help but wonder how the cops must have felt as they asked me about my whereabouts the previous Sunday… Well, I was in church the day in question and had almost 400 witnesses to back up my claim… It was a wasted trip for our discouraged law enforcement officials and I was told I could return to class… To this day I don’t know of anyone else in my peer group who have ever been questioned about and under the suspicion of being a cattle rustler..Life can get really interesting when there are cowboys around.