THE RITE OF PASSAGE

 

My father’s errands were small rites of passage. He would press a few coins into my palm and send me down the street to Lola Elvie’s store, just a few houses away from our home at the back of the Puericulture Center. It was a general merchandise shop, typical of the 1970s, where rice stood beside soap, kerosene, and sundry goods—necessities for survival in upland Balete, when the Jal‑o River was still the principal road. By Saturday, Market Day, the place swelled with voices from Ilaya, the upland folk carrying their week’s barter and coins.

There, amid jars of candy lined like jewels and the faint smell of kerosene clinging to the air, I would ask for my father’s brand—Marlboro. Nang Viola, Lola Elvie’s daughter, would smile as I appeared at the counter, her eyes bright with familiarity, and ask what I was after for the day. That simple gesture—half welcome, half ritual—made the errand feel less like contraband and more like belonging. The cowboy’s brand, riding across the television to the brass and drums of The Magnificent Seven. I did not care for the cigarettes themselves; I cared for the music, the gallop of horns that seemed to promise a frontier beyond our town’s center.

            Returning home, I carried the sticks like treasure. I would lift them to my nose, inhaling through the filters, imagining a future where I too would smoke—not Marlboro, but Philip Morris Menthol, cool and green, a boy’s fantasy of adulthood. I told myself, when my time is come, I will be that man.

           Yet wonder of wonders, the years passed, and I never lit a single stick. The cowboy rode on without me, and the menthol dream dissolved into laughter. I laugh now at Ayn Rand’s solemn declaration that smoking is Atlas shrugging—man asserting his mastery, or a capitalist man proclaiming his dominion of Earth’s resources. To the boy I was, however, it was nothing so grand: only a cowboy, a soundtrack, a smile at the counter, and a scent caught in the filter.

          Now I stand grown, lungs unscarred, memory intact. The Marlboro Man remains a phantom of my childhood, his anthem still echoing somewhere in the background. And I, who once thought smoke would crown my adulthood, discovered something else instead: that sometimes manhood is not in the fire one learns to light, but in the fire one learns to leave alone.