Soda and sueltos - a good place to pick up bad habits

It began in Bariloche, in South Bar. As we enjoyed our artesanal beers, Ian lit up a cigarette, and, also claiming to be a non-smoker (nevermind the pack he kept in his pocket), he asked me to share it with him. And feeling no remorse for just a few puffs with a beer (there's something that almost seems obligatory in such a setting), I obliged. Thereafter, I only smoked with Ian in South Bar.

Then we both ended up in Buenos Aires and discovered, in a still sidestreet off the Sunday rush of San Telmo, that the ubiquitous kioscos sell single cigarettes, or sueltos. We had stepped out of the throng to buy a soda (my favorite kind, Pasos del Toros, pomelo, sooo good), which seemed less a vice than a fact of life when needing something more than stale bottled water to rehydrate from the salt-sucking heat of summer in Buenos Aires.

Our shared sueltos have been more like a tradition than a bad habit, a symbol of the occasion of crossed paths. I deviated from that only when Mike came to visit in Buenos Aires and the late night mayhem of Plaza Serrano followed by the blue light of a jazz club demanded a shared cigarette or two (sorry to throw you under the bus too, love, during my mea culpa).

But I have deviated again, and by myself this time, in the lively and lovely city of Córdoba.

Maybe it's an attempt to assimilate, to counteract the strikes against me of real blond hair and blue eyes. Maybe it's an effort to feel less frenzied by the narrow sidewalks and the slow walkers. Occasionally it's a clever way to make change.

Maybe it's to combat the lonely feeling creeping up on me as the days insert themselves between now and the time I passed with friends, and a family, and the space to settle in for a bit in Rio Tercero. Last night the owners of the hostel where I'm staying (if ever you come to Córdoba, you must stay at Hostel Que Onda - it's on a loud street corner, but the price and the people cannot be beat) invited me to an asado, and among the quaint company of four, we discussed the true value of travel, which is not the checklist of places to visit and photograph, but the people you encounter in an enthralling collision of otherwise wildly divergent lives. I have been very lucky in that respect, and the next time I find myself in a big-windowed, corner-side cafe with free wifi and no rush to turn tables, I would like to write an "homenaje" to them.

And I can't help but remember my dad, who I think of often here. There are those split second instances when something mundane, insignificant becomes the breach of a reservoir of memories, and if there is any addiction in a cigarette for me, it's remembering my dad's casual aside about how the first puff is the best puff. And at that moment when the flame touches tobacco, I fly through a montage of flashbacks that makes me feel very sad and very happy at the same moment. I have never pretended that his death doesn't have something to do with why I'm here, though before now, I have been reluctant to say it without a face to say it to. What's different now is I don't really want to smoke.

I leave Córdoba tonight to spend a few days taking photographs of spectacular places before making my way to Mendoza where I will hang up this vice for bike tours of wine country and some physical labor on a farm. I can already anticipate a set of memories I associate with both and send much love to their collaborators. And I anxiously await the next collision.