Like we need more advice on the perils of tobacco.

I speak as a former cigar smoker who still enjoys having one around, a well-made cigar to chew on, to wave in an authoritative manner, to inadvertently attract people who like to talk about cigars. Cradle a good shotgun in your arms, or put your hands on the steering wheel of an old sports car, and the same feeling is there. You need not light one up to know you’ve holding something of quality.

A cigar these days, no matter how good, is politically incorrect these days, except in certain circumstances generally involving happiness, celebration and satisfaction (and usually elegantly upholstered furniture). Condemned by people who cannot tolerate anyone’s vices but their own, cigars are generally regarded A Pleasure Not Good for You, but this newspaper regularly publishes recipes and reviews saloons which have the same resume.

Cigar smokers enjoy trotting out the anecdotal evidence of long lives through lighting up once in a while. George Burns, Groucho Marx, Fidel Castro, Winston Churchill, someone’s grandfather who was a great guy and always had a deliciously rich penumbra of smoke around him.  

“A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke,” Rudyard Kipling wrote, a line which makes little sense unless you read the entire poem (“The Betrothed,” wherein he chooses between a box of cigars and a fiance. She loses, and if she was a poet I’d have loved to read her rebuttal). Ignite a good cigar and you’re part of an historical chain of men who seem to be enjoying what they’re doing.

If some other item is, by your lights, desirable, iconic and fulfilling just by having it — a Blackberry or a cup of Starbucks coffee, perhaps — you know the feeling.

I thought of all this when I observed that Kenmore’s newest retail shop is a tobacconist, a seller of high-end cigars and other, as the British phrase it, “smoker’s requisites.” One of those places you don’t expect to see in the hurry-up 21st century, the Kenmore Smoke Shop, in a strip mall on Delaware Avenue, is still under development, but offers a cabinet full of imported cigars with exotic names like Cohiba, Macanudo and Montecristo. Exotic guilty pleasures from Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere.

The plan is to install a lounge, proprietor Tom George told me, with couches and chairs and a television presumably tuned to ESPN. A nice, old-school clubhouse, the sort of thing popping up in neighborhoods all over America to replace the restaurants and bars where people unafraid of tobacco are no longer welcome. Code-authorized ventilation and quality furniture have been ordered.

“There is no cigar lounge in Kenmore,” he told me, “and we offer low prices on top cigars.”

It is not a place to run when you need a smoke. That’s what back alleys are for. It’ll be a lounge, people, at least that’s the idea. I suspect some participants in the get-going, check-the-list, right-now world we’ve made for ourselves could really use a place like this. Some of us choose not to buy into the marketing idea that the best way to relax is a strenuous workout followed a plate of tofu.

The Kenmore Smoke Shop offers other things beyond the image of mustachioed quasi-plutocrats puffing on cigars while griping about politics or the National Football League. Like a roll-your-own cigarette machine, with tobacco and paper tubes provided. While it will never be confused with a head shop, it is likely Kenmore’s only source of decorative glass hookahs, the exotic waterpipe for smoking tobacco and a newer, non-burning molasses-based product. An evening around the hookah is evidently a current fad among college students.

The whole idea of this is so deliciously archaic that I approve heartily. Not everyone needs a good cigar or a place to enjoy one, but those in Kenmore who do, now have an outlet. Remember, this is a community that kept Oracle Junction, a second-hand book dealer, in business for twenty years (a long time ago it also had a water fountain on the Village Green, paid for by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, to forestall those in need of refreshment from entering a saloon. One side was for people, the other for horses).

Kenmore also kept a small X-rated supply store going, next door to a pizza shop, for more than 30 years, now that I think of it. Guilty pleasures are not only personally mandated, they are guilty. And pleasures.

Tom George says everything about his business is by the book, that the ventilation system to be installed is beyond the requirements, and that there have been no complaints, only welcomes.

Admittedly, tobacco can be deadly, but it is on a long list of modern hazards. This ex-smoker would not recommend a reader develop a smoking habit any more than I would urge him or her to begin riding motorcycles, collecting Ferraris or gorging on a daily lunch of chicken wings. And yet. ...

Open up a new box of good cigars and see what Kilping named “a harem of dusky beauties, fifty tied in a string” in that poem. Like artist’s brushes, a cook’s kitchen tools or 88 keys on a piano, there is promise there, for those who take pleasure from it.  

Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.