The Ohio Blue Tips Strike Again

If you fan aside the billows of smoke, you will find me, somewhere, cigarette in hand.  My last filtertip you'll find smoldering in a nearby ashtray.  But you won't find any matches.  Matches once led me astray.

I dislike being an audience for Madison Avenue, and I avoid reading advertisements even on matchbooks.  These either urge me to redraw a fawn or puppy‑-something I know in advance I cannot do‑-or promise me a fine career if only I'll take a high school equivalency course.  Unfortunately it takes all my wits to be a teacher.  Studenthood, like so many of my past glories, is beyond me now.

I did not, however, mind the matchbooks I'd recently bought.  The covers were strikingly colored and no two were alike.  The first one I remember glancing at had a picture of a man with a pigskin, arm back, muscles straining.  Football‑-indeed, any sport that isn't baseball‑-ranks in my mind with the Eleusinian Mysteries: it contains rituals whose meanings remain unrevealed to me.  While I had never heard of the Ohio Blue Tips (his team's name was neatly printed beneath him), neither could I identify any other football team.  Moreover, I was indifferent to the whole matter, my one interest at that moment being to end a nicotine fit.  That accomplished, The Pride of the Ohio Blue Tips vanished from my view.

But I had completely forgotten this picture when I drew forth a second matchbook, days later.  On this cover was a bright yellow bird.  Now I don't delight in fowls, edible or otherwise.  Ornithology, as I once told a friend, is for the birds.  I still remember his withering glance of scorn as he picked up his field glasses and flew off.  Thus I had no one to tell me whether I was gazing at a canary or a goldfinch.  Under the bird, however, was the legend "Ohio Blue Tip."

"Must be a goldfinch," I mused.  "Canaries don't have blue feathers."  I inspected the pictured bird more closely.  Since I could find no blue feathers on the goldfinch either, I assumed that it had them on the tip of its tail.  This the picture didn't show.  It was a tricky way to name a bird, I decided, but then I had always been one to confuse the Rose-Breasted Grosbeak with the Full-Breasted Dowager or the Long-Billed Dowitcher with the Large-Billed Wallet.  Again I lit my filtertip and turned to less bewildering matters, in particular the subjunctive mood of the verb "to be."

I still didn't remember the words "Ohio Blue Tip" when I found them identifying the animal shown on yet another matchbook.  On this was a picture of a seahorse, a creature that's unmistakable.  In fact, the closest you can come in failing to recognize one is to confuse it with a kangaroo, and that only after the third drink.  Undeniably, incontrovertibly, I was staring at a seahorse.  But why the cryptic tidings under it?  And why the faint echo of familiarity the message evoked? 

"Ohio Blue Tip."  I reviewed my mental map of the United States.  No, I decided, there could be no species of seahorse inhabiting the waters off the Ohio coast: Ohio was too far north.  There could not, and I was prepared to argue in defense of my conclusion, be a seahorse known as the "Ohio Blue Tip."

Slowly, and with the certainty if not the brilliance of the dawn, a thought rose and memory wakened.  I slid the lid up so that its bottom edge, normally tucked under the striking zone, was exposed.  Triumph!  I had, indeed, been right.  The animal was a seahorse; its true name was printed at the very bottom of the cover.  And then, so shortlived are my triumphs, full day broke at last, and I knew, shatteringly, what an Ohio Blue Tip was.

I have used lighters ever since.