Cocktail Hour

Bumped into a new neighbor holding two fluffy pooches with one leash. Taking him in, noticing his cigarette, cocktail in his left hand, the unabashed way he stood in the street, in the middle of the day, a weekday, in the second decade of the new millennium. He looked like a family friend from my 1970s childhood in Westchester County, New York, a pretty place where surrounding the beauty and freedom, there existed an ever-present haze of smoke, alcohol, edgy excitement and benign neglect. 

Winston-Salem, NC