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Joshua Stephens | Dec 16, 2025

The Slow Burn: The Gift I Didn’t Know I Needed

The excitement was killing me.

It was Christmas morning, 1992, and I was awake before anyone else. Wide-eyed. Wired. Ready. Although my grandma and I lived alone, my uncles were in town for the holiday. Two uncles, a cousin, one girlfriend-of-the-moment… and a dog.

His name was Muffin. A miniature poodle. White. Fluffy. Pom-poms. Bows. The least masculine dog you’ve ever seen.

I refused to be seen in public with him, lest I get jumped for having what looked like a walking cotton ball on a leash. And yet, memory unlocked, I can still smell the time he ran through a field of cows, rolled in manure, and I had to hose him off behind my mom’s trailer while trying not to throw up.

Anyway… Christmas.

I wasn’t supposed to get out of bed until an adult came and got me. Christmas Eve rules were strict. No wandering near the living room. No peeking. No catching Santa mid-operation. But time moved slowly. Painfully slow.

So I did what any kid would do. I crept down the hall like a church mouse. Around the corner. Holding my breath.

And there it was.

Glowing in the reflection of Christmas tree lights….a 1989 wine-red Tama Imperialstar drum kit. Full setup. Hardware. Cymbals. Throne. Ready to rock. It was a popular, affordable drum kit known for its poplar shells, offering a full, warm tone, often coming as a complete "ready-to-rock" package with hardware, Meinl cymbals, and a throne, featuring durable hardware, Omni-Sphere tom holders, and modern Accu-Tune hoops for easier tuning.

FREAKING SWEET!

It was the only thing I’d ever wanted.

And somehow… something I didn’t even know I needed.

Drums are arguably the loudest instrument on earth, and yet I was on a stealth mission. They were calling to me, “Please beat me,” but I managed to sneak back to my room unseen.

Sitting on the floor with Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joes, I staged a concert. Splinter on vocals.

Donatello and Leonardo on guitar and bass. And on drums?

Snake Eyes.

Holding two swords like drumsticks.

Both my uncles were musicians. My birth mom could sing. I had an aunt who would go on to play for the San Francisco Symphony. Music ran in the family, even if I didn’t fully understand it yet.

Before the drum kit, all I had was Hot Cross Buns on the recorder. But the drums weren’t a curveball. I’d already been terrorizing pots and pans outside the garage while my uncle’s band practiced. I gave that cookware hell.

Finally, my Uncle John knocked on the door.

“Josh, you awake?!”

I nearly tore the door off its hinges.

“Let’s go see what Santa brought.”

Now, I already knew…but I had to play it cool.

I walked into the living room like I’d never seen anything so glorious. Uncle John told me he’d put in a good word with Santa. And I believed him. Fully. This was the most over-the-top gift imaginable.

I hadn’t even asked for a drum set. Yet there it was.

Everything I wanted.

Everything I didn’t know I needed.

The rest of Christmas is a blur. I don’t remember who got what. I don’t remember dinner. I don’t remember which girlfriend was there.

I do know one thing, though. That drum set changed the trajectory of my life.

A lot of kids pick things up and put them down. I didn’t. Drums stuck. Probably helped that Grandma was half deaf, otherwise there’s no way that kit would’ve survived.

By middle school, I learned you could get girls by being a musician.

By college, I learned you could see the country.

By my twenties, I learned you could even make a living creating art.

Life revolved around music from age nine to twenty-four. Stage lights. Applause. Long nights. Cheap meals. A lot of fun.

Eventually, ambition outweighed ability. Peanut butter sandwiches got old. I came home to chase another version of the American Dream.

But those drums?

They were exactly what I needed at the time.

As a kid, I was scrappy. Detentions stacked up. I wasn’t mean…I just stood up for myself. Being the chubby kid meant catching flak. I couldn’t throw a great punch, but I learned Swiss Army triplets real fast.

Drums gave me confidence.

I beat the skins until they broke. Then did it again. I learned the fundamentals: time, groove, restraint. And later, that lesson paid off.

A drummer who plays in time is a drummer who gets paid.

Looking back, this is a long way of saying something simple:

You never know which gift will shape your life.

As Christmas approaches, many of us celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ…in my humble opinion, the greatest gift ever given.

Some gifts show up wrapped in paper.

Some show up wrapped in purpose.

And some, like that drum kit, don’t reveal their meaning until years later.

And sometimes, the things we didn’t ask for end up becoming the things that carry us through life.

What I didn’t understand at nine years old, standing barefoot in the living room, staring at that cabernet drum kit, was that the gift wasn’t the drums.

The gift was time.

Time spent alone learning how things work.

Time spent failing in private before ever succeeding in public.

Time spent listening before being heard.

At first, drums were chaos. Noise. Energy with nowhere to go. I hit everything as hard as I could, because that’s what made sense. Louder felt better. Faster felt impressive. I thought that if I could just do more, it would mean something.

But drums don’t reward brute force for very long.

They reward restraint.

You learn pretty quickly that if you don’t tune them, they fight back. If you don’t respect timing, everything falls apart. If you rush, the song suffers. And if you don’t listen to your fellow musicians, to the room, to the space between notes, you get replaced.

That lesson followed me into adulthood, long after the stages got bigger and the gear got nicer.

Somewhere between my teenage years and my twenties, I learned something that stuck:

The most important part of a groove isn’t what you hit.

It’s what you don’t.

The space. The restraint. The discipline to sit in the pocket and let the song breathe.

That’s when music stopped being about me and started being about connection. When I realized the job wasn’t to impress, but to serve the moment.

I didn’t have language for it back then, but looking back now, I see it clearly.

That drum kit taught me how to wait.

How to sit with discomfort.

How to let repetition do its work.

How to trust that showing up, day after day, rep after rep, eventually changes you.

And that lesson? It applies to far more than music.

Years later, when cigars entered my life, something felt familiar.

Not the smoke.

Not the ritual.

But the pace.

A good cigar doesn’t rush you. It demands presence. If you puff too fast, it punishes you. If you ignore it, it goes out. If you don’t respect the leaf, the whole experience unravels.

Sound familiar?

Cigars, like music, are a craft that reveals itself slowly. You don’t get the full picture in the first third. You have to earn it. You have to listen. You have to let the thing unfold in its own time.

We live in a world obsessed with shortcuts. Instant gratification. Viral success. Overnight expertise.

But the things that last…the things that shape you….rarely arrive fast.

They arrive like that drum kit did. Quietly. Unexpectedly. With more responsibility than excitement at first.

They ask you to commit before you understand the payoff.

Brolo exists in that same space.

It’s not about chasing trends or cutting corners. It’s about honoring the long road. Respecting the craft. Understanding that real connection, whether through music, cigars, or community, is built slowly.

Like learning to play in time.

Like learning when not to hit.

Like learning to sit in the silence and trust that something meaningful is forming.

I didn't know it then, but that Christmas morning gave me a framework for life.

Be patient.

Respect the process.

Listen more than you speak.

And trust that the things worth keeping take time to reveal themselves.

That’s the slow burn.

The Slow Burn: Kansas City Cigar Festival

Last week, several of the Brolos and I attended the Kansas City Cigar Festival. The festival was Saturday, but we decided to make a weekend out of it. Because apparently a bunch of grown men with an unhealthy amount of cigars can't simply arrive at an event, attend it, and go home like normal people.

We left Dallas around 6-ish Friday morning and pulled into Kansas City around 4:45 that afternoon. In between were gas stations, snacks, questionable decisions, lunch at Bite Me BBQ in Wichita, and a quick stop at Old Town Cigars. Shoutout to Old Town, by the way. They had an awesome selection of boutique cigars, including some of the old-school Metapas from before Foundation rebranded them as Aksum. Those aren't exactly sitting on every shelf anymore.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Shawn arrived at my place a few minutes late and blamed traffic. In his defense, he wasn't lying. 380 in the morning is a complete nightmare. North Texas has grown at a ridiculous pace, and it seems like no amount of construction can keep up. Every road is simultaneously being expanded and somehow getting worse.

We loaded Shawn up and headed to a bougie neighborhood in Prosper to grab Justin. We made it through the gate, pulled up to the house, and there he was...sitting in a camp chair, bags packed, already smoking a cigar.

It was a sight for sore eyes.

Naturally, we immediately started roasting him for not even making it to 6:00 a.m. before lighting one up. His defense was that he was "afraid he would be left out." Justin is the newest cigar smoker in the group, but the man put the first number on the board that weekend. Kudos.

Next up was Mr. Babyface himself, Mark. Picture this: it's roughly 5:30 in the morning and Mark is standing outside next to his truck, bags packed, looking like his parents just told him they were taking him to Disney World. Everybody was ready. And for the next eight hours, we absolutely destroyed my car.

Four men. A few boxes of cigars. Windows cracked. Ash everywhere. I don't think it will ever smell the same again. But that's the price you pay for making memories around something you love.

We put Justin in charge of picking lunch.

This was our first mistake.

The Slow Burn: Maine

A reflection on Maine and the fear, pressure, and freedom that come with finally letting go of something you created.

Heritage: Recently, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about heritage and what that word actually means to me.

It’s an all-encompassing term.

There are the tangible things and the intangible ones. The personal and the cultural. Traditions, values, stories, recipes, land, names, beliefs, habits, and physical objects passed from one generation to the next.

Some things are handed to us intentionally.

Others just arrive.

Building Brolo has me thinking about heritage quite a bit.

The cigar industry, maybe more than most, loves heritage. Many brands benchmark their quality against generational pedigrees, old-world traditions, luxury positioning, or some combination of the three. Families who have worked with tobacco for generations. Names that stretch back a hundred years or more. Stories with roots deep enough to make whatever they're selling today feel connected to something much older.

And there's something beautiful about that.

But where does that leave a kid like me?

I didn't grow up with a mother and father.

There isn't some great family enterprise being handed down to me. I didn't serve in the Armed Forces, and the only time I was involved with law enforcement was usually in the back of a squad car.

What the heck is my heritage?

And if heritage matters so much, how am I supposed to compete with that?

So I started digging.

Not through ancestry records or old family photographs, but through the things that got me here. The memories. The scars. The people. The failures. The things I learned accidentally and the things life taught me, whether I wanted the lesson or not.

I started asking myself:

What makes Brolo, Brolo?

The first image that came to mind wasn't tobacco.

It was a hay bale.

I was probably six or seven years old.

During the summer, my Grandma would drop me off for a week at my birth mother's trailer in East Texas, back behind the Pine Curtain.

Every summer, I dreaded it.

My second stepdad was quite a doozy...a real piece of work. Abusive. Violent. Looking back now, I can see he was probably just an angry boy trapped inside a man's body.

But when you're six, you don't have that kind of perspective.

You just know you're scared.

They lived in the country....or, as East Texans pronounce it, the cunnnn-trrrryyyyyyyy.

The acreage seemed to stretch forever, with a little creek running along the back of the property. My mother worked all day as a nurse, and my stepdad worked as a carpenter, taking odd jobs here and there.

I don't remember him being particularly great at woodworking.

But the man sure knew how to rip a doobie.

Wherever they were, I wasn't.

Most days, I was on my own, traversing the countryside. Climbing hay bales. Jumping hay bales. Falling off hay bales.

And, eventually, crying next to hay bales.

I remember getting hurt out there once.

And I remember being angry with myself for getting hurt.

Scared because I didn't know if I'd be able to survive a sprained ankle, let alone another week unsupervised.

Broken because I was alone and hurting.

And nobody showed up that day to help me.

Although that was the first time I remember feeling it, it certainly wasn't the last.

Those experiences taught me independence.

Eventually, they also taught me control.

If nobody is coming, you learn to handle things yourself. You learn to anticipate problems. You learn not to need much. You learn how to survive.

Useful skills.

Until they're not.

Because somewhere along the way, independence can become isolation. Self-reliance can become control. And learning not to need anyone can leave you desperately wanting someone.

Maybe that's heritage, too.

Not everything passed down comes in a box.

A few weeks ago, I went to the doctor for a regularly scheduled checkup. Somewhere between the blood pressure cuff and the usual questions, she started asking about my family.

Heart disease?

Cancer?

Diabetes?

High blood pressure?

She was trying to understand my family history...to identify the things buried somewhere in my DNA that might eventually become part of my story.

In other words, she wanted to know:

What runs in your family?

It's a clinical question.

But I've thought about it differently ever since. Because a lot more than disease runs in families.

Work ethic runs in families.

Faith runs in families.

Temper runs in families.

Generosity runs in families.

Addiction runs in families.

The way we handle money. The way we argue. The way we love. The way we apologize....or don't. The things we celebrate and the things we refuse to talk about.

Somewhere along the way, all of it becomes inheritance.

We tend to romanticize heritage.

Grandpa's watch. Dad's old truck. Mom's recipe written in her handwriting. The family Bible with names and dates scribbled across pages yellowed by time.

And those things matter.

But heritage has a shadow side, too.

Some things are worth preserving.

Some things are worth restoring.

And some things need to end with us.

My childhood was a lonely one through no fault of my own.

As I got older, I started pursuing people.

At first, probably because I was afraid to be alone.

I was tired of being alone.

I was starving for belonging.

But somewhere in that pursuit, I discovered something much better than simply not being alone.

I found connection.

If this were one of my gospel-centered recovery pieces, this is probably where I'd spend the next thousand words talking about how human beings were created for connection.

And I believe that.

I believe true connection begins vertically...with God...and that healthy relationships with one another are a by-product of that relationship.

But that's another rabbit hole for another day.

Back to connection.

Because that's what Brolo is about.

Not heritage manufactured through some bullshit origin story.

Not luxury for luxury's sake.

Not pretending we've been making cigars since 1873.

Connection.

It's the early-morning text from a friend encouraging you to succeed while simultaneously making light of your many proclivities.

It's the random Tuesday-night HERF where, for whatever reason, the whole crew shows up, and you belly laugh until your face hurts.

It's an early-morning coffee where somebody finally stops saying they're "good" and tells you what's actually going on.

It's spending so much time smoking cigars together that you know your buddy's palate almost as well as your own. You know what he's going to love. You know what he's going to hate. And occasionally, you make a recommendation that he actually likes.

It's getting bombed by one of the Brolo's.

It's seeing the UPS truck turn onto your street....or maybe even chasing it down, and feeling that little dopamine hit because you know there's a box headed your way.

It's knowing that whatever ails you, somebody is rooting for you.

It's complete strangers finding each other in some random corner of Discord or Reddit, sharing a cigar through a screen, and eventually becoming friends in real life.

Those things probably don't sound like heritage.

At least not the way the word is usually sold to us.

There aren't any centuries-old family photographs.

No tobacco fields passed from father to son.

No crest.

No pedigree.

But maybe I've been thinking about heritage all wrong.

Maybe heritage isn't just about where you came from. Maybe it's about what you carry forward.

And maybe the things we weren't given are sometimes the very things we become most determined to give away.

I didn't inherit a great legacy of connection.

So I built my life around finding it.

And now we're building Brolo around giving it away.

Maybe that's my heritage.

Not the kind printed on the inside of a cigar box. Not a family crest, a famous last name, or some romantic story about generations of men who came before me.

It's messier than that.

There's some good in it. There's some bad. There are things I'm proud to carry forward and others I've spent most of my adult life trying to put down.

But all of it got me here.

And I suspect the same is true for you.

What's your heritage?

Not just where your family came from or the traditions you grew up with.

What did you inherit?

What runs in your family?

What did someone teach you without ever sitting you down to teach it?

What wounds shaped you?

What values stuck?

What traditions still matter?

What parts of the people who came before you can you see when you look in the mirror?

And maybe more importantly:

What are you doing with it?

Because at some point, we stop being merely the recipients of heritage.

We become responsible for it.

We decide what gets carried forward.

What gets restored.

What gets rewritten.

And what ends with us.

Heritage isn't just the story of the people who came before you.

It's happening right now.

In the way you raise your kids. The way you love your spouse. The way you treat your friends. The work you put your hands to. The things you make time for. The things you refuse to compromise. The table you build and the people you invite to sit around it.

Whether you realize it or not, you're leaving something behind.

When I think back to that little boy sitting alone in East Texas, hurt and scared and wondering if anybody was going to show up, I can't change his story.

Nobody came that day.

But I can decide what I do with what he gave me.

Maybe that's why showing up matters so much to me now.

Maybe that's why the table matters.

Maybe that's why connection matters.

Maybe that's why Brolo exists in the first place.

So maybe the better question isn't simply:

What's your heritage?

Maybe it's:

What will someone else inherit because you were here?

What impact have you made, or lack thereof?

And maybe that's convicting...if so...that was my intention.

Kaitlyn and I don't make cigars to avoid life. We make cigars to fully embrace it. The good, the bad...the hurt and the wins.

All around a shared smoke.

About This Blog

I wrote this back in 2017 and never published it. I found it again. And reading the words of the man I was has been an uncomfortable experience. This post is a multipart post about shame and where we can find hope. Stay tuned for the next post in the series...

The Slow Burn: Calluses

Some things can only be learned the hard way.

As a writer, I wage a lot of wars against a blinking cursor.

I get caught somewhere between what I want to say and what I think people want to hear. And I’m beginning to believe that’s a dangerous intersection.

The Slow Burn: Currents

The ocean never asked where I wanted to go…it simply carried me. Life works the same way. Left unattended, our faith, health, relationships, and purpose all drift. Currents is a reflection on recognizing when we've wandered and finding the courage to swim back toward what matters most.

The Slow Burn: The Things We Love

Beneath a Nicaraguan moon, hidden behind a mosquito net, tree frogs wage war against my sleep. Their calls echo through the jungle like ladies of the night working a truck stop, each one louder than the last. Halloween Moon Crabs scatter across the ground beneath our cabana. I have to pee...but I'm not getting out of bed. Nature can have this one.

The Slow Burn: Rearview Mirrors

We all have a collection of "if only" moments….roads not taken, mistakes we'd undo, opportunities we missed. But the longer we stare into the rearview mirror, the more likely we are to miss the blessings sitting right in front of us.

The Slow Burn: Pushing The Chips In...Again

I knew a lot of people, but I wasn't truly known by anyone. That realization changed everything. What followed was addiction, recovery, reinvention, and another chance to choose the life we wanted to build.

The Slow Burn: The Gift I Didn’t Know I Needed

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