The Smoking Chronicle

I recently took up a habit I had given up long ago. I have been under a lot of relationship stress, old obsessions came up and infiltrated my mind, and I caved in to an old comfort. I took up smoking again. I had become one of the people who frowned at smokers, wrinkling my nose at the smell, waving my hand in front of my face when smoke came my way. I started thinking how cigarettes and smoke had defined parts of my life. My earliest memories are of clinging to my mother's skirt while she stood at the stove, stirring something, a spoon in one hand and an unfiltered Lucky Strike in the other. We lived at the edge of my grandparent's farm, and summer Sundays were spent chasing other cousins in and out among the Adirondack chairs set in the yard, the grownups drinking sweet tea and smoking cigarette after cigarette. The smoke settled around our heads like clouds in the sky. One of my mother's brothers grew tobacco in southern Virginia, and I loved to go into the tobacco barn in the late afternoon when the light filtered through the cracks and the dust motes in the air turned golden. It was quiet and beautiful and smelled wonderful. I learned to read on my father's lap, the newspaper spread out before us, picking out the words I knew while he patiently read me little bits of stories and the obituaries. The haze from his Camels, the sound of his breath when he inhaled instilling in me a sure sense that reading and smoking went together. I still read obituaries compulsively.

The knowledge that smoking killed both my parents is not lost on me. My mother suffered from heart disease and chronic depression. Cigarettes and white sugar were her mainstays. When she lay ill in bed for days at a time, an ashtray, cigarettes, and cup after cup of sweet coffee were constantly on her nightstand. It was my job to bring them to her. She did not give up smoking even in the hospital. (yes, people smoked in hospitals in those days.) We were taken to see her a week after her open heart surgery. She came into the cafeteria and my father brought her a cup of coffee, and she lit up a Lucky Strike. She was dead of a massive stroke a week later. I was seventeen, and had recently taken up smoking.

My dad's story lasted a little longer. He gave up smoking in his late fifties after having to stop for breath halfway up the drive from the mailbox. This was a distance of about fifty feet. He said it made him mad not to be able to breathe, so he came into the house and threw the last of his cigarettes in the trash. He never smoked again. Ten years later he came up with lung cancer, and he didn't seem surprised or even angry. He told me he enjoyed every cigarette he ever smoked, right from the very first one out behind the barn that made him sick as a dog. He also stopped drinking , another long story, when he got sick. The two things that had so defined his life were gone. He didn't complain, had no withdrawal that was obvious. He said he had just made up his mind. I have often thought that this was a trait of his generation. They still believed in willpower, they still believed they had it. My generation thinks bad habits are a product of their unhappy childhoods, and spend plenty of time in therapy to cure themselves. Perhaps the science of the mind is not all it's cracked up to be.

As for me, I'm lucky that I am not an addictive personality. (I learned this in therapy.) I'll smoke through my little crisis, get disgusted like my Dad, and throw them away. I have done this once or twice in my life. Although I haven't smoked for eighteen years, they taste pretty good, at least in the morning. I had forgotten some of the bad side effects, like the nasty taste in my mouth and stairs being a little harder. I have been thinking that once in a while we need an old, bad habit to remind us to be good and take care of ourselves. Sometimes, even with age and wisdom, we are tricked by good health and an easy life that we are, not invincible exactly, but maybe impervious to the things that can hurt us. I have been smoking for two weeks. Another two ought to do the trick.