Smokin'

I’m sick of all the pious bullshit I have to take everyday from almost everyone because I smoke. I’m sick of the righteous, zealous indignation of non-smokers who know I’m addicted to a dangerous legal substance (that was pushed on me from every corner of my society since birth to fifty) yet still expect me to STOP! because they think I should. Why not the same kind of fascistic attack on the civil rights of drinkers? No drinking in public places. No drinking in the presence of children. No drinking in your own apartment! Thank God I own a house. I hate cell phone users who talk on the phone non-stop when they are out to lunch with a friend or sweetheart. Should we prohibit this noxious behavior because it offends me?

I was born in 1944. My dad was fighting in France when I was born in Paris, Texas in the hospital on the Army Base there. I’ll bet the doctor who delivered me was smoking while he whacked me on the bottom. My mother was smoking in her hospital room while she fed me from a bottle while her perfect breasts pained her no end as her milk began to dry up. It was the thing to do in 1944.

We moved to Salt Lake City before I was three and the years went on. I survived in our turbulent family, and just before it split into it’s sad little parts, my mother taught me to smoke. I was remarkably good at it. Granted, smoke is always better fresh than second hand. I learned to French inhale in short order and was amazing her friends at cocktail parties. I could do plenty in the smoking department. It’s the only thing I was ever praised for. Well, at least the most normal thing I was praised for.

I was five when our family flew into it’s individual pieces. I got sent to Sherman, Texas to live with my mother’s brother and his wife. They were childless and happy to have me, so made no objections to my smoking. Everybody smoked everywhere, anyway. And it was kind of cute. I was well cared for at my aunt and uncles. Taught things, too. Like, how to shampoo my own hair, roll a pin curl, scrub my ankles with soap and water. My mother never showed me anything except how to smoke and she groused about all the work I was for her. When she came to visit me on my birthday, she called me a prissy little thing. Said I looked like a poodle. Then when she whirled me around playing airplane with me, my sweaty hands slipped out of hers and I went flying into the backyard table and broke two ribs. We smoked a cigarette together and then she left.

Six months later, just before Christmas she came and got me and we rode the train to Salt Lake smoking all the way. There was even a special car on the train called the smoking car. That didn’t mean you couldn’t smoke everywhere else. We smoked in the dinning car. We smoked in the toilet, we smoked everywhere. Everyone did.

She married into a well-to-do family, and everybody in that family smoked. My new grandfather was one of Salt Lake City’s most prominent physicians. Chief of Staff at St. Marks and Holy Cross Hospitals. He was a general practitioner and surgeon. He smoked. Everywhere, all the time. While he was examining you in the office a smoke dangled from his fleshy lips. He probably smoked in the operating room.

In every car we rode in everyone smoked summer and winter. Every time we ate, someone had a cigarette going at the table. We smoked at the movies.

Now I’m 63 and remarkably healthy. I have high blood pressure. Everyone In my family did. No one died of cancer. All the men died of heart attack and all the women in my mother’s family died of vascular dementia. I took care of my mother once she couldn’t care for herself anymore. She was incontinent, didn’t recognize anyone, not even herself. She quit smoking in her fifties. She died in her early eighties when her brain stopped sending the signal to her mouth to chew or swallow. She died on Christmas morning, two days after her birthday.

My doctor, who sees me seldom (because of my relative good health), never fails to lecture me about the dangers of smoking. He listens to my lungs and shakes his head, unable to look anything but disappointed that they are clear. No, cancer doesn’t scare me.