 |
||||
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Even those of us with a past which includes the Marlboro Man have a hard time remembering what our culture used to be like. There were free smokes given out at college events and cheap cartons of cigarettes at military PX's. There were even free smokes at some hospitals. Smokers didn't go outside in the rain to indulge, they smoked at parties and meetings and at their desks at work. They weren't pariahs, then. I wasn't a pariah but I knew cigarettes were bad for me. The other day, stricken with a cold, I coughed a really deep, deep cough and someone turned around and said, "You're a smoker, aren't you?" in a kind of nasty tone of voice, and I remembered how bronchitis used to be a frequent visitor and how I coughed almost every morning while looking around for a match. Well, I'm not a smoker any more but that cough did bring back memories of smoking with a cold, smoking on the street, in restaurants, of running out of smokes and scratching up stubby half-smoked cigarette butts out of ashtrays. The worst was searching waste-paper baskets and, yes, the garbage, for a smokeable item. I was well and truly addicted. I sometimes dream that I am still smoking even though it has been eleven years without so much as a ashtray to keep me company, and then I wake up afraid, because I am not at all sure that I could stop again. I tried everything to quit, including nicotine gum. Ads for the gum sometimes call up an odd craving even now and the dangerous thought trips through my brain that I COULD have nicotine gum. No, no I remind myself, I can't have the gum, the patch, a pipe, a cigar, or my favorite brand of cigarette in its glamourous gold wrapper. People have handed me smokes and I have handed them back, unsmoked, but I don't volunteer to hold them lest the urge come over me and I end up smoking again. People have started to smoke again after years of freedom. It could happen. Most of the time the cigarettes and matches and ashtrays and entire paraphenalia of tobacco are nowhere in my life. I thought about all of those things every ten minutes or so for decades, and now, most of the time, they simply do not exist. I quit with a habit-extinguishing program which helped me get control of the addiction by telling me when to smoke. I carried a little hand-held device around with me; it beeped whenever the time came to smoke and gradually reduced the number of beeps per day until there were none. I remember the exact moment I was free of tobacco. There weren't going to be any more beeps. Ever. The realization that I didn't have to smoke anymore came as a complete surprise. I kept the hand-held device. It is in a box in the basement somewhere. I could find it if I needed it. I also kept a pack of my favorite brand hidden in a pocket of my winter coat for a year and then threw the pack away, unsmoked. I worried about succumbing to temptation for several years, worried about being at parties where clouds of tobacco smoke might hang in the air, deliciously. Well, the clouds did hang there but not attractively. In fact, they didnít smell all that tasty to me, more like a smoldering trash fire. Trying to remember what smoking was like feels like remembering something that was completely wrong and you can't remember why you did it. Like a bad love affair. The smokers huddled together in doorways in the rain look pitiful to me, as if they are still in love with the same faithless, mean lovers and can't figure out how to break up. Freedom is not easy to explain, and harder still to believe in. Those smokers don't yet believe in freedom from tobacco. They can't imagine liberty for themselves, but they will. The rest of us, ex-smokers and never-did-smoke people, need to be patient, especially in the next few weeks during the annual "Great American Smoke Out" event sponsored by the American Cancer Society. Most smokers are not rude, only desperate. We should be kind to them as they make the effort again to "Commit to Quit." I think we should all remember what a popular habit it used to be. Almost like drinking. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Jean Blake White is a regular contributor to The Meadow.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
