Smoking

 I don't smoke. I've never ever smoked. Never once, and I haven't smoked pot either. The concept of breathing in something other than air is completely alien to me. One of my big fears is drowning, and I think smoke inhalation is a step away from that so it is exceptionally unappealing to me. 

My parents smoked my whole life. My dad did quit about 28 years ago on Thanksgiving. We were home with jess, who was a little over 1 year old. There was a blizzard, and he worked for the town. His job was to go out and plow. He missed most of our visit because he was working (I can only imagine the money made for basically 30 straight hours of plowing during a holiday!) and he would come by the house to get fresh coffee. My mom would brew him up some, fill the thermos, and send him on his way. 

He told me in 24 hours he smoked four packs of cigarettes, and his chest hurt. His head hurt. He was in agony. And he looked at my kid, and said that he wouldn't see that baby graduate high school if he kept this up. So he quit cold turkey. And never started back up again. I'm still impressed with that.

My mom has quit a few months at a time over the past 30 or so years. Usually when she is sick. She has COPD so really, why bother quitting now ... right? But she would get pneumonia or bronchitis and end up in the hospital on oxygen, and wouldn't smoke for weeks and weeks, but would go back to it after a while. 

My sister has smoked forever. She said she needs to quit, it's expensive, it's bad for her, but she still smokes. 

Me, it grossed me out growing up. The smell, how it stuck to my clothing, my hair. It was disgusting. On some people, sometimes, the smell of the burned paper and tobacco lingering around them is not vile. But on me, it just hung there like stink on a monkey's butt. 

 I remember going to a youth group meeting in high school and the mom hosting the meeting took my coat and put it on the back porch. I was ashamed and embarrassed by that. She asked me (in the typical evangelical Christian loving mom way) "Christine, are you a smoker?" with this tone of judgement and arrogance. Looking down her nose at me like smoking could be the worst thing ever, and how could I ever come into her home stinking of this reek. 

"No, my parents smoke and my mom dropped me off here, so it, I guess, um.... sticks to me?" I was like 15 or 16. And it was horrible, how I felt. I've never forgotten how humiliated I felt. 

When I go back to visit, my parents have a nice porch that they sit on and my mom smokes out there. She doesn't smoke in the house. The interior of the porch is nicotine stained - the ceiling, the walls, the aluminum siding of the house. Yellow, brownish, and not the bright white it should be. My sister and I tried to clean it when my mom was in the hospital in 2017 after breaking her hip. We scrubbed, the ceiling the wall the floor, the porch furniture. We barely made a dent in it. When I was there last week I was looking at where we worked vs. where we didn't get to. The colors were almost matched up again. 

My parents will pass away. We'll inherit this trailer and this porch. And I'm hiring a professional cleaning crew to oxidize and clean this porch. If my mom passes before my dad, I'm not sure my dad can live by himself (my mom can). So I want him to have a wonderfully cleaned porch. Because he sits out there and watches TV, and all summer it is Red Sox games on his little flat screen, while he lounges in the chaise lawn chair and laughs at the games. 

So having never been a smoker, I've recently been thinking about some of the behaviours and habits surrounding this ... habit. I've been watching people smoke, they go out, they take a break from work, they share cigarettes. The art of handing someone a cigarette and then lighting it for them, with a nice lighter and not some Bic lighter with a football team logo on the side. 

There's a kind of fellowship and kindness to it when I watch that. Words are not spoken. The recipient of the cigarette and the light, they don't usually say thank you until after they pull that first drag. 

And then they have deep, important conversations about things. You can tell by their bodies. And then a joke, and there is laughter.

I think of rituals sometimes, these kinds of social agreements. As a non-smoker, I don't get to participate in these things but they are interesting to watch from a distance. 

Once, while working for a small company, several of my office mates smoked. They'd get up periodically, head outside, and do their thing. As a non-smoker, I felt I deserved a break too. But I wasn't going out there to smoke. Instead, I'd play a game on the computer for a few minutes, and stop when they came back. 

The big boss walked by, saw me, and proceeded to give me shit. I pointed out that four of my coworkers were in the parking lot, having a smoke. Me goofing off for a few minutes until they came back in, in my mind, was equivalent to them going out and talking about the Patriots game while puffing away. 

He didn't see it the same way. 

As a 30 yr old human instead of a 16 year old human like the one that felt berated by the mom at a youth group meeting, I just looked at him and said 'honestly, what's the difference, guy? Go out there and give them shit and tell them to get back to work the same way you told me to. I bet you won't.' 

I won that argument. He never gave me shit again. 

Part of me thinks about this acceptable behaviour, for people to take a break and walk away. Maybe I could have taken a break and gone for a walk around the building but games are fun. I prefer games. 

And after all, we're all just playing games with our lives sometimes, right?