Up In Smoke

While at Curves this morning I saw a young man walk over to the tavern next door (it's closed during those morning hours) and rummage through the cigarette butt depositories outside the place. I do not know if he found any he could smoke. Probably. 

The incident brought much to my mind. He did not look "down and out" and Audrey said he looked too young to buy his own. So age could be the reason he looks for butts.

Audrey asked me if I had ever been tempted to smoke. I said yes, I had been tempted. I did not tell her about the time behind a bush in the vacant lot across the street from our house in Santa Monica. I was probably seven or nine or ten, and I tried smoking. Lucky Strike. You know, I likely believed the ads L.S.M.F.T. Lucky Strike means fine tobacco--as if that might be all a person would want or need in life. Fine tobacco.

My experience was not nearly as wonderful as the radio ads said, with their promises of good taste and pure smoking pleasure. I don't remember any taste. Mostly it was just hot in my mouth. Besides, I didn't know what to do with the smoke, didn't know to inhale--thank goodness--only knew to blow it out. I think I may have taken two puffs. That was plenty. Besides, someone from the house might have seen me sneak behind that bush, might have seen a little smoke. When I got back in the house, no one said anything, which meant to me that no one saw anything. Anyway, I was cured, or close to it.

When Audrey was a kid, she got in big trouble the day she took her dad's pack of cigarettes and tore them all up. She didn't want him to smoke. That didn't stop him. I suppose he smoked all the rest of his life, until he died a year ago. I can't know if smoking shortened his life. He was in his 80s.

I told Audrey about Michael Sklarski, who smoked in 5th grade, which would mean he was 10 years old. She asked why. I said probably because it was a grown-up thing to do. Isn't that why young people start smoking today? Audrey wondered if it was that people didn't know how bad smoking was for them. Maybe. We always knew, we in our home, that it was bad. And I can remember Edgar Bergen's puppet Mortimer Snerd saying that smoking would stunt your undergrowth, a play on the notion people had that it would stunt a person's growth.

This little confession worries me.