I smoked for about six years (and quit about 12 years ago). I never crave a cigarette, like I thought I would, but I do sometimes miss smoking. David Sedaris's personal essay,
Letting Go, reminds me of that. *****
I smoked Camels, initially, in the summer before my senior year of high school. My friends smoked Camels, and I bummed theirs for a good while. I don't know why I started smoking. Again, my friends smoked...growing up in central Maine, it was something to do. Immediately, I liked the taste of a cigarette, the experience of a cigarette--sliding it out of the pack (especially a new, fresh pack), lighting it, the first inhalation...and exhalation. I loathed my first beer, a can of Bud Light, but loved my first cigarette--the virginal lightheadedness. I didn't smoke a lot in high school--I played three sports, and so smoked mostly in between seasons, and in the summers. In between high school and college, I spent a year in Denmark, and over there I smoked Prince cigarettes, the only Danish-manufactured cigarettes. I smoked mostly when we were drinking (usually bottles of Tuborg beer), but that was often. (A standard line during the Tuborg Brewery tour was that Denmark had recently moved from fourth place to third in per capita beer consumption worldwide--as East (3rd) and West Germany (2nd) had recently reformed into Germany--Czechoslavakia was number one.) My host mother smoked, too: she purchased loose tobacco and empty, filtered cigarettes, into which she inserted, with the help of a red, plastic device, the tobacco. So sometimes late at night, when I was out of cigarettes and while the rest of the house slept, I would make a cigarette or two in the kitchen and smoke them on the patio outside my bedroom. Upon returning to Maine, I returned to Camels. Camel had a promotion at the time: Camel Cash, which accompanied each pack of cigarettes. The Camel Cash catalog presented a great variety of items for purchase, from tins of matchbooks to leather jackets (with Joe Camel on the back)--I even, no kidding, recall a white water raft. So that summer I smoked Camels and collected the cash, and that fall at college I smoked Camels and collected the cash. I never collected enough cash for the raft, but I bought some tins and a Zippo lighter or two. And then I met a girl, and she smoked Marlboro lights. I became a Marlboro man, and began to smoke in earnest. The first three years of college I moved back and forth from a pack a day to two packs a day. But even when I was smoking 40 cigarettes a day, I knew there would be a day when I would stop. I had known that all along--it wasn't an attempt to justify or rationalize the habit. I just knew that I smoked, and soon there would be a time when I would not. Those years, I lit up most every chance I got, often thinking of a good reason for a smoke: "I'll have a coffee--and smoke a cigarette; a beer--and smoke a cigarette; I'll eat a snack--and then smoke a cigarette; I'll go for a walk, a drive--and smoke a cigarette." Cigarettes filled in the gaps in time. I smoked early in the morning before breakfast, late at night just before bed, and any imaginable time in between. I could not fathom drinking a beer without a cigarette--at parties I would notice non-smokers with a beer in one hand and the absence of a cigarette in the other, and wonder how the hell they did it. Then, during my senior year, I started purchasing Drum tobacco and rolling my own cigarettes. They tasted better, they smoked smoother, and I began to smoke fewer cigarettes each day. I had begun the decline. Earlier, I had tried to quit several times, lasting a day or an hour (Mark Twain said: “Quitting smoking is easy. I’ve done it hundreds of times.” ) but it never took, because I didn't want it to take. But "the time when I would not smoke" had arrived. I smoked ten cigarettes a day, then five, then three, then one. Finally, one day when my packet of Drum was empty, I decided I would not purchase another. I have smoked probably less than ten cigarettes in the last decade. Though I smoked for five plus years, and though I sometimes miss it, I now have no idea why anyone chooses to smoke.
