I didn’t realize until the late afternoon: it’s twenty-five ago today that I smoked my last cigarette. And I still notice the cigarette displays in convenience stores and supermarkets. Look, there are the Camels. Look, there’s the Drum. I still sense the magnetic field when I walk past the shop where I bought tobacco and papers for three or four years. I still dream of cigarettes, and then I dream of them some more. I have engaged in a self-interview about smoking, and another, and I still identify with Apollinaire’s beautiful poem “Hôtel”: “Je ne veux pas travailler je veux fumer.”
Just last week, after a wonderful lunch with Elaine, I was sipping coffee, and I felt a pang. If someone had offered me a cigarette at that moment, I wouldn’t have wanted to resist. But you can’t smoke in restaurants anymore, and besides, it was almost twenty-five years since I’d stopped. I am, like they say, so over cigarettes. Never even think of them even.
Elaine and I wrote a song several years ago in response to an unusually specific Google search: “Please Don’t Smoke.” It’s addressed to seven-year-olds (really), but it’s good advice for all.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
No smoking
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comments: 3
Congratulations. My dad had a cough that used to wrack his whole body and would scare us to death almost daily. He quit at 65 or so, and the cough went away almost overnight.
I may have mentioned this before, (and if so, I apologize.) My dad had smoked much of his young life, but he quit as a gift to Mother in his mid-forties. Fifty years later, it reached out and got him--bladder cancer, which metastasized despite radical surgery. He wanted to live to be 100, and he did make it almost until age 91--good long innings. But I still miss him, and I always applaud anyone who fights the good fight to give up tobacco.
So glad you stopped!
"... it’s twenty-five years ago today that I smoked my last cigarette."
Somebody said everybody knows where they were when they first heard President Kennedy was shot.
Apparently, people also remember when they had their last cigarette.
Important things, we remember.
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