THANK YOU

On a walk, a longer walk than usual, we added a turn around a park pavilion, a turn that we’d never taken before. I was listening to This American Life, to a long segment by the writer Sean Cole about his struggle to stop smoking cigarettes. And I started thinking about cigarettes.

Or more accurately: I started feeling about cigarettes. I last smoked a cigarette almost thirty-four years ago (October 8, 1989), and I would never smoke one again, but I still sometimes miss them. I started visualizing a pack of Pall Malls — the deep red, the elongated white letters, the (fatuous) slogan “Wherever Particular People Congregrate.” I visualized the blue paper strip across the top of the pack (I think it showed a somber-looking Native American man in my day), and then I visualized the tips of the unfiltered cigarettes — white outlines with brown and tan flakes of tobacco, all against the deep red pack.

And then, as we moved past the pavilion, I saw a sign above the picnic tables: THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING. Well-placed, Department of Parks and Recreation.

Related reading
All OCA smoking posts (Pinboard)