Smoking,by Gillian

“I quit smoking when I was in college”,  I say, righteously; but that is a huge distortion of the truth!

It's not exactly a lie. I have probably not smoked more than ten cigarettes since the late 1950's. But I didn't quit in the sense of the huge conscious effort of concentrated willpower the word implies. I just kind of drifted away from it and never really missed it; rather in the same way I had drifted into it. It was attractive, for a while, in the way of all forbidden things, especially to the young. We smuggled ill-gotten packs of cigarettes onto the school bus, puffing away at them huddled on the back seat while the driver turned a blind eye. He chain-smoked so why should he care if we took a few inexpert drags?

I didn't quite get the attraction, but of course did not say so. There's a limit to how much of an odd-ball one is willing to become, and holding a cigarette between my fingers for a few seconds every now and then was a cheap price to pay for belonging: not being an outcast. (Being the child of a local teacher offers many challenges.)  Nobody seemed to notice whether I ever actually placed the cigarette between my lips, much less inhaled. Life was easy.

In college, at any social gathering, I always had a drink in my hand. So did my fellow party-goers. Most of them also held a smoldering cigarette. But the drink was my membership card, so few, if any, noticed the lack of burning embers.

A few years later, at a party with several twenty-something co-workers, my husband and I both had the obligatory drink-in-the-hand when the joint came by. We both passed it on, untouched by human lips; untouched by ours, anyway. We both knew that we had enough of a challenge controlling the attractions of alcohol and had no need of another.

So, in a very strange way, booze has saved me.

But the attitude of the medical profession towards drinking and smoking which I find rather strange.

“Yes”, I acknowledge, “I probably drink more than is good for me.”

“Do you smoke?” is the inevitable response.

I think if I said, “There's a huge pink elephant in the corner of your office,” the reply would probably be, “How many packs do you average a day?'”

© August 2016 

About the Author 

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years. We have been married since 2013.