It Makes More Sense at Sixty-Seven

I loved smoking.  Can't say I didn't.  It was such a hippie thing at 16, a cool thing at 20, a relaxing thing at 30.  I enjoyed the way it gave me a moment to think before I spoke.  I liked the relaxing aspect at the end of a task.  I liked the social thing of smoking on campus with other smokers.

I started smoking at 16.  My boyfriend and I had just broken up and I didn't want to be the goody-two-shoes that was my imagined image.  So I stole some gawd-awful thing that my mother was smoking--something with icky mint (still curling up my nose at that while I type that!  LOL).  Then I found some non-filtered thing that I liked using for a while.  Soooo badass.  But I settled on pretty much anything I could get.  In college, I smoked clove cigarettes.  Height of coolness.  Bad lung cough.  Stopped that unless I wanted to smell cloves and look cool.

When I discovered the Internet, I would stay up latelatelate chatting with people all over the world.  Eventually found the channel #41plus (I was, you know, 41) and chatted and hot chatted and traveled and loved and loved and one final time, loved.  Of course, throughout the whole IRC (Internet Relay Chat) adventures, I smoked.  This little clock was always next to my computer monitor when it wasn't traveling with me across the states on my summer treks.  I won it from some banking campaign back in like 1974.  It was bright white and black.  It told me what time it was in Kentucky and then what time in Pittsburgh while I was three hours earlier.  It is now in my window near my sewing machine in the apartment in California.

Notice the color change...  The window sill is white.  The little clock is yellow.  *nodding*  Yeah, yellow from all those years of smoking next to it, traveling with it, it breathing in the second-hand smoke I was breathing out.  Poor lil thang.  Didn't have a chance.

It was in 2001 that I quit.  I was 5o.  Cold turkey from two-three packs of smokes a day.  I didn't quit because I no longer wanted to smoke.  I quit so I would no longer smell like a smoker.  I quit during Spring Break so that I could be okay when classes started in a week.  We put my house on the market that same day.  I thought I was doing pretty well as I went out to look at new houses.

hahahahahahaha *deep breath*  hahahahahahahaha  *wiping my yes*  hahahahahahahaha

I became pretty isolated in my office, eating lunch at the desk, not taking breaks.  Over the next 12 years of teaching, I never did find out what nonsmokers did for breaks.  I just didn't take a break.  I missed the smoking friends and the companionship.  I got a lot of work done!  I became known as the One Who Would Do the Work.  The committee member.  The doer.  The program director.

I always believed I was good at making a reasonable argument.  I could remain pretty cool-headed when in a verbal fight.  That is...until I quit smoking.  Without the barrier of time--inhaling exhaling--that came with smoking, I had no filter to my thoughts.  Non-filtered words.  First things that came into my head spewed out to the world.  Not the height of coolness.  I still haven't learned exactly how to argue without smoking, but I have learned to hold back most the time.

I remember a doctor once said to me when I was in college that smoking was bad for my health.  Sheesh like I didn't know that.  I mean, they had those little warnings on the side of the carton and individual packs.  I could read.  I heard the Surgeon General tell us over and over and over.  They had already taken smoking ads off television.  Cigarette companies had to pay big monies to people.  I looked at him and said, "WHAT??  When did this happen??"  Yes, I could be a snot :)  He didn't continue the subject.  After all, I was strong!  I was invincible!  I was woman!  Oh sorry...different issue.  But disease and death meant very little to me at 28.  

Yesterday I picked up my little clock and studied it.  It was no longer telling correct time.  Probably too much second-hand smoke. It had new batteries; the hands moved around.  It just didn't tell the correct time.  I again noticed the yellow shell and thought about what I didn't think was really true (even with science behind it!) almost 40 years earlier: smoking is bad for your health.  

This little clock says something different to my thinking all those years ago.
peace~~~