Last night my wife and I made a pact to stop smoking cigarettes today. This morning, after walking the kids to school, I walked to the gas station and bought a pack. My wife will be pleased when she gets home this evening. She knows, as I do, that we were just blowing smoke last night.
At the time of my brother’s call I had been a nonsmoker for six months. When I heard the news, my first thought was I want a cigarette. But I had none on hand, and the urge subsided for a time.
I’ve tried almost every stop-smoking aid on the market: nicotine patch, nicotine gum, nicotine nasal spray, nicotine inhaler. I’ve tried them in combination with antidepressants. I’ve gone cold turkey, whole hog, one day at a time, hour to hour. I tried acupuncture and stopped smoking for three miserable days. I haven’t gotten around to hypnosis, but my brother once weighed in on its merits relative to acupuncture. After acupuncture, he said, he lit a cigarette in the car on the way home. After hypnosis he lit one on the way to the car.
I began smoking regularly in high school. I was an honor roll student, not a troublemaker, but I hated school. In the morning before class I’d stand by the chain-link fence that marked the boundary of school property and smoke with my friends. No matter how bad the weather, we’d gather in clusters–freaks and greasers, dopers and juicers, the college bound and the going nowhere, industrial artists and National Merit Scholars, even a few jocks–and chain-smoke by the chain-link. Smoking was our common ground, and as long as we were on “our” side of the fence, we could do it with impunity.
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My mother was hospitalized four times for these ailments. Each time she was released the doctor arranged for her to have oxygen at home. She refused to turn on the machine: she was afraid, she confided, that she’d light a cigarette and set herself ablaze. “Now that’s what I’d call lighting up,” she’d joke. But it made her nervous just to have the thing in her house, as if it were the ghost of my old man standing there with the can of gasoline he used to burn leaves when I was a kid.
