Reflections on Smoking

Great read in The New Yorker

Letting Go

When I was in fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the American Tobacco plant in nearby Durham, North Carolina. There we witnessed the making of cigarettes and were given free packs to take home to our parents. I tell people this and they ask me how old I am, thinking, I guess, that I went to the world’s first elementary school, one where we wrote on cave walls and hunted our lunch with clubs.

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When New York banned smoking in the workplace, I quit working. When it was banned in restaurants, I stopped eating out and when the price of cigarettes hit seven dollars a pack I gathered all my stuff together and went to France.

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Just after my mom started chemotherapy, she sent me three cartons of Kool Milds. “They were on sale,” she croaked. Dying or not, she should have known that I smoked full-strength Filter Kings, but then I looked at them and thought, Well, they are free. It took some getting used to, but by the time my mother was cremated I’d switched over.