Learning a harsh lesson about smoking

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/08/2020 (1940 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They say smart people learn from their own mistakes, wise people learn from others’ mistakes and fools never learn.

Let’s face it, we all make mistakes in our lives. One of mine was trying cigarettes. Actually, I tried cigars at 10 years old. A friend and I came across some cigars and were caught smoking them by my friend’s father.

“What are you guys smoking?” he exclaimed as he opened the back door.

To teach us a lesson, Craig’s dad made us light them up so he could watch us smoke. As I reached the end of mine and was about to put it out, his father wouldn’t let me, saying, “come on, finish it, that’s the best part, that’s where you turn green.” 

I must say it was a while before I smoked again. Chalk it up to being young and foolish and perhaps a little curious.

But then, a couple years later in junior high school, at 12 years old, smoking seemed to be the ‘cool’ thing to do. Everyone was doing it, right? Most of the heroes and tough guys in Hollywood movies were smoking. It was not only a cool thing to do but glamorous as well. Heck, there was even a cigarette commercial in the ’60s that showed Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble “enjoying” a smoke.

That winter of ’76, I was well on my way to becoming a career smoker. My father was a heavy smoker and would always say to me, “don’t you ever smoke,” with a smoke in his hand.

I kind of thought, “What a hypocrite,” until I realized one day what an addictive substance tobacco was. My older sister went to a social with her boyfriend and my father asked her to pick up a pack of smokes on her way home. Well, she picked up the cigarettes but left them on the dash of her boyfriend’s truck. There was a major snowstorm that night and the city was basically shut down the next day and my father turned into a different person when he wasn’t able to have a cigarette. He ended up ripping open teabags, rolling up the leaves and smoking them.

“Ewww,” I thought. “If that’s what smoking leads to, then maybe it’s not something that I should be doing.”

And I haven’t smoked since. 

I lost my father to cancer in 1992, at just 61 years old. He even had a tracheotomy and continued to smoke. So maybe my father wasn’t such a hypocrite. Maybe he really was looking out for my best interests. After all, he really knew how addictive those things were.

Love ya dad, thanks for the harsh lesson.
 
Doug Kretchmer is a freelance writer, artist and community correspondent for The Times. Email him at quidamphotography@gmail.com
Twitter: @DougKretchmer