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My father was a chain smoker, he
smoked about three packs of cigrarettes a day and coughed so
hard that it sounded quite painful. He wanted to quit and
with the backing of my mother tried everything he could think
of. Then he had back surgery and was laid up in bed for a long
recovery. He begged my mom to go buy him cigarettes but she refused. By the hand
of this fate he finally controlled his demon. As for me, I started smoking when I
was five years old. My brother, Paul, who was ten, snitched my
dad's cigarettes and we went down into the woods to smoke. We
brought our next door neighbor with us. He was only four. Now we
didn't just smoke cigarettes, but Paul and Carl managed to get
us cigars and pipes as well. Paul warned me that mom would smell
the smoke on my breath, so he told me I needed to brush my teeth
after smoking. One day as I came out of the woods and went to
the bathroom to brush my teeth my mom found it strange
that I would be brushing my teeth in the middle of the day. It
didn't take much effort on her part to assess what was going on,
and to get me to stop she decided to make me smoke nonstop in
front of her until I got sick. (She says she found out later that
was quite dangerous, that I could have gotten nicotene
poisoning.) Some people have asked me if smoking until I got
sick cured me. I think it was more the getting caught that cured
me, and having to smoke in front of my mother seemed to put the
exclamation mark on the "You're not hiding anything from your
mother!" They had cigarette ads on TV pretty often in those
days, and I remember chiming in with one or two of my siblings,
"Eiwww! Cigarettes!" I am grateful that my smoking came
to a resolution at a very tender age. Had I been a teenager when
I started smoking I would probably have gotten away with it long
enough that there's a pretty good chance I would still be
smoking today, and croaking my lungs out the way my father did,
and the way his brother did until the day he died. |
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