I had just loaded the groceries into my trunk when he walked by. He was combing the parking lot, looking for shopping carts, when he saw mine. We smiled at each other, I handed him the cart. The entire exchange lasted maybe 10 seconds. It took me back 20 years.
What really happened was this: It was a sweltering summer day. The young man who took my cart was smoking a cigarette. He had just exhaled. The smoke hung in the air, motionless ”“ a cloud framed by heat. And the smell of the smoke hung, as well, with nowhere to go.
Amid the foul city smells that day, cigarette smoke ranked high on the list. And yet I was tempted to linger, like the smoke itself, inhaling its stale, sweet stench.
What is it that so tempts even an ex-smoker of long-standing?
Instantly, my mind compiled a catalog of cigarettes past: There were the after-dinner smokes whose pleasure exceeded that of most desserts; the cigarettes that bought time and distraction in a heated talk; and the cigarettes that served as punctuation ”“ the pause between thoughts. Cigarettes were an extension of the hand, a tool of the emphatic gesture. So encompassing was the habit that it became nearly inseparable from most activities and things.
To breathe was to smoke.
It is an odd habit, this sucking of dirt, which is what smoking really is. Yet I always envied those whose habit was well-modulated ”“ say, three or four cigarettes a day. It was the golden mean applied to an addiction ”“ a paradox, at best.
For many of us, though, the average was more like 20, maybe 30, cigarettes a day, and most of those were smoked so hazily as to go nearly unnoticed. Which is why smokers sometimes have two cigarettes burning at once. It’s as if we were smoking in our sleep; we practically were. We acquired smoker’s cough and smoker’s voice, yellowed fingertips, and rank smoky smells on our clothes. Yet there was that handful of cigarettes each day that somehow justified the rest ”“ small pleasures so complete and self-contained that we couldn’t resist.
Back to the parking lot. So this is what we’ve come to: As former smokers, we inhale the smoke of others, almost pining for the habit we kicked. Indeed, I know an ex-smoker who urges friends to blow their cigarette smoke her way. Proximity is what counts. This way, she gets a whiff of evil on an otherwise virtuous path.
— Joan Silverman writes op-eds, essays, and book reviews for numerous publications. This column originally ran in The American Reporter.
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