Memories of a Sweet, Lethal, Smoke-Filled Home

I half smiled when I heard the report about a Virginia woman who was sentenced to 10 days in jail for smoking in the presence of her children.

That’s because my parents smoked.

Every night after dinner, my mother and father would lounge on the couch and put a match to a cigarette.

I remember watching them and feeling a little envious. It was like they were having another dessert. They seemed to enjoy it so thoroughly, and they looked so good doing it too.

They are young in this memory, their hair still dark, their faces still smooth, their bodies slender and strong. I remember sitting on the floor, just watching them, anxious for the day when I would be allowed to smoke.

We had ashtrays all through the house. The good ones were made of thick green or golden-bronze glass. There was a plastic one in the bathroom that sat on the back of the toilet or sometimes on the rim of the sink next to where we kept our toothbrushes. We even had a large ashtray with a fancy J on it, like a royal stamp. Whenever my father jinked his ash, his Army ring banged against the glass ashtray, making a tinkling sound and creating the illusion that the cigarette itself could chime.

I mostly enjoyed Sunday afternoons when my father would sit on the floor in front of the television, lean against the footstool and watch whatever sport happened to be in season. He would fix himself a tray of peanuts in the shell; a bottle of beer; a fresh, stiff pack of cigarettes and an ashtray.

I would often sit next to him with a bottle of soda and pretzel sticks that I would pretend were cigarettes.

There was a sunbeam that would slant through the living room window in the afternoon, slicing through the smoke that was always there. I loved watching the minuscule particles in a hazy spotlight, dancing in wild splendor.

Once, when no one was looking, I took two cigarettes from my dad’s pack. My best friend Curt and I ran down into the woods and lighted them up. The menthol taste was so offensive to us that we could not get beyond a few puffs. “Let’s try my dad’s,” Curt suggested, and he pulled out two regular cigarettes.

“Mmmmm, now that’s a cigarette,” I said.

Curt and I continued sneaking cigarettes from his dad as often as possible.

We even, upon occasion, bought our own packs. Because both of our fathers used to send us to the store to pick up a pack of cigarettes for them, like our moms would send us for a loaf of bread, it was easy and there were never any questions asked.

When I was in sixth grade, my mother stopped smoking. She told my brothers and me that it was a nasty habit. “But Dad smokes,” we said. It’s bad for him too, she said.

I never remember seeing my mother with a cigarette in her hand again.

My father continued smoking -- one to two packs a day. I smoked off and on from about the fifth grade through college.

When my father died of bladder cancer at the age of 56, it was clear that his smoking was a direct cause of his demise. The nicotine concentrates in the bladder, the doctors said, bathing the organ in carcinogens.

When my mother died of lung cancer at 56, only 17 months after my father, it was clear that my father’s smoking was a direct cause of her early demise as well. Secondhand smoke, the doctors explained, is often more toxic because it is unfiltered.

The most beautiful smoke that balleted through the air -- plie, pirouette and sissonne -- ribboning with elegance in certain slants of light on Sunday afternoons was that unfiltered smoke that danced into my mother, my brothers and me from the warm, glowing tip of my father’s cigarettes.

Ten days in jail for smoking around one’s own children may seem like a severe punishment, but it just may be what it will take to beat an early death sentence.