Light Up and Live!

For years (or ever since I took a noncredit adult-education night course on the dynamics of personality) I smoked with what I took to be enlightenment, believing that the cigarettes I cherished were a socially acceptable, accessible symbol for breast-feeding — and nothing more.

And then, not long ago, i was ordered to forgo smoking for a period of time which I measured by the microsecond. The withdrawal symptoms were fierce. Not only were my bronchi at loose ends without the regular onslaught of tars and nicotine, but my dynamics altered. Where there was smoke, there I was, too, following strangers up and down the street and in and out of doorways in the wistful hope that they would exhale in my direction. I slept on a sachet of old, charred cigarette butts, and 1 sublimated with lemon drops, by the gross. My behavior cycle spun alarmingly. Several times I was near convulsion.

Mainly for the comfort of watching somebody else light Up, I stumbled into a study of tobacco commercials on television, a research project I recommend to all psychiatrists. Talk about adult education! At last I knew why the life had gone out of me. I had deprived myself of a product which has become our culture’s fount of romance, the fine arts, gracious living, physical fitness — and climate control.

I resolved to turn over a new tobacco leaf when at last I got the goahead to begin smoking less and enjoying it more. The only question was, which leaf?

Did I want a real cigarette? Yes, decidedly, I had had enough of licorice and milk chocolate. No more pacifiers for me. But didn’t I also want to feel better about smoking? I must make my choice: one or the other — or something else altogether. For wasn’t it time to seek the moment of truth, smoking only honest tobacco instead of those cigarettes that once tasted so good, so satisfying, yet told me nothing but little white lies?

I began to realize that, while smoking had benefits I had never dreamed of, each brand’s reward differed. Which was the cigarette for me? It was rapture to consider that soon I would be able to go out into the woods and watch the spotted deer at play. Yet, semantics entered the picture, and I was torn asunder by homonyms: another brand was offering me another kind of dear — unspotted, and at play in wolf’s clothing — a smoke that would enable me to meet temptation two-ona-match with a handsome man.

How frivolous of me in these urgent times! I should put selfishness aside and think of my country first, smoking only that tobacco over which, right in the field, a marching brass band had played. But might the crop not be a bit bruised and pulpy after undergoing “The Stars and Stripes Forever”? And could such nicotine ever feel truly at home in an art gallery?

I was mesmerized, then, by the thought of smoking the cigarette that would come to me from the clouds, beside a mountain stream. One puff, and it would be springtime, anytime! But that meant April showers and daffodils all year round. Could I stand it? I would miss the old familiar change of seasons, and the figure eights and half nelsons I could otherwise perform, in my flip-top iceskating skirt, but it wouldn’t help matters much if I switched to the smoke with the smoky nightclub atmosphere, and me at the bass viol.

You see, I had to think of Hubby.

He wouldn’t want me down there twisting at the night spots. He would want me at the ready in his home workshop, poised to blow little cooing smoke rings of delight when he finally got that milking stool hammered together. But would that be fair to the children? Shouldn’t Pop and I both smoke the cigarette that would give us the knack of having fun—sledding, playing touch football, and generally sporting around en famille in a kind of domestic decathlon?

If I expected more, I would get it, that was sure, but while I would then be in a better position to blow up party balloons, I would have sacrificed that really memorable endaround play, scoring only seconds before the gun would sound in the homecoming game. I couldn’t even be a drum majorette. And it would mean, too, that I could never again scamper in and out of tropic waters, up to my apple-smooth knees.

The king-size decision faced me, only a quarter inch away. Would I settle for being refreshed, or did I want to be an architect?

And the dismaying thing about it was that, either way, I would have to do without those tobaccos which had been to the marrying room, with the window shades drawn. How could I possibly trust my bronchi, and my social future, to tobaccos which had got together without benefit of clergy — particularly those twenty-one great tobaccos who were undoubtedly practicing polygamy?

In the end I found I simply couldn’t choose. With the exception of cigars, and that cigarette known as the man’s smoke, each brand had something different to offer me which I desperately needed if I were to become a firm, fully packed, and well-rounded individual.

I took the only way out. It’s expensive, rather like an umbrella insurance policy, but I’m covered, and I feel good, like I should. What I do is, I buy one package each of ten different brands a day, and at twilight — in my specially designed ten-branch candelabrum of a holder — I smoke one of each simultaneously. Then, after I have taken the pass that comes to me from the clouds and run the ninety yards to the goal line in the rain, the spotted deer come up and nuzzle me and I design my own swimming pool. Strike up the band ! Draw the window shade! And never mind those nursing bottles.