Rosa and Marcy's Quit Smoking Story
Both of my parents were smokers and both of them eventually died from it, but, since my mother was, throughout my childhood until I was 16 years old, an old-fashioned 1950's style "stay at home" mom, my strongest memories, the ones forged in early childhood, are of her and her smoking more than of my father's.
Bound up in my earliest memories of my mother - right along with the sound of her voice reading or singing to me - is the smell of cigarette smoke. It is said that the sense of smell is more evocative than any other sense, more compelling, more associative, more able to create a memory image. I know this is true because the memory of my mother is instantly, vividly and inexorably evoked for me by the smell - tobacco smoke mixed with a slight hint of fragrance from the Avon cosmetics she used - which permeated her skin, her hair, her clothes, her bedroom, her books, her house and her very life from as far back as I can remember. Possibly even before, because the other sense which is considered to be strongly associative is the sense of taste and, since I was breast fed for the first few months of my life, (though, because my mother stopped producing milk when I was 8 months old, probably because of her smoking, I was given a bottle which I promptly rejected and began sucking my thumb - a habit which continued throughout my life until I started smoking!) I probably absorbed the taste of nicotine from her very body as an infant and so, when I tried smoking for the first time, the taste and the sensation instantly found a very old neural pathway and dug in.
My mother smoked all of the time. Her bright red pack of unfiltered Pall Malls and her ashtray were always with her. At the kitchen table where she liked to sit and drink her coffee and talk (and she was a great talker) all of her life (and where my siblings and I were always seated to listen to her, either casually or to be scolded, all of our lives), on a table beside her bed, beside the rocking chair where I sat in her lap to be read or sang to, beside the chair she sat in to read or to listen to the radio or, later, to watch television.
And why wouldn’t she have smoked? She was born in 1926 and came of age in the late 1930's and early 1940's - the wartime years. In her world, all adults smoked. That was, in fact, a sign of maturity and independence for young people of both genders. A sign that you had reached adulthood and were no longer a child - you smoked. Adults smoked and boys and girls tried it daringly as adolescents, the same way they began to experiment with sex.
Indeed, the culture in which they lived (most tellingly reflected by the movies they watched) associated cigarette smoking and sex both subtly and not so subtly. Lovers lit cigarettes two at a time, one for her and one for him, in romantic gestures. A woman put an unlit cigarette to her lips and caressed the hand of the man she allowed to light it for her as she leaned seductively toward him. She inhaled slowly, exhaled with a provocative pout and left a red imprint from her lipstick on the ones she extinguished in an ashtray.
Men - why, their very manhood and virility was associated with smoking and they used it to show their masculinity, prowess and courage in countless ways. Men about to die in battle sitting in a foxhole, or in front of a firing squad, or lying on a deathbed in a comrade or a lover's arms, had one last cigarette, often lit and held for them by a woman they loved. Macho men gripped a cigarette between their teeth and gazed flintily at the object of their desires (be it a woman or a fast car or horse or an oil well that would make them rich) with eyes that squinted through cigarette smoke. A cigarette asked for or shared was a way of creating an instant intimacy between couples, a kind of flirting. And in the earliest days, when cigarettes first began to be mass marketed and produced, that was both the sign of a so-called "loose" and of an emancipated "new" woman - she smoked.
On the silver screen and in their real lives, cigarettes were everywhere. So it is not at all surprising that my mother smoked; that she began smoking when she left home and got a job and began to live as an adult. Or that my father smoked; that he began to be a serious smoker when he joined the service and thought of himself as a man. He smoked unfiltered Camels - the man’s cigarette - when he began and throughout most of his life. It would have been an anomaly if my parents didn’t smoke. All of their friends who were the same age, who had grown up in the same culture they did, smoked too, and they all smoked every time they got together for a visit or a party or even for coffee in the mornings. So, as a child, in MY world too, everybody smoked, every adult I knew. The ever present smell and haze of tobacco smoke permeated my house, my memories and my life.
Bound up in my earliest memories of my mother - right along with the sound of her voice reading or singing to me - is the smell of cigarette smoke. It is said that the sense of smell is more evocative than any other sense, more compelling, more associative, more able to create a memory image. I know this is true because the memory of my mother is instantly, vividly and inexorably evoked for me by the smell - tobacco smoke mixed with a slight hint of fragrance from the Avon cosmetics she used - which permeated her skin, her hair, her clothes, her bedroom, her books, her house and her very life from as far back as I can remember. Possibly even before, because the other sense which is considered to be strongly associative is the sense of taste and, since I was breast fed for the first few months of my life, (though, because my mother stopped producing milk when I was 8 months old, probably because of her smoking, I was given a bottle which I promptly rejected and began sucking my thumb - a habit which continued throughout my life until I started smoking!) I probably absorbed the taste of nicotine from her very body as an infant and so, when I tried smoking for the first time, the taste and the sensation instantly found a very old neural pathway and dug in.
My mother smoked all of the time. Her bright red pack of unfiltered Pall Malls and her ashtray were always with her. At the kitchen table where she liked to sit and drink her coffee and talk (and she was a great talker) all of her life (and where my siblings and I were always seated to listen to her, either casually or to be scolded, all of our lives), on a table beside her bed, beside the rocking chair where I sat in her lap to be read or sang to, beside the chair she sat in to read or to listen to the radio or, later, to watch television.
And why wouldn’t she have smoked? She was born in 1926 and came of age in the late 1930's and early 1940's - the wartime years. In her world, all adults smoked. That was, in fact, a sign of maturity and independence for young people of both genders. A sign that you had reached adulthood and were no longer a child - you smoked. Adults smoked and boys and girls tried it daringly as adolescents, the same way they began to experiment with sex.
Indeed, the culture in which they lived (most tellingly reflected by the movies they watched) associated cigarette smoking and sex both subtly and not so subtly. Lovers lit cigarettes two at a time, one for her and one for him, in romantic gestures. A woman put an unlit cigarette to her lips and caressed the hand of the man she allowed to light it for her as she leaned seductively toward him. She inhaled slowly, exhaled with a provocative pout and left a red imprint from her lipstick on the ones she extinguished in an ashtray.
Men - why, their very manhood and virility was associated with smoking and they used it to show their masculinity, prowess and courage in countless ways. Men about to die in battle sitting in a foxhole, or in front of a firing squad, or lying on a deathbed in a comrade or a lover's arms, had one last cigarette, often lit and held for them by a woman they loved. Macho men gripped a cigarette between their teeth and gazed flintily at the object of their desires (be it a woman or a fast car or horse or an oil well that would make them rich) with eyes that squinted through cigarette smoke. A cigarette asked for or shared was a way of creating an instant intimacy between couples, a kind of flirting. And in the earliest days, when cigarettes first began to be mass marketed and produced, that was both the sign of a so-called "loose" and of an emancipated "new" woman - she smoked.
On the silver screen and in their real lives, cigarettes were everywhere. So it is not at all surprising that my mother smoked; that she began smoking when she left home and got a job and began to live as an adult. Or that my father smoked; that he began to be a serious smoker when he joined the service and thought of himself as a man. He smoked unfiltered Camels - the man’s cigarette - when he began and throughout most of his life. It would have been an anomaly if my parents didn’t smoke. All of their friends who were the same age, who had grown up in the same culture they did, smoked too, and they all smoked every time they got together for a visit or a party or even for coffee in the mornings. So, as a child, in MY world too, everybody smoked, every adult I knew. The ever present smell and haze of tobacco smoke permeated my house, my memories and my life.
