To smoke or not to smoke?
My parents smoked cigarettes when I was growing up. My mother would always light up a Kent filtered cigarette when she smoked. My father on the other hand would have nothing to do with filters. He needed that straight tobacco taste. He was a Camel cigarette smoker.
Neither my sisters nor I were smokers. At least I never knew if my sisters ever tried smoking or not. I would say it’s probably because we inherently knew that smoking was bad for us. Even knowing that, in my case, that wasn’t the reason I don’t smoke.
When I was in sixth grade I was hanging out with a group of kids from my elementary school one weekend when one of them, Richie, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and said let’s smoke all the cigarettes in the pack. This was the first and only time I was with anyone my age that smoked. At that point, I was not very confident in my ability to say no. I knew my parents disapproved of smoking, even though they smoked and I didn’t want to be teased by the kids I was hanging around with. So I took the offered cigarette and smoked it, at least that is what I thought I was doing. There were no instructions given when I was handed the cigarette and I certainly wasn’t going to ask for any and look uncool. I took in the smoke and then blew it right out, just like I’d seen on TV. So that fact that you were supposed to inhale the smoke deep into your lungs was not a thought. I took in the smoke quickly and blew right back out. I ended up smoking 3 cigarettes that day. Had I known to inhale and breathe deep it might have ended up differently.
I didn’t see the fun in what I was doing. The kids offering me the cigarette didn’t look at me any differently. Plus these kids were not my normal everyday friends; it just happened that they were in my class. I never hung around with them after that and whether it was fear of my parents or sisters finding out, or that none of my other friends smoked, I never tried to smoke another cigarette again.
As to my parents, my mom did eventually stop smoking. She realized the dangers of smoking, even though she claimed she never inhaled. It might also have been the cost of cigarettes that stopped her. My dad only stopped after he had a stroke. But he also stopped a lot of other things after the stroke too.
I’m not sure if it would have been different had I chose to associate with a different group of friends, ones that smoked. But I’m glad that I made the decision that I did. Smoking held no interest for me; It cost too much and I found no pleasure in it. I’d have to find another way to look cool.
