A Small Thing at the Playground

My beautiful young Mom

            I’m walking back home from the grocery store across the field near the playground and I notice this sign that says, “No smoking, young lungs at play.” It makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time because when I was growing up and all the horrors of secondhand smoke were known and ignored, people smoked everywhere. And God forbid anyone should object to people smoking outside! It’s outside for Christ’s sake! What could be the problem with that?

My mother was a smoker so I got to enjoy secondhand smoke in my very own home. Everyone smoked back then, (except my dad) especially on T.V. and in movies, so it seemed like the most glamorous thing for my beautiful young mom to be holding a cigarette in her hand or to her lips nearly all the time, except for when she was drinking or eating. The way she would hold it, just so, was nothing short of graceful; Ingrid Bergman Casablanca graceful. Smooth, romantic, utterly cool.

I think I was around five when I started picking up my mom’s cigarette and pretending to smoke it, holding it exactly right between my two stubby fingers then sweeping it to my lips, where I just, you know, placed it gently and kind of puffed. This was all fine and dandy until my dad saw me one day and decided to teach me a lesson or kill me, I’m not sure which. He told me to suck in on the cigarette like Mommy did and low and behold I nearly choked to death. I don't know if I turned blue, but I never did smoke or even touch a cigarette after that. Lesson learned. Stay away from Daddy.

Though my Mom was the lone smoker in our nuclear family we often went to my grandparents’ house where everyone (except my grandfather) smoked. My mother had three siblings and among them were more than ten marriages so it’s hard to keep track of how many of the spouses smoked, but I know that my sister and I and our revolving door of cousins often were stuck in a fourteen by eighteen foot room with as many as fifteen smokers. We repeatedly complained of headaches and were told to go outside or down cellar to my grandfather’s office but not without first being reprimanded for whining and complaining about something that had nothing to do with their smoking.

My grandmother believed in smoking like her mother believed in Jesus. She allowed her children to start as early as they wanted, my mother at eleven! She also encouraged my sister and me to try it and not be such “goody-goodies.” We would have nothing to do with it, but I did enjoy eating the gin-soaked olives she left in her martini glasses that (sans pimentos) fit very well on my tiny little fingers.

I know this sounds like child abuse by today’s standards but these are not unpleasant memories, except for the smoking. We also ate at these gatherings and my grandmother, “Gammy,” made this salad we called “Gammy Salad.” It consisted of soggy iceberg lettuce, mayonnaise-drenched tomatoes, onions, and (here’s the really good part) little slivers of Swiss cheese! The reason it was so soggy was because of the endless cocktail hours that preceded dinner. There were pitchers of martinis that kept getting emptied and refilled, I kept eating the olives as an appetizer, and before you knew it, the main course, “Gammy Chicken soaked in French Dressing” was so over-cooked that it was falling off the bones (yes, chicken had bones in those days) and it was delicious!

Gammy never quit smoking, even after several operations to reopen the collapsed veins all over her body. She never got lung cancer. She did have emphysema, but I don’t ever really remember her being very sick. Near the end of her life, she brought a handsome young man as her escort to my mother’s third wedding. This same guy was a pall bearer at her funeral. She did whatever the hell she wanted. She was not a nice person, but she was an accidentally amazing cook!

My mother was the only one amongst her siblings who died directly from a smoking-related illness; emphysema at the age of 64. She did quit smoking in her late 50’s but by then it was too late. Her husband died of lung cancer seven months before her death.

Smoking kills people. It really does! I’m glad that a few young lungs will be spared by the sign next to the playground. But I also wish that the people I loved who got killed by cigarettes were back with us to enjoy a few moments of smoke-free air around most everywhere now. I’d stand in the sunlight with them, watch the children play and just breathe in all that fresh air.

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This week’s blog post came from reading (well, skimming) William Zinsser’s The Writer Who Stayed. At age 87 he offered to write a personal essay once a week for the web version of the Scholar and wound up doing so for 19 months! Like me, he also taught writing and loved helping other writers find their voices and get over whatever it is that’s holding them back from writing. For me, it’s finding a subject that I feel comfortable writing about each week and keeping to the deadline like the word dead means something.

I thought about small hands, young lungs, the little mouth that puffed the cigarette and slurped the salad. The joy of childhood, the weirdness, the photos and fragrances (acrid sometimes) that take me back there. And Gammy. She surprised me.

There’s always something worth writing about, if you think small and dig in.