Smoking

I am embarrassed to admit that I was a smoker. While I was never a heavy smoker, I was a smoker non-the less. It is hard for me to believe now, that I did it for so long. Now, I don’t even like to be in smoky places.

My smoking started out innocent enough. I think I first tried it under a bridge on West Madison Street. Then I think maybe a couple times with the boys in the neighborhood. David or Billy, who both had parents who smoked, would steal a few from them and we would get together someplace secretly and smoke them. I was probably 10 to 12 years old.

Later, we would send Billy to the gas station to buy a pack. We would all smoke one or two and then hid them someplace. Many times we would lose interest and never go back to find the hidden pack. I suppose some of them could still be out there somewhere? A few times Billy bought cigarettes for us to sell at Boy Scout camp. In the black market our camp cigarettes would sell for as much as one dollar a piece. As I have written before, I often came home from camp with more money than I took.

By the time I was a freshman in high school I was having a cigarette or two almost every weekend when I was out with the guys or on a date. By then I could buy my own at a vending machine somewhere. They were about 35 cents a pack, I think. Athletes had to be careful they didn’t get caught smoking because they would be punished. I recall only a few who didn’t smoke at one time or another.

With each year I seemed to smoke a little more. In its peak in my high school years I probably smoked as many as five cigarettes a day. That’s not many but it was still becoming a habit. In continued into college even when I was on the swimming team where oxygen is a premium. I guess it didn’t help that the coach smoked, too.

When I became a teacher I could only smoke at certain times. I had to go to the boiler room of the building to do it. I began to plan my whole day around when I could smoke and my consumption increased to about 10 cigarettes a day. It never got much higher than that. Along the way I smoked a pipe for a while and often would have a cigar or two if I was out fishing or hunting.

I quit smoking cold turkey on April 29, 1978. I would have to say it has been the most difficult thing I have done in my life. I smoked my last cigarette that Friday night. I have not had another smoke of any kind since that day. Sometimes, now, almost thirty years later the urge is still there but I haven’t given in.

The power of the addiction is huge and I am afraid if I would have just one it would lead to another. You should never yield to anything that powerful except God! You have to take charge of your body.