An informative and frightening show titled "Women and Cigarettes: A Fatal Attraction" was recently on TV.
While I was one of the lucky ones who more or less never succumbed to the smoking rage, I nonetheless found much of it hitting home -- home meaning my home, where my mother, father and sister all smoked.
I never minded it. I never saw it as hazardous to their health or my own. I used to like to light my mother's cigarettes, and I can recall doing it on drives to Pittsburgh, when she would allow me to push in the lighter and then put the poker-hot circle to her cigarette.
We never looked at it as a bad thing. When my sister was a teen-ager, she forgot to remove the bits of tobacco from the shirt pocket where she had kept her cigarettes. Of course, my mother discovered it, and they talked about it.
My mother did not scold my sister. She wanted to say she would not tolerate lies. My sister had told her she did not smoke; the lie was wrong, not the smoking. As long as my mother knew, all was forgiven. After that, they even smoked together.
I was thinking about this as the ABC program showed how movies and especially advertising made smoking appear glamorous.
That is what made me want to smoke, so I guess the Madison Avenue geniuses and Hollywood hype did the job.
It didn't happen in high school or college, where so many friends began to smoke. It happened when I had my first real job. A desk was not a desk without an ashtray. It was as if that made you a woman who had arrived.
Then there was my Aunt Dot. More than my mother, or Lauren Bacall and Bette Davis on film, she was the main influence in leading me to my first cigarette.
She smoked beautifully. Why seeing smoke come from a woman's nostrils could be considered glamorous, I'll never know. For me, it was the way Aunt Dot flicked the ashes from her long Herbert Tareytons that made me yearn to do that, too.
She had long, lovely fingers, and she did it with finesse.
She gave me a very thin, feminine lighter one Christmas. That did it. I had to smoke.
Off and on, I did. But, like President Clinton, I never inhaled. That was obvious when I was cast in a play at Jennerstown Mountain Playhouse. I had to smoke on stage, and being very new to it, I was awkward. I made a lot of smoke, which wasn't in keeping with the sophisticated character I was playing at all. I was 18, trying to be 40.
I didn't try again until my aunt gave me the lighter and I had a job with my own desk -- with an ashtray. You could smoke at your desk back then, which seems centuries ago.
Cigarettes were never my addiction, but I admit that when I held one between my fingers, I believed I looked like all the beautiful people in the ads and in the movies.
Advertising convinced me I was sophisticated and sharp and as good as anybody with that rolled slim tobacco product propped between my two fingers. But I hated the taste in my mouth. I hated the way clothes smelled after being in a particularly smoky restaurant.
From time to time, a cigarette seemed to be the solution to a mood. It still is, but rarely, maybe one or two a year. It's stupid, I know.
And yet, I might be sitting on my deck to figure out what comes next in my life, and I will think, "I want a cigarette."
Usually I don't have one available, so the mood passes. We should all be so lucky.
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