Where there’s smoke

They say confession is good for the soul. My soul can use all the nourishment it can get, so I’ve decided to own up now to some personal transgressions of long ago. The urge to come clean was sparked by recent discussions of whether and how much to restrict public smoking in our city. I was reminded of the tons of smoke I once foolishly sucked into my lungs. And how I became a thief to feed the desire to puff.

By the time I was eleven years old, I’d already begun, surreptitiously, to develop a pretty good smoking habit. In my limited defense, let me point out that the culture, if not encouraging, at least offered little discouragement of this habit. For example, my school, grades 1 through 12, had a semi-official smoking area behind the separate building housing the shop and the agriculture classroom. Teachers and students who smoked could do so in that area during breaks and recess, a provision that seems preposterous now, especially as nobody enforced any kind of age restriction. Keep in mind, though, that this was in North Carolina, a state where tobacco was almost as profitable as moonshine and a lot more legal.

Rarely having any ready cash, my problem was how to acquire cigarettes. My dad solved the problem for me to some extent, though unintentionally. In our kitchen there stood what is usually called a “pie safe,” a tall, wooden cabinet with pierced tin panels in the doors. We just called it “the safe.” Its top was surrounded by a wooden border a couple of inches tall, which meant that a lot of stuff could be stowed out of sight inside the border. We habitually stuck there small items that had no assigned place in the house. A small something needing repair, a spare box of kitchen matches, or an obsolete but still useful almanac? “Put it on the safe,” was the standard comment, so there tended to be a lot of stuff up there. That’s where my dad put each fresh carton of his cigarettes, first tearing open the end so he could reach up and, by feel, slide a pack out easily.

My system of thievery was to ease a pack of cigarettes out of the opened carton and leave it loose nearby, just one more item in the jumble of things there. If my dad missed the pack, it could be found, possibly even by a suddenly helpful thief. If there was no outcry by the time a new carton was brought home, the stray pack was mine.

While stealing was my primary means of ruining my health by smoking, it was not the only way. I managed occasionally to amass a few coins, not many, and if I could get to a store somewhere (I lived in the country), I could buy a pack of cigarettes. Mainstream brands — I preferred Old Gold, advertised with statements by alleged doctors, assuring smokers that there was “not a cough in a carload” — cost eighteen cents a pack. Lesser brands, such as Wings, might run fifteen cents. And was it a problem for a kid my age to buy cigarettes? Never, in my experience.

Two things caused me to stop my descent into crime: I got tired of worrying that I would get caught and, more important, I joined the church and realized that stealing cigarettes from my parent did not exactly fit with that decision. Sad to say, while I could recognize moral wrong, evidently I could not identify stupidity, so I periodically continued my development as a smoker until I became highly proficient at it. My addiction to tobacco lasted many years.

In adulthood, I was still capable of wrongdoing, though not stealing. You would find some of my misdeeds much more entertaining than my youthful thefts, were I to write about them. Don’t hold your breath.

This story was originally published April 28, 2017 at 3:58 PM with the headline "Where there’s smoke."