Essay

Blowing smoke

By Kit Pancoast Nagamura

Smoke: some we hate, some we love. Cookout smoke calls to my inner cavewoman (picture early Rachel Welch, okay?), smoke from incense burning at a temple is an olfactory prayer, and bonfire smoke is the cologne of summer. But if someone lights up a cigarette in a restaurant — and so often this happens just when my meal arrives — I am (pardon the pun) incensed. That kind of smoke trashes (a word with "ashes" included) the taste of good food, which is of course why so few people light up when their meal arrives.

I have solid grounds for advocating many of the new laws popping up in Japan, curbing public cigarette smoking. Both my grandfathers smoked, and died young. My Swiss grandfather preferred Gauloises, which he loved to tell me were made by sweeping detritus from the gutters of Paris and rolling it up in toilet paper. My other grandfather's story is a morality tale. He and his two older brothers were promised by their father 100 bucks, big money back then, if they didn't smoke before the age of 21. My grandfather's brothers collected their rewards and never smoked. My grandfather also refrained from smoking, but when he came of age, the Great Depression had bankrupted his father. Crushed, my grandfather took up smoking, and died long before his siblings, of lung cancer.

That should have been enough evidence to prevent me from ever smoking, but as my son loves to point out, as I fan away fumes in restaurants with my menu, "You did it too, Mom!"

This, I regret to say, is proof of why you should keep quiet about your early failings to your children. But my son is right. I did smoke in college. I smoked like Lauren Bacall, in black and white splendor, imagining someone desirable on the other side of my graceful plume of secondhand toxins. I was a magazine editor, and smoking seemed to suit the gritty, self-inflicted-heart-attack pace of journalism. I smoked when writing, too, using the burn time to reflect, to inspire myself with nicotine, to inhale the opiate of creation.

My senior year roommates, tired of being exposed to bad air, ganged up on my habit and bought me a 50-pound bag of carrots to help "ween me from the oral fixation thing." I chewed carrots like Bugs Bunny through the writing of my final thesis. I learned that cigarettes leave a yellow gunk on windows, stain teeth and fingers, coax out ugly wrinkles, and make you more vulnerable to colds. When one of my favorite authors, Raymond Carver, contracted lung cancer, I finally quit.

But here's the funny thing.Though I try hard to avoid secondhand smoke these days — the outrage of the reformed can be comically fierce — I still associate the lingering smell in clothing, or the languorous poses struck by tobacco-lovers with my adored grandfathers, with my first taste of freedom and identity, with back-alley rebellion and endless nights of searching for the slightly crazed element of artistic perfection. Which sort of stinks, but there you go.

Shukan ST: May 8, 2009

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