Do You Mind if I Smoked?

Good thing I wasn’t still smoking in August 2019, when I started working at the American Heart Association. 

I quit 20 years earlier, after an epiphany while driving my red Jeep Grand Cherokee with the window wide open on a glacial February morning; I dangled a cigarette out the window so I wouldn’t get ashes on the car’s interior. Freezing, I wondered what the hell I was doing. 

But this is not simply a post about a smoker's recovery. It’s also a celebration of the glamorous side of the world's worst habit.

Now, Voyager

In classic Hollywood movies like Now Voyager, smoking served as a stand-in for sex. You knew what time it was when Paul Henreid lit Bette Davis’s cigarette. According to smoking historian Richard Klein, Casablanca is an “encyclopedia” of smoking.

As for me, both of my parents smoked.

Dad was a prominent physician and a constant cigar smoker who puffed on the job, even during meetings with colleagues and patients in his hospital office. His justification was that he did not inhale. Incredible. 

Mom would set out small bowls of Eve cigarettes – the pretty ones introduced in 1971 that urged women to “embrace their femininity” – around our living room when entertaining guests. 

I'll never forget my dinner with her in Palm Beach in the ’90s, when we both lit up. She quit shortly after.

As a college and graduate student, I smoked continuously—it was part of my persona. Later, I had a small corner office at Random House in the 1990s and smoked everyone out of the joint. It never occurred to me to ask whether anyone minded.

Midcentury ashtrays

Today, I am still captivated by smoking paraphernalia, even though my last smoke was in 1999. A couple of years ago, I built an extensive collection of midcentury ashtrays, which we mounted around our family room TV. I enjoy seeing these relics transformed into an art installation. 

That room is our homage to smoking and includes other nods to it, such as vintage pipes and a hookah. It is our nonsmoking smoking room.

The other day, our pool guy showed up with a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. I'm now so averse to smoking that I don't even want anyone smoking outside our house.

I'm glad I survived smoking. It might have been bad, but when it was good, it was heavenly.

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