Chapter 27
Smells have always brought back memories to me. A certain kind of perfume reminds me of cold, snowy winter nights in the east. Lemon furniture polish conjures up visions of my mother-in-law’s house. Poke salad greens boiling away on the top of the stove stirs up recollections of my Poppa.
The other day a man smoking a cigarette came into the office. Way down in the dusty basement corner of my mind the memories of other menthol cigarettes half a lifetime ago caused me to smile.
That was eons ago when smoking was “cool”—way, way back there when cigarette packages didn’t have that little blocked off warning about how BAD they are for you. Probably back there when the surgeon general even carried a pack around in his shirt pocket.
Mother always said that WE were to bring our smoking, drinking or whatever HOME to do it.
That way she’d KNOW just exactly what her children were doing, and so on and so forth!
But I knew she didn’t really MEAN all that—she would’ve slaughtered me if she’d even suspected I had TOUCHED a cigarette—so my girlfriend and I used our lunch money to buy them and smoked on the sly! !
That made them even better! We convinced ourselves that they were so GOOD… then some smart aleck told us that we really were supposed to do more than puff the smoke in and blow it out! I mean all we did know how to HOLD them like all the sophisticated women on the soap operas.
Not to be outdone we had a major earth-shattering conference on the way to school one morning and came to the all-powerful decision that we would learn to INHALE! We turned a
gorgeous shade of green, thought we’d lose our breakfast for sure and then was afraid we wouldn’t, and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were about to DIE!!
However, we KNEW we could NOT die. If we did, our folks would smell the smoke, find the half-smoked butts laying beside us on the dirt road, and might even find the rest of the pack hidden safely in the lining of my friend’s purse.
Then they would sure enough die and would be waiting for us halfway up the golden staircase with a three-hour lecture.
So, we lived! Against our wishes, but we did!
We learned to roll ALL the car windows down to get rid of the smoke smell—didn’t matter that it was 16 below ZERO.
The smell had to be AIRED out. Mother had a nose like a bloodhound, so we ate tons of peppermint to cover up our smoker’s breath.
All the trouble!! If it hadn’t been so exciting to break the rules, we might have QUIT long before we did.
Then there was the night we ran out of cigarettes and took an old boy we knew up on a dare. We lit up CIGARS! And no one told us that you didn’t INHALE them. We split a bottle of PEPTO-BISMOL the next morning before we could crawl out of bed.
Which reminds me - the smell of that pink, thick stuff brings back memories of a
convertible, cigars and chocolate root beers! The thrill of youth!! Wouldn’t take a mint for the memories but wouldn’t give a plug nickel to relive any of it, either - Wow, that pink stuff stinks!!!