My Affair by Paula Shene (best way to read books .txt) 📕

This year, from Mother’s Day to Father’s Day, life in my household has been more dramatic than normal. It is usually just a circus with one clown or the other taking center stage but this period of time, all three rings were performing without a curtain call or so it seemed.
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Many years ago, I had a boyfriend named Pat...he was slightly older than my twelve years. Pat was the leader of a gang but that many years ago, a gang was just a bunch of guys and girls hanging out - kind of like Fonzi and the crowd on Happy Days.

Pat was cool and our ‘going steady’ lasted long enough for him to introduce me to cigarettes, encouraging me to get past the messy vomiting stage we smokers all went through at the start of our affair with the ‘Cig.’

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The only statistics I want to throw into this article is that in the United States one in five deaths is attributed to smoking. That means 400,000 yearly, 1,098 per day, 45+ per minute, almost 1 person per second. The United States is lower than most - India has almost a million deaths due to cigarettes a year.
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You with the cigarette, do you figure this is fighting odds? I had a debate with a friend about the number of murders in New York City vs. San Francisco. That year SFs numbers were a lot lower than NYCs numbers but when he said “Well, that’s not too bad then,” referring to SF, my reply was “No, unless you happen to be one of those ‘not too bad’ numbers.”

Longevity depends upon many factors - gene make up, environment, habits. Two of these three you have very little control. One of the two, no say at all, lest you have an in with God before He quickens you in the womb.

Environment, unless you are highly aware of everything that is going on around you, in that too, you have limited say. You can eat scant process foods, filter your water, have your soil tested for contaminants, live in a rural area, etc. but there will always be factors you are not aware of that can cause sickness.

The one area you do have control over is your habits. To smoke or not to smoke; to die or to live. To drink in excess or moderation. To be a drunk or a healthy imbiber.

I can really only testify to what these habits have done in my life. Granted, I also had a myriad of factors working for me and an equal, if not more so, working against me.

I was born sickly {rickets} but well loved. I had chicken pox at three months, polio at six months, severe upper respiratory problems accompanied by earaches grim enough to be hospitalized before the age of two with the remaining adolescent years followed with the usual childhood sicknesses. While one is only ‘suppose’ to contract German measles once, I managed to do it twice and once supplemented with regular measles and mumps. Can’t say I didn’t go for the hard way even early in life.

I was fortunate in that my grandparents were both close to the earth people. They believed in natural eating not processed; good hygiene, enough sleep, etc. but that again was before the world spiralled seemingly out of control.

At the age of twelve, wanting to lose weight and knowing it helped curb my mother’s appetite, my boyfriend’s suggestion of smoking is ‘cool’ and will help you, was the clincher in picking up this monkey and letting it ride me for twenty five years.

So, fresh faced, I head into my teens with a cigarette between my lips. With today’s laws, it is slightly harder for children or teens, to buy cigarettes or booze but now parents are relieved if that is all Suzie or Johnny are indulging in. With "Designer drugs" on the upswing and less interaction between children and their parents, it is hard to get a handle on what the kids are doing.

As each generation can testify to the one before, “Yeah, we know, back in your day, when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, things were different.” Boy, were they ever! We walked the streets of major cities without a fear of being harmed; part of this was foolishness and part in that, it truly was safer. There were drug addicts but those were people you heard about, not lived with as neighbors or in your own home.


Television in the home setting was a fledgling with comedy, music, or news being the staple served while you sat with a tray first on your knees, then on its own little legs. The commercials, at first, were straight forward. You were sold a product on the merits of the sellers’ belief in its product and they were entertaining little stories to go with the product. The innocuous commercials that sold refrigerators or washing machines that never broke down but then...


I Love Lucy, a major comedy of the day, had cigarettes used casually within the storyline leading into the commercial. And the memorable, to a child and probably some adults, were the dancing packs of cigarettes and the dancing cigarettes themselves.

The children’s cartoon, The Flintstones was originally adult fare and thus has the main characters smoking their favorite cigarettes. Did it really matter that the children of the house were also partaking of the show? After all, didn’t dad and mom smoke too?

My walk on the deadly side started in the late 1950s just when the cigarette companies were starting to add chemicals to the tobacco. My grandfather had smoked his own rolled cigarettes from a blend bought at the local tobacconists and another cherry aromatic for his pipe smoking. His smoking was limited to one or two cigarettes a week and one session with the pipe during the same period; not a chain smoker by any means. And his blends were pure without added fillers and chemicals.

I neither, was a chain smoker but because I used regular cigarettes, I was exposed to all the chemicals that were added at that time. Within five years, I had changed brands at least eight times, each time for a hardier, more robust flavor. I enjoyed smoking and did not have a smoker cough.

At sixteen I attended a seminar on Smoking - How to Quit, a compulsory meeting held in the gym at the high school I was attending.
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I was the girl standing by the split rail fence just at the edge of the school property smoking with the other {boys} kids that had taken up the fashionable monkey of the day. Looking back, I was just one of the guys on break. There were other kids in school that smoked but they ‘snuck their smokes behind closed doors of bathrooms. We were the open ones about our habit.
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At this seminar we were allowed questions and I asked, “How long before the dreadful things you talked about happening, will actually happen? Five, ten, twenty years? This was part smart aleck and part truly wanting to know. At sixteen, the years stretch before you giving the false belief of invincibility. When told an average of ten years was the norm, I walked away with the mantra of “I’ll worry about this when I’m twenty-six” and into a maelstrom of disease.

A year later, the second brick in my road to destruction was laid. On the yearly trip to the dentist, my first cavity was discovered and filled. It’s easy to see milestones when you’re looking back to an incident which should have been merely a rite of passage step.

When I dated my future husband, we would end in a bar here or there drinking and talking for hours. Drinking alcohol was not normal even though I already had ‘come of age’ a year previous. My mother was an alcoholic so I shied away from heavy drink.

I now had the three ingredients for my future disaster.
{to be continued - Starting Gate}

Text: published originally in Angie's Diary Ongoing series 2011
Publication Date: 11-04-2011

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
I knew when I started this series it would not garner too many positive remarks but I just attended my sister-in-law's funeral and yes, she lived her three score and seven but went out painfully because the emphysema squeezed her to death. Regardless of that, this series is about my experience with the monkey and if it stops one person from picking up a cigarette to start smoking or gives a smoker the push to stop or if all it does is exorcise my demons, then there has been a purpose to write it.