LSMFT: Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco
~ TV ad from the 50s
I wake in the mornings with my mother's smoker's cough, though I've never been a smoker in my life - except for that time in my late 30s when, for some stupid reason, I decided I wanted to smoke and someone had left a package of Kools in my car and I smoked them one night when I was driving back to San Jose after meeting a friend in San Francisco, and by the time I got home, I was sick to my stomach. I understand why teenagers think they look cool when they're holding that cigarette - I am quite sure I was the epitome of cool as I drove down 101 blowing cigarette smoke from the side of mouth - but I can't, for the life of me, figure out why they continue, since puking never looks cool and tastes even worse. Oh. Maybe they don't get sick, as I did. Too bad.
Anyway, I have her cough for the first 15 minutes I'm awake in the morning. Odd, that.
After her mother died, my mother took on some of her mother's characteristics. Out of the blue, she started saying things like, "Well, bless your heart!" which she had never done before but her mother was famous for. And while I loved those things about my grandmother, it was just plain weird coming from Mother. One day when I was hanging out with my sisters and we were talking about this, it occurred to me that maybe such behavior was a sort of rite of passage when a woman's mother dies, and I looked at my sisters and said, "Okay, let's settle this right now: When Mother goes, which one of us is going to be her, and I'm telling you right now, it's not going to be me." We all voted for Carolyn, my next youngest sister, but she never did step into Mother's shoes. In fact, the older Carolyn got, the sillier she became, and Mother was never silly, although she did have a sly sense of humor.
Summer, 1972: I'm at Mother's house with my two daughters, ages 3 and 5. I am wearing a dress that it is so short, it barely covers my butt (1972, folks!).
Mother says to my oldest daughter, "That's a cute blouse you're wearing, Lisa." Then she turns her gaze upon me and says, "That's a cute blouse you're wearing, too, Verna."
Anyway, I somehow got her smoker's cough, and really, I'd rather be blessing people's hearts.
One night a few years after Mother died, I was lying on the sofa reading when I smelled fudge. Mother made the best fudge in the world, and it was her fudge I was smelling in my kitchen - where I had never ever even tried to make fudge. The next day I was telling my youngest sister this story, and she said that on her way to work she had smelled cigarette smoke in her car, where there had never been a lit cigarette.
"Great!" she said to me. "You get her fudge and I get her cigarettes."
Dad started smoking when he was 12, and he lived until he was 84 without ever having that awful cough or emphysema or lung cancer. Mother took up smoking when she married Dad and died at 74 with heart disease and half of one lung gone to lung cancer. They came of age during a time when everyone smoked and no one ever heard of the dangers. Lucky me that my lack of good sense at 38 led only to dry heaves and the yucky taste of tobacco in my mouth. So where did the cough come from? No idea.
My dad died of lung cancer after smoking from the time he was 13. He was 84 when he died. Like you, I did not take up the habit. I do remember as kids, we used to run across the room, swatting at the clouds of smoke that came from my father's smoking to see the designs and movements we could generate with our flailing arms. I had chronic bronchitis and ear infections growing up. The dr. told my mom it was the dampness of the Bay Area.
Like you, at the age of 34 I sat and smoked one whole packet of cigarettes one night after work, then went home to my kids. When I entered the house they saw their mother - pea green and crawling across the floor. The looks on their faces spoke volumns about what they were seeing. I said, "OK kids, this is why you do not want to smoke cigarettes!" They never have.
love you,
rs
Posted by: Robin Song | 01/23/2012 at 12:24 PM