If eating cookies and desiring a slice of pecan pie can be overlooked as bad habits, I have had only one: cigarette smoking. I never cared that much for alcohol; excess drinking was never among my addictions. My maternal grandmother consumed more than she should have. Consequently, my mother never drank alcohol. My father seldom had a beer, but on occasion would drink a small amount of wine or whiskey. In college, for social acceptability, I learned how to nurse a beer or a Scotch-and-soda for extended periods. Later, private or professional cocktail parties were to be endured, not enjoyed. During my younger days, drugs were not readily available; I had no interest in trying them, when they did become culturally acceptable. My only exposure to marijuana came in the form of unavoidable inhalation while rushing through the entrance tunnel to the Student Union at UMass.
Although a majority of my male friends in high school had the Fonzy-look with a cigarette package rolled up in the sleeve of a white T-shirt, I waited until I was a freshman in college before I took on that appearance. Cigarettes with coffee (double cream, double sugar) became a way of daily life at Kent. At Cornell, the cream was eliminated, thanks to those damn tetra-packs, but the rest of the habit remained. In fact, it increased over the years, despite an increment in cost. A twenty-five-cent pack of Pall-Malls no longer existed. Some forty years later, a twenty-dollar bill was needed for a carton of filtered, Benson & Hedges cigarettes that were a silly millimeter longer. At a current average rate of $8.00 per pack, a single cigarette demands a price higher than I once paid for a pack of twenty!
For more than forty years, I had retained, despite the intense nagging of our kids, this destructive habit. Fortunately, I did not enjoy cigars and their odor. During college, I had attempted to smoke a pipe, but could seldom keep one going for more than a few minutes. On the other hand, I knew all of the scientific reasons for quitting cigarettes. Yet, I smoked even when my professional work on cytochrome c oxidase indicated I had to desist on those days when I was involved with laboratory experiments on oxygen metabolism.
I did reduce the sites for indulging in the habit. Once we had moved to Longwood, I never smoked inside of the house. I no longer smoked in the car. At work, I did not smoke inside Baylor; I would carry a cup of coffee with me as I retreated to an outside patio, and later, to a bench farther from the building.
I had also devised a scheme for fake-smoking, since I had to do something with my hands while engaged in otherwise boring, routine actions. By rolling up a small piece of notepaper, I could construct a tube for handling and sucking, when one filled with tobacco was not possible for use. It worked, except when a joking friend would attempt to light my non-burning cigarette. My three-pack-a-day habit was greatly reduced by this subterfuge.
At points during the previous three years, I had been able to go for a couple of days without inhaling tobacco smoke. My ersatz paper tubes had provided sufficient finger movements. I also had taken up origami during boring meetings. A table area in front of me often became the nesting grounds for a variety of birds, which I would offer to other participants at the closure of the session.
With the beginning of the third millennium, it seemed that something special should be done, personally, to commemorate the year. Furthermore, as my great-grandchildren began to expand in numbers, I thought I might like to live long enough to see them grow older. These conditions might provide additional reasons for not buying another pack of cigarettes. However, my resolve did not materialize. I continued to smoke, usually outdoors, and only thought about quitting.
On Good Friday of the year 2000 I ran out of cigarettes. I thought it might be penitential for me to go without smoking for the rest of the day. On Saturday, I thought I might resist smoking for another twenty-four hours. A similar resolve occurred on Easter Sunday. By Monday, I realized there might not be any reason for me to start again, at least for a while. I have not had a cigarette since then.
Strangely, I continued, on occasion, to dream I restarted the habit I had maintained for more than forty years. Within each dream, I became extremely annoyed and angry with myself for returning to that habit. This addiction has remained within me for the last twenty-plus years, but I have not yielded to it. Perhaps it’s good that a package of cookies is half the cost of a pack of cigarettes.