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T A B L E++T A L K Does it matter in the long run whether your child attends public or private school? Join the discussion in the Mothers area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Dear bridal party Spoiled rotten Mothers who think too much Ask Dr. Love Turning the tables on Terry Gross BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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WE'VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY | PAGE 1, 2
The American affair with smoking is coming to its tragic close. Where once there were nonsmoking sections, there are now entire states in the union where you can't smoke in restaurants. Even smokers' havens are slowly being taken away. Dunkin' Donuts are more and more becoming nonsmoking institutions. There was something so utterly American -- verging on the holy -- about a cup of coffee and a cigarette in an all-night shop. It reminded you that no matter who you were or where you were driving from, you were allowed a moment of sanctuary. But now there are cigar bars, the Disneyland of smoking, where people who don't really smoke like to go to pretend they do. Where once entire narratives revolved around smoking and smoking paraphernalia (Cary Grant never would have fallen in love with Deborah Kerr if it weren't for his cigarette case), even the film industry reflects the end of a once great romance. Now it seems only criminals and cops smoke. But as America turns its back on cigarettes for possibly all the right and noble reasons, there is still a lingering need, in the same way that the lover who is most wrong for you is the one you continue to pine for. It seems without cigarettes America may be healthy, but we are less handsome. It has been about three months now since I've had a cigarette, after about 16 years of smoking, with almost two packs a day for the last 10, and while certain old movies, coffee shops and Italian dinners make me shudder a bit, it is only when I see my mother smoke that I can feel the craving engulf me. It is as if there is, in the back of my throat, a small, almond-shaped hole that sucks everything I am into it, and the only way to close it up is with a cigarette. I quit simply because it was making me feel terrible and 40 years older. So while visiting my folks every week brings me much joy, I have begun to dread it, knowing that watching my mother smoke is one of my greatest pleasures, but it could also prove to be my downfall. My mother, some have said, is a vain woman, a trait I've inherited. Part of my reason for quitting was that I was obsessively worried about the way cigarettes made me smell. But my mother's vanity has kept her beautiful. And the cigarette, like her rings and pocketbooks, is a necessary accessory to the cause, each part playing its own fitful role in keeping the whole going, a dynamic interplay of movements, sounds and smells. I can clearly see my mother reaching into her pocketbook, the crinkling of papers trumpeting the retrieval of a soft pack of 100s. Then a deeper search that uncovers an immaculate silver fuel lighter. Before she lights it, my mother tends to talk with the cigarette bobbing in her mouth, and then the click of the lighter and that first deep drag, as if it's her first breath and her last, and all the Bogart movies in the world could not make me crave a cigarette more. It is possible I have romanticized smoking and am using my mother as a way out of my own folly, to blame her instead of my own insufferable addiction. But I will admit that while I am not smoking now, I will always be a smoker, and it is simply that I am now choosing not to smoke. And I love cigarettes, so much that at the end I was rolling my own, each one a small crafted ritual. But I truly cannot blame myself entirely. Once, seeing my mother tending her plants, a watering can in one hand and a cigarette in the other, I knew I was doomed to never hating cigarettes. And it is the hating of them that might be a possible prerequisite to quitting forever. My mother's smoking is for me the last remnant of a time when all the men wore hats and all the women smoked. It is odd to have a nostalgia for someone else's age, and yet I am so kindred to her, it only makes sense that I would sentimentalize my mother's history. And while I wish my mother would quit so that I'd have more to be nostalgic about, her smoking so connects me to her and to her own particular generation that I am bound forever to her through it, much in the same way we are bound as Jews. Two generations removed, great-grandparents took up smoking in the same
way they took up America. They gave up their old-world Judaism for things
like opera and communism, which they sought out in the cities where they passed
on to their children a Jewishness rooted in the actual, in the chaos of
America that actually seemed ordered when you simply remembered to eat
together on Passover. In my father's family, his grandmother smoked her way
into modernity, passing on through the matriarchal line a seed that bore
witness that being a mother didn't mean giving up worldliness. My mother
carried on this tradition, raising me and my siblings with her hair in a
scarf and a cigarette in her mouth. We were a family of the '60s and
'70s; Eastern European orthodoxy was someone else's memory. But my mother
made sure that Judaism echoed in our home. She lit the Friday night candles
as if every woman in her family were watching her. And after she cradled the
flames in her hands up to her eyes, she had a cigarette, a shared smoke with
all the mothers and grandmothers before her.
Peter Bebergal is a freelance writer in Cambridge, Mass. He is currently co-editing a reader on religion and pop culture.
Not waiting to inhale Dr. Joycelyn Elders talks about new reports that smoking is on the rise among black teens, her rocky tenure as surgeon general and why she still supports President Clinton
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