There is an apocryphal tale in my family that while my mother was in labor, driving to the hospital during a snowstorm in February, she insisted that my father pull over so she could run into the drugstore to get cigarettes.

There is another, mostly true story that I was born weighing only four pounds, eight ounces, and had to stay in the hospital. When my father called my grandmother to tell her the news, my older sister, who was staying with her, asked why I couldn't come home. My grandmother went into the refrigerator and pulled out a small uncooked chicken and said, "This is how big your baby brother is."

My mother learned to smoke at a time when young ladies did not and continued to smoke when all the ladies did. She was not told during her pregnancy to stop. One can even be reasonably certain that her doctor smoked. And whether or not my small birth weight can be attributed to her smoking, I know that my own love of tobacco and all things smoking is a legacy passed on to me by either the nicotine in my amniotic fluid or by the same chemicals that gave me and my mother similar facial structure.

I don't think I became acutely aware of how much my mother's smoking had affected me until once, while I was eating breakfast with a lover, she asked me to pass the arts section of the paper, and I was suddenly hit with her breath, a creamy bath of coffee and cigarettes, and in a flash my entire childhood of Sunday mornings swept over me like, well, smoke. Suddenly I was awash in images of my mother eating a bagel with whitefish and drinking coffee, of her and my father lightly bickering over the Times puzzle, and of course, a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside her.

My whole family smokes or has smoked. And even those of us who no longer smoke do not consider ourselves nonsmokers. It's too much in the blood, too much a part of who we are to ever really refer to it in the past tense when referring to ourselves. Even my father, who has not smoked in more than 30 years, still has dreams of them, and sometimes, after a fine meal sipping a VO and soda, would love to have a cigarette. The family smoking habit is sort of like the way we are all Jewish. It is something you are born into. You don't need to practice to refer to yourself as part of the culture. And to deny it would be to deny the very core of who you are. But it is my mother's smoking that makes her the matriarch of the habit, and while we all wish she would quit, we all secretly know that she is bound to her cigarettes by more than mere addiction, that something about it makes her truly who she is and truly our mother. And it is not only a familial spirit that haunts me, but an American one as well.

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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.