Up in Smoke by Brian Kane

Photo Source: Unsplash

When I wait at the traffic light to turn left off Chain Bridge Road onto Fairfax Boulevard, I look down at the gutter and see hundreds of cigarette butts. Piles of them. They say we have decreased cigarette smoking in the United States, but the asphalt display tells me a different story. I do not remember if they are biodegradable or not, but in any case, it’s a bunch of litter in the road, and disturbs me for the duration. From the lips of strangers to litter in our streets.

Before I get a green light, my thoughts turn back to flying Eastern Airlines to visit my grandparents in Fort Lauderdale when I was in grade school. My family would sit in the non-smoking section of the airplane, usually starting a few rows behind the smokers. Like that did anything to prevent us from contracting lung cancer in our later years. Overhead, the sign lit up to show the cigarette with a red line through it, a bit of a mystery to me, as I reached as far as I could to play with the reading lamp and the ventilation buttons, barely within reach of my 9-year old frame.

My parents had parties from time to time and the day before a soiree, my mother often asked me to polish the ashtrays’ silver rims before they were placed around the living room (four round ones with crystal bases). I would smear a pink substance on them with a grey sponge and then let them rest and then buff it off after that. I knew that Mrs. Moran, Dad’s secretary with the curly dyed blonde hair, would sit and smoke in one of the green velour swivel chairs, her hips flush against each arm of the chair as she talked while moving side to side, laughing with a smoke puff over her head.  Mom would slip upstairs to kiss us goodnight at some point in our dark rooms, and she reeked of her guests’ smoke. 

My dad smoked a pipe, never at parties, and there was a large green marble pipe ash tray with a carved slot to hold the pipe upright when he put it down. He only smoked in his office, and sometimes by the fireplace when a fire was burning. I loved giving him a pouch of sweet-smelling tobacco for his birthday and Christmas, and I couldn’t believe how awful the smoke smelled when burned compared to the wonderful, raw scent in its pouch. There was a pipe and tobacco store in our town, long since gone along with a toy store next door where the Matchbox cars rotated in a case with a push button that turned the wheel, and next to that, a pet store that had many cool lizards, birds, fish and snakes. I would buy mealworms there for my three chameleons, two that I had captured in Florida from my grandparents and they lived almost six years in captivity in Virginia. Humphrey lived six years until someone in my family unintentionally put the terrarium out in the sun in the summer when I was sick with a fever one summer.

The central courtyard of my high school -newly built - was not a garden, as schools feature today, but a smoking lounge. It was packed between classes with teachers and students holding their Marlboros and Kents for eight minutes. I never walked into that space once in my four years. Only the “freaks” went in there, and some of them had good rapport with the teachers and the vice principal Mr. Rawlings who also was a chain smoker. Tobacco guarded against any severe punishment.

The high school’s mascot was Johnny Reb, and there were plenty of rebel flags flown at Friday night lights. While we were a suburb of Washington, D.C., some still felt that the South was sure to have a second chance. The cemetery where my father lies just a mile from the high school has a large monument to the Confederate dead, and when I visit, there are often short Confederate flags at several of the soldiers’ plots. It’s only been 161 years but who’s counting?

Dad stopped smoking his pipe when I was in college, and I think he had heard enough warnings about lip and throat cancer. My mother placed bowls of unshelled pistachios and peanuts around the house to keep him distracted until the year that we discovered that a mouse had carried them one by one to the doorframe over the laundry room door and stored them in an even row there. And then Dad got a case of diverticulitis, and the nut shop was permanently closed down, and by then he didn’t miss the smoking so much. He made it to 83 so I am not sure it really influenced his long-term health anyway.

At an engagement party thrown by my soon to be sister-in-law, my aunt, who suffered from schizophrenia, and my mother-in-law and father-in-law (divorced) gathered on the patio of the house to smoke on a frigid January night. (No smoking out of respect for the hostess’ new baby ). A housing developer, a woman who lived on social security, and a woman who raised my wife and her four siblings solo found common ground in the cigarette balanced between their fingers. Someone had a lighter and offered it to the others, and the talk was short and to the point, as you only had about seven or eight minutes anyway.

That same aunt confused the heck out of us when we would visit my grandmother’s house in Pennsylvania, and my Aunt P. would turn up, dressed in a 1920s flapper gown or, sometimes, wearing an Indian headdress. (She had a huge place in her heart for Native Americans, to the point that she spray painted the family's boxer to look like a prairie coyote. She sent me annotated copies of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee when I was in college, and spoke passionately about the colonists’ many transgressions). On one family visit, she had scribbled the cardinal directions on the clocks about the aging 1920s foursquare with red lipstick. She always had a cigarette in her hand, and my brother and I would spy on her sitting on the porch rocking swing by herself, muttering strange phrases, and talking about meeting Stevie Wonder on the nearby street corner. We believed that Aunt P. truly brushed with musical fame until my older sister admonished us saying, “Do you know how many men wearing sunglasses are out there imitating Stevie Wonder?! And why would he be in Ardmore anyway ?!”  “Oh.”

My mother-in-law, like my aunt Pauline, was a chain smoker, and I was grateful when she asked us for barbecue at her house, cause the smoke didn’t bother me outside, as my sensitivity increased as I grew older. I had smoked at some parties in college but never took a liking to it, and it was more for the coolness factor, but I never felt the amazing calm that people describe.  I mostly used it as a prop to fill the hand of a nervous 19-year old who was barely legal enough to drink beer in Massachusetts.

I didn’t always enjoy Christmas dinners at my wife’s mothers home, since I was always seated to my mother-in-law’s right - my place of privilege  - or did her children not want to be that close?  I remember my eyes watering all of Christmas dinner and being the first to step up to clear and anything else I could do to avoid the smoke. When our children arrived, she kindly stopped when we asked her to not smoke around them and we kept an empty tuna fish can on our porch for family gatherings to collect  for cigarette ash and butts. The tuna can become a humorous symbol of our compromise, and I would step out onto the porch and talk, we would chatter about the blooms of the camelia this year, or the variety of hydrangea I had planted to replace the shrubs damaged from the prior winter’s ice storm. The record heat one Christmas had us both drinking gin and tonics on the porch as I prepared the grill for flank steaks because no one was going to turn on an oven in the 76 degree heat. The tuna can was filled to the top by evening. Chicken of the Sea.

She succumbed to lung cancer at age 82. She smoked a pack or more a day since she was 20 years old, so she had great genes or a diet that kept the cancer at bay for all those years. She never complained during her illness, and declined treatment after diagnosis. “What more do I have to live for, and why should I ask for more?” All grandchildren graduated from high school, and six had graduated from college, so she saw the next generation launched. Once I took her onto her patio to have a smoke on her deck, after the nurse removed the oxygen machine. She was bold. Smart.  And brave.

None of my friends or my acquaintances smoke today. It’s taboo. But people sneak. My friend whose daughter died of a rare chromosome disorder smokes when she gets onto her fifth Miller Light. On some late summer evenings when I lie on the porch sofa with a book suspended above me to catch the last bit of a summer’s day, I smell cigarette smoke. Mr. S. next door has stepped out onto his back porch for a breather. If I sit up I can see the orange glow with his puffs even though I can not clearly make him out. His wife doesn’t allow him to smoke inside, and I wonder if she knows she is out here after a party. I found the lighter and the Marlboro pack on a wood platform at our kids' now unused playset at the very back of our yard. Late-night wanderings after partying, I assumed.

At my annual physical, I am proud to check the box “Never” next to the smoking question. Drinks per week, maybe 5? Less these days as it just makes me tired, but a Pinot Noir on a cold January evening when a fire roars in our fireplace is good winter therapy.  In the adjacent dining room, our wife has filled a glass jar in the china cabinet with about 100 match packs from restaurants all over the Washington area, places long since out of business. A few from hotels. A few are from our dates in the 1990s when these were a staple at the host station. Juan’s Flying Burrito. Kinkead’s. Cote D’Or. Older ones are from her mother’s house and are probably from the 1970s and 80s. You can’t find a match box in a restaurant today. Those who used those matches are probably now long gone, but hopefully they enjoyed some blissful after-dinner smokes before their time ran out.  I wonder if the matches still spark when you strike one against the flint.

Brian Kane’s essays focus on trees, abused landscapes, and environmental crises.  Twenty-five years as a landscape architect and educator make him particularly attuned to landscape degradation and environmental challenges.

He is the father of four daughters and works in the conservation field, focusing on the protection of old-growth. He loves watercolor painting, swimming and kayaking in his free time.