Writings: Vice

Smells often evoke the strongest memories. I remember being a little girl curled up on my favorite uncle's lap staring up with fascination at his prominent Adam's apple bobbing with each hearty laugh while little dragon tail wisps of smoke escaped between his teeth. He didn't blow smoke out of his mouth but through his nose, like a true dragon, in thick curling mustaches that would disappear the moment I cupped my hands over them.  "Little sister, do you know how to smoke a cigarette?" he teased me in an ancient language, so different  from English, still spoken in that tropical land of starfruit and sugarcane where several generations of my family sat together in a yellow wallpapered room. I nodded yes and chomped down on an unlit stick in my efforts to imitate him. He and my other relatives erupted in laughter at my 4 year old innocence, and it is the smell of the smoke that envelops the memory of that golden room filled with the heritage my parents left behind for promised dreams elsewhere.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I am an older little girl chasing firefly flashes in the warm Texas dusk. Do people outside of Texas know how clear and expansive the sky can be or how it can melt your heart more than a pair of the bluest, clearest eyes you'll ever see? Under perfect sunsets my sister and I would run barefoot in the front yard catching and making wishes on those poor fireflies, while my parents would sit on lawnchairs worn thin in the seat from many summer nights just like this. We always knew it had been a tough week at work, when my father would have a smoke. At least that's what our mother told us, and being little girls who adored their father we would try to be extra good those nights and go to bed early without much fuss. But not before watching nightfall punctuate scores of blinking lights and the single, red ember of my father's cigarette. The smell of smoke reminds me of these Texas summers.

It's not the taste of burnt air deep in the lungs and out the nose. It's not the nicotine-induced rush of blood to the head or the quickened heartbeats that brings relief. No, it's the association with better times that work as the anodyne to life's pains. Smoke is a warm friend, an old friend.

I am fortunate that through medical knowledge and real-life patients I know the lasting afterglow of cigarette smoking is cancer, heart disease, and emphysema. For me reason has prevailed and I join the authorities in imploring people to break habits that only create more problems down the road. But I cannot stigmatize people for attempting to recreate comfort and solace in the only ways they know how. I have no moral superiority to judge this vice.