When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,84

were saying that Kools had fiberglass in them, but surely that was just a rumor, started, most likely, by the Salem or Newport people. I’d heard too that menthols were worse for you than regular cigarettes, but that also seemed suspect. Just after she started chemotherapy, my mom sent me three cartons of Kool Milds. “They were on sale,” she croaked. Dying or not, she should have known that I smoked Filter Kings, but then I looked at them and thought, Well, they are free.

For people who don’t smoke, a mild or light cigarette is like a regular one with a pinhole in it. With Kools it’s the difference between being kicked by a donkey and being kicked by a donkey that has socks on. It took some getting used to, but by the time my mother was cremated, I’d converted.

Six

Over the years, I’ve had quite a few essays reprinted in textbooks. When the students are high schoolers or younger, the editors will sometimes ask if they can replace or eliminate a certain filthy word or phrase, which makes sense, I suppose. What didn’t make sense, at least to me, was a similar request to eliminate a cigarette, to essentially blank it out. The same is done with photographs now, and the effect is disconcerting. Here is Marlene Dietrich in repose, her fingers spread apart for no reason, her eyes staring at the burning tip of nothing.

This particular textbook was for tenth graders. Horizons, it was called, or maybe Perspectives. The line that the editors wanted to erase did not glamorize smoking. In fact it was just the opposite. The cigarette in question belonged to my mother and was referred to as an irritant, something invasive that had given me a headache. I suppose I could have replaced the irritating Winston with an irritating Roman candle, but the story was supposed to be true, and my mother never sat around with fireworks in her mouth. The point I argued is that certain people smoke. It’s part of what makes them who they are, and though you certainly don’t have to like it, altering someone’s character seems a bit harsh, especially when that someone is your mother, and picturing her without a cigarette is unimaginable. “It’s like she was a windup toy and that was her key,” I said.

It seems crazy to cut smoking mothers out of textbooks, but within a few years they won’t be allowed in movies either. A woman can throw her newborn child from the roof of a high-rise building. She can then retrieve the body and stomp on it while shooting into the windows of a day care center, but to celebrate these murders by lighting a cigarette is to send a harmful message. There are, after all, young people watching, and we wouldn’t want them to get the wrong idea.

We’re forever being warned about secondhand smoke, but if it’s really as dangerous as they claim it is, I’d have been dead before my first birthday. My brother and sisters would be dead as well, or maybe we’d never have lived to begin with, our mother having been snuffed out by her own parents’ cigarettes.

My grandparents on my father’s side didn’t smoke, but as owners of a newsstand and tobacco shop, they profited from other people doing it. My dad started smoking when he went to college, but he quit when my older sister and I were still young. “It’s a filthy, stinking habit.” He said this fifty times a day, not that it did any good. Even before the warnings were printed, anyone could see that smoking was bad for you. My mother’s sister, Joyce, was married to a surgeon, and every time I stayed at their house I was awoken at dawn by my uncle’s hacking, which was mucky and painful-sounding and suggested imminent death. Later, at the breakfast table I’d see him with a cigarette in his mouth and think, Well, he’s the doctor.

Uncle Dick died of lung cancer, and a few years later my mother developed a nearly identical cough. You’d think that being a woman, hers would be softer, a delicate lady’s hack, but no. I remember lying in bed and thinking with shame, My mom coughs like a man.

By the time my embarrassment ripened to concern, I knew there was no point in lecturing her. I had become a smoker myself, so what could I say, really? Eventually she dropped her Winstons in favor of something light and then ultralight.