Smoking. Yea, cigarettes. I don’t. I am not a smoker. I have been saying that since May of 2004 just a month past my fiftieth birthday. I didn’t mark the day. I know you’re supposed to keep track like a sober birthday, but I didn’t and I don’t, but by simple math and memories of the events then I can get an approximate date and figure out how long I have been a nonsmoker.

It was just about the time I joined the Amee Chapman band. They were all new people to me, as far as any of them knew I did not smoke cigarettes. They didn’t know I did. I smoked over a pack a day for thirty-five years. Sometimes it was three packs a day. I was a real smoker. I elected to not be a smoker.

My dad did much the same thing. He was younger when he turned the switch, but he was a real smoker. He smoked Camels for years, spitting out tobacco crumbs and turning his fingers a deep orangeish darkness of flesh. He smoked everywhere. He smoked in the house, in the car, and at work, I’m sure. He would take smoke breaks when we were working on the fence or the car.

My sister got caught smoking pot. She was four years younger and I was probably seventeen. And when she got caught, I was implicated as the source. Hell broke loose in Mississippi on Whispering Pines Dr. where we lived. I don’t really recall what happened but things were dark for a long period of time.

A few days into the aftermath, I noted that my dad was not smoking. I didn’t really think about it, but weeks later I checked his stash of cigarettes. He always had at least one carton of his Salems, his new favorite. They were still in the coffee table where he kept them. I looked again in a few days and his supply had not diminished.

My mom asked me if I knew that my dad had quit smoking. She said she didn’t think he smoked anymore. He never said a word. He was not a smoker, he did not smoke. I wound up smoking all of his Salems. I don’t know if he knew that. I never saw him look in the coffee table drawer. But when I didn’t have the forty or fifty cents a pack of Marlboros cost me, I’d grab a pack of Salems for a cool experience.

Years later he told me that when he quit smoking he decided he was not a smoker. He never said he quit smoking, he just wasn’t a smoker. He told me it was like a switch got switched, he was not a smoker. Not he was a smoker and then he wasn’t. He just wasn’t a smoker.

I did much the same in 2004. I never told anyone I quit smoking, I still went outside at the club or work when everyone went to smoke. I hung out, told the same bullshit stories I always tell, depending on company, I made the same dirty jokes, I laughed, and didn’t change anything. I didn’t smoke because I was not a smoker.

I don’t know if I had a hard time or not, I think not really. Years later though, I will have an occasional urge to reach in my shirt pocket every once in a while, usually when I sit down to make a phone call, or when I get in and start my car. That was always a time I would light my L&M Full Flavor, Long Lasting, Pleasure Stick.

Smokers don’t turn me off, the smell is not really all that objectionable to me. It’s not pleasant but not enough where I will bitch about it. I have a hard time in smoky bars, it hurts, physically. Recently I found out I was not always a non-smoker. I have emphysema and it comes from being a smoker, but I still insist on believing I don’t smoke. And I don’t.