The Smoking Champion of Central Ohio

I smoked for seventeen years, despite the fact that I knew that smoking was a totally stinky, gross habit that made your teeth brown and your lungs all black and furry.  Why did I smoke?  God knows. Probably because it was better than the alternative: eating potato chips all day.  About six years ago, however, I quit, and life has been much better without cigarettes. 

My mother disagrees, however, and she sees her habit of at least sixty years as an accomplishment in longevity, rather than an exercise in walking the razor’s edge of emphysema and lung cancer.  And, to her credit, if smoking were an Olympic sport, she would probably have more medals than Michael Phelps.  He has 22 medals, by the way, so my mom would have at least 23.  I realize this would be difficult, but that is what I am telling you: my mom knows all the tricks.

Trick #1: Start early.  My mother, on last check, got up around 6 am most mornings.  To go to work?  No.  To get a leg up on the competition, smoking-wise.  Every morning, she jumps out of bed (in my mind, she throws her arms up in the air and shouts “Hello, world!” but that probably doesn’t really happen), showers, gets dressed, and comes downstairs to the dining room table so she can start rolling and smoking.  Rolling?  Yep.  She rolls her own cigarettes.  When smokes stopped being a buck fifty a pack, my mother, a champion cheapo, invested in a cigarette rolling contraption, and made friends with the guy at the loose tobacco store.  So every morning, you can hear the rhythmic cha-chunk, cha-chunk as she rolls her own.  One time, her little contraption broke, and she paid my son, like, $25,000 to fix it.  It was either that, or just start eating loose tobacco.  And the woman does have standards.

Trick #2: Be Classy.  My mom started smoking in the days when a cigarette was elegant and sophisticated.  So to keep that element of class up, my mother has found the perfect receptacle in which to carry around her cigarettes: GladWare.  What is GladWare?  It is like Tupperware’s imbecile cousin.  Well, what do you expect a 78-year-old woman with forty loose cigarettes to do?  Carry them in her hands?  That would be ridiculous.  With the GladWare, her precious smokes are protected from rogue water spills, hostile weather conditions, unexpected tumbles, and more.  Also, no thief would ever steal GladWare containers.  Even thieves have standards.  Now, you might wonder, “Does she really take the GladWare everywhere?  Because I heard that your mother, despite the fact that she is 78 years old, is also a tour guide.”  If you are saying that, you are correct.  My mother is a tour guide, because she does not let her age dictate her awesomeness, and also because she figured out that being a tour guide is the cheapest way to travel as much as she wants.  As I mentioned before, she is quite a cheapo.  On those occasions when the GladWare is simply too gauche for the occasion, she has a special leather pouch that she purchased on the cheap in Mexico that she wears on a lanyard around her neck.  Yes, it’s a cigarette lanyard.  And yes, it’s beaded.  Let your imagination do the work for you, folks. 

Trick #3: Don’t let the occasion stop you from smoking.  Here is a true story: many years ago, my mother and I were in Paris.  I saw all the great sights: Notre Dame, the Champs-Élysées, the Louvre….you name it, I toured that motherfucker up.  My mother, on the other hand, smoked all the great sights.  We got to Notre Dame, and she was like, “That’s okay, I’ve already seen it.  You go on in.”  So I did, and she sat outside and smoked.  The Louvre?  Same thing.  She was like, “Take all the time you want.  I’ll be out here,” as she caressed her cigarettes and lighter.  And, sure enough, when I came out, she was gabbing with all of the other Louvre smokers.  Ah, Paris.  By my count, the woman has smoked her way through most of Europe, a great deal of Central America, and almost every state in the Union.  Worthy of 23 gold medals?  I should say so. 

Trick #4: Find your own personal nirvana.  For my mother, it’s the casino.  Think about it: where else can you smoke, drink bottom-shelf liquor, and play the slots at the same time?  The best trick is to find a casino on Native American land, where you can also buy cheap cartons of cigarettes (it would not surprise me to find out that my mother was the kingpin of a reservation smuggling operation) and then smoke them all while staking your claim on a one-armed bandit.

Trick #5: Break the mold.  Sure, most 78-year-old smokers are on ventilators by this point, but my mother comes from a long line of old ladies (on both sides of her family!) who smoke, drink, and recklessly drive giant automobiles until they’re 100 years old.  She doesn’t plan on going anywhere, and her membership in no fewer than five book clubs, a couple of bowling leagues, water aerobics, and, of course, her job as a tour guide, keep her healthier and more active than many of the forty-year-old lazy bitches I know. I mean, the woman’s lungs probably look like Chernobyl at this point, but you have to kind of admire that she’s like, “Listen, everyone has a talent, and this appears to be mine.  Quite frankly, it would be selfish of me not to explore my talent to its greatest potential.” 

Well, you got me there, Mom.