How to Quit Smoking

In trying to recall why I quit smoking cigarettes, I had to look things up. On January 11, 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry announced that cigarette smoking caused cancer, so I switched to cigars.

This is not to take anything away from Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who made a related announcement in 1988. Koop may have been a great man. When President Reagan, an old fool, tried to get Koop to claim that abortion was bad for women's health, Koop refused. Reagan managed to block Koop's attempt to address AIDS, but Koop did a lot for disabled children.

I cannot keep track of the damage done by Republicans.

Anyway, after Terry I switched to cigars, not mentioned in the first news reports. I didn't inhale cigars and smoked them for about fifteen years. At first people around me enjoyed it, saying it reminded them of their grandfathers, but over time objections began to arise. I switched to a pipe. By then I was a professor, and a pipe came attached to tenure. Again, pipe smokers usually don't inhale. Strangers on the sidewalk. told me the smoke remained them of their grandfathers and, in some cases, of their clay-piped Irish grandmothers. 

As time passed, the places where a pipe could be smoked grew fewer until there were none other than in my own van. I kept saying that I could give up smoking without effort or regret, and last year I did. By then the habit of combining this activity or that with smoking had already been whittled down to the nub by all the laws making places smoke-free. One day I stopped buying tobacco and immediately forgot about smoking. The whole painless process had taken less than 65 years.  I was curious about how how my kith and kin would respond to this modification in my behavior. To date not a single person has noticed.