Worst Personal Reflection on One's Generation Ever

"Second-hand smoke" seems a little tame to describe the mushroom cloud hovering over the dinner table when all the relatives got together at holiday time when I was a kid. My mother had nine sisters and a brother, and every one of them smoked.

 

Riding around the back seat in winter time with two smokers up front.

 

I found I could bury my nose between the cushions of the backseat of our 1977 Caprice Classic and the smoke got less cough-inducing. My dad called me a dramaqueen. So I started rolling the window half down at 20 degrees outside.

Thankfully he quit by the time I was about nine.

 

Best piece involving Gen X this year was my most-played song.

Every generation makes its own apologies…

 

My parents smoked like trains inside my whole life. I always had sinus issues growing up. I was at doctors, specialists, chiropractors, etc. trying to solve the problem. Miraculously, when I joined the Navy and left home, the issues went away. When I came home to visit, I was stuffed up the second I walked in the door. When I left, I cleared back up. After a couple of times, it clicked with me. It was the smoke. I mentioned it to my dad, and his response was, "Ohhhhh, that's got nothing to do with it."

 

I lived through all of this as well, but honestly the worst was when my dad would wake up first (his cough would wake me up) and as he lit his first cigs, the fresh cigarette smell would infiltrate throughout the house.

I can't imagine what my clothes smelled like when I went to school.

 

I've thought the same thing over and over.


It was normal for my dad to wake up at 1-2 in the morning, have a cigarette and go back to bed. Even until the day he died, when he had been confined to a hospital bed in their living room for 8 months, he'd wake my mom up in the middle of the night so he could smoke. Of all his ailments, oddly enough, lung cancer wasn't one of them.

 

My dad, and maybe mom, too, would smoke in the middle of the night. They didn't have a bedspread without cigarette burns. It's a wonder they never burned the house down.

 

To my knowledge, my mom certainly and my dad, didn't smoke it bed. He'd get up and usually go stand in the kitchen. When he was bed-ridden and didn't have any choice, my mom kept his cigarettes and lighter out of reach. if he wanted to smoke, someone was in the room with him.

 

My dad was a two-pack a day Marlboro red smoker and I had a chronically running nose, to the point that I was constantly dragged to allergists at a very early age. My mom and dad divorced when I was like two years old and my mom, who was not a smoker, had the carpets, couch and drapes cleaned. My congestion suddenly went away and my dad was told under no uncertain terms that he was not to smoke around me, which he did until he died when I was five.

 

IIRC my mom said she started smoking at age 13 or 14.