The Intimacy of Smokers, Then and Now

In my last couple posts, I've talked about the role cigarettes played in creating communities in my life. For those of us who started young, who stole cigarettes from parents and skulked in convenience store parking lots, a smoking buddy was a partner in crime. The fact that we were engaging in taboo behavior(as mild as it was) only brought us closer together.

Once you get a bit older, that intimacy starts to fade. You get a driver's license, cigarettes are easier to acquire, finding a time and place to smoke no longer requires cunning and intricate planning. What was once a social activity by necessity now becomes solitary.

This might be starting to change. In the last ten years, smoking has been banned from restaurants and bars, cigarettes are twice as expensive as when I started, and there are murmurs of banning smoking from public spaces. Smoking has become a moral issue and subsequently smokers are ostracized. Life has become harder for smokers, and it's resurrecting the ghosts of my youth.

Not long ago I visited the town where I grew up, the tony suburb of Princeton, New Jersey. Armed with cigarettes but with neither matches nor a lighter, I was at the mercy of my fellow Princetonians. Walking block after block in downtown, I was dismayed to realize that smoking was simply out of fashion here.

After twenty minutes, I finally found a fellow smoker. He lent me his lighter and moved on but, just briefly, I felt that old commiseration once again.