Quitting smoking

Eight o'clock tonight will mark three full days without a cigarette. Not that I'm counting...much.
I can remember my first cigarette. I was eleven years old and we lived in Barrie, Ontario. Four of us had walked, on a Saturday afternoon in late spring, up to the end of our street and then, from where it ended, up the hill that rose beyond town. In a small copse of trees we sat in a circle and passed around a Lucky Strike. I coughed and I sputtered and I knew with absolute certainty that I was a smoker. I guess I was patterned by my dad who was a pack a day man.
I can remember thinking in my early twenties that I was going to quit pretty soon. And at times in each of the succeeding decades of my life.
I can remember hiking on Mount St. Paul up near the summit of the Alaska Highway, and climbing the Hermit in Glacier National Park and cross country skiing five miles outside of Faro, Yukon, and in each instance dropping to my knees at some point early on in the trip and puking from shortness of breath, from thirty fags a day. Boyo, smoking and the great outdoors only go together in the commercials that sell smokes.
Although, truth be told, I also remember, while on backwoods hikes, finding some small cover in rough and rainy country and bending in to roll a smoke and light it and deeply enjoy the warmth of that small comforting rush of nicotine.

It seems to me that I've quit smoking now four or five times. That does not include the countless times that I've packed in the habit for a day or a week. As Mark Twain wrote, quitting smoking is easy, I've done it a thousand times.

Every time that I have started smoking again that first smoke has tasted like the first one I ever had. Ummm. It has also tasted as though I had been waiting for it for each of the days that I had been without.

My dad spent the last twelve years of his life in Memorial Pavilion, a VA hospital in Victoria, suffering from emphysema and recurrent congestive heart failure and all of the other diseases that are so often the legacy of a life time of smoking.

When he finally passed at 79 years of age he was years beyond when he'd begun to wish he was dead. A hard way to go. Strangely, not once during his illness did I think of quitting myself.

So, why now. Well, I feel the effects of the habit more now that I'm pushing into the last quarter of my fifties than ever before, I watch my youngest suck back more of these things than I do and feel guilty at the example I've given her and I guess I feel that I want to have the extra energy that has always been in my life when I'm not smoking.

All of that being said, the habit of smoking is harder to give up than just the physical addiction to nicotine. I do miss them.

If you've read this, say a small prayer for my continued success.