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I remember the very first time I smoked...and it wasn't even a cigarette!

We were little girls, probably seven, my friend and I. Living in the country in a coal mining patch, our parents figured we were always alright. Oh, golly, what they didn't know. We used to pick up garbage and then go on the old dump covered with coal slack down from all the family's homes and start a fire and my friend would sneak potatoes from her house to throw in the fire and we would get these sticks with holes in them, sit around the fire and smoke the sticks. Thinking back I guess I always considered myself a smoker.

As we grew to be teenagers we slowly settled in to smoking cigarettes. One friend gave me an unfiltered cigarette, one of the really "old named" strong ones, on a warm summer night when a bunch of us kids were sitting on the railroad tracks. I remember my fingers becoming cold and feeling a buzzing in my head and when I think back now at the 'self destruct' mode I had sunk to that I should have never ever picked up that second cigarette.

I enjoyed every cigarette. When I first started working which you will see was long ago, cigarettes cost a whopping fifteen cents and they progressively went up and up in price throughout the years. I would only smoke three a day at the time even when the kids were little I did not smoke that much until I obtained a job which was a career job away from home all day travelling around in the car which was lonely so my cigarette became my friend. For twenty years I smoked seventeen cigarettes a day and began to have a nagging cough in the nighttime.
Still, I would not quit.

As it happened I was listening to a man give a seminar on the telephone, of all places. He said that we could do whatever we wanted if we already thought we had become it or done it. I didn't give it much thought at the time. I had remembered reading this prayer a woman had prayed with her little child. In the course of the prayer she said, "And please help Sally to stop sucking her thumb, dear Jesus," and the little girl spoke up and said, "Oh no, Mommy, don't ask Jesus to do that because I love to suck my thumb!" So, you see, that was how I was...no matter how much I knew I should stop smoking I didn't really want to.

Then it happened. I was sitting thinking about the smell of the house, the smell of my clothes, the money I was spending, my husband who had quit a while back was still breathing in my smoke, the walls and curtains of the house were brown, it was just too much to think about. I told my husband, "I don't think I want anymore cigarettes." He said, "Oh yeah, I have heard
that before!" But, as the days went on and I didn't smoke, he realized that I meant it. Being sort of an analytical person I like to think in times and numbers and have recently figured it all out. I have not breathed in over 18,000 cigarettes in the last 33 months saving me way over $3300 and saving my and my husband's lungs how much more?

I know that I will never go back to smoking cigarettes again because I choose not to smoke them anymore. I am not one of those people who snub smokers or tell them they should quit or fan the air around them. I know for a fact how a person loves to smoke and how enjoyable something called a cigarette can be!

Learn more about this author, Theodora McBain.
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