I WAS five years old the first time I tried to smoke a cigarette. It was an unfiltered Lucky Strike my buddy, Mike Capps, and I had stolen from his dad’s pack of cigarettes. We sneaked out to the field by the railroad tracks near the paper mill, and using matches we fired it up. I took the cigarette and inhaled it once, like smokers do. I let out a scream as my lungs seemed to be on fire. I ran directly to his house, into the kitchen, and stuck my mouth under the faucet for the kitchen sink.

After revealing our misdeed by such conduct to our parents, I found harsh punishment soon followed. You would think that would be the end of my smoking, but it wasn’t.

When I was about 13 or 14, we started getting a pack of cigarettes, hiding them somewhere, and sneaking a smoke now and then. We might slip out to go look at the pond, and smoke a cigarette while away from the house. As soon as we’d return, Mike’s little sister Pat would likely as not yell “Mike and Jim’s been smoking!” She had the nose of a bloodhound, and could catch a hint of cigarette smoke at 20 paces.

BY THE TIME I was 15, I was smoking quite regularly, and by 16 I was openly carrying cigarettes and smoking them as I drove, and sometimes as I worked. I smoked them at school, in the smoking circle out behind the shop building, and always smoked as I hung out or had a good time. I went with filtered cigarettes, menthol for a while, but switched to non-menthol to regular filtered L&Ms. From the time I was 16 until my early 20s, I smoked about a pack of cigarettes day. When I was in the military, they were so cheap I told people I couldn’t afford not to smoke cigarettes.

Through my 20s, 30s and 40s, I would smoke a pack a day for years at a time, then stop some period of time. Somewhere along the way, I switched to Benson Hedges Menthol. I might stop for a month, a year, or several years. But I could pick them back up and be smoking a pack a day any time. That urge for that first drag off a freshly lit cigarette never went away.

A few years ago, however, I quit cigarettes for good. Smoking them started making my head hurt. I’d get a throb in one spot, and it was obviously correlated to my lighting up a cigarette. I decided I needed to give it up for good. I went about two years where I still had the urge to smoke, but then a couple of years ago, something happened. I didn’t have any urge any more to light up a cigarette. That first drag isn’t what I think about, any more. Instead, cigarettes have come to mean that stinky smoke that floats off the cigarettes others are smoking.

I KNOW IT’S strange, but I really can’t stand cigarette smoke any more. I’m the better for it. My lungs, heart and vascular system all tested well this year in a variety of medical tests. My numbers are lower than one would expect, and I know that my quitting smoking helped my health vastly. I never worry about coughing up a lung any more.

It’s not a cause for me. I don’t want to stamp out smoking. When I was in the military, nothing I loved to hear better than “smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em!” I have enjoyed the use of a cigarette as a prop for dramatic purposes, or just to make me look cool like James Dean. They were fun while they lasted, but I’ve kicked them to the curb, and I’m a better man for it.

© 2009, Jim “Pappy” Moore, All Rights Reserved.

Jim “Pappy” Moore is a native son of East Texas who still makes the piney woods his home. oaktreefm58@hotmail.com