"I Am Always Remembering..."

If you "smoked" these as a kid, you're at least as old as me...

For those who don't know what's inside the box, it's rods of bubble gum wrapped in powdered sugar dusted paper, printed to look like cigarettes. When you first put one in your mouth, you quickly blow hard before the paper gets soggy and the powdered sugar shoots out the end like smoke. After that "excitement," you'd peel off the paper and chew the gum while walking around with the box bulging your shirt pocket just like dad's.

My father had been a lifelong smoker and so he thought these were a cute gift for his sons, but around the time I was 6 or 7 my mom asked him to stop buying these. This was around the time the Surgeon General's warnings were getting pretty serious. It was also around this time that my older brother who was about 14 decided we had to get dad to stop smoking. Back then they used to run tv spots explaining the health dangers of smoking and warning of cancer and all manner of ailments.

My father would buy his cigarettes every week during grocery shopping. A carton of Trues was his brand, and as soon as we'd come home with the groceries, my brother would be pretending to help put them away, but he was actually looking for the cigarettes. When he'd find them, he'd hide them, and wouldn't tell until dad got mad enough to threaten a whipping if he didn't hand them over. One week, my brother refused to give 'em up and dad did give him a terrible whipping and he still wouldn't tell. And when finally, my father asked him why he was doing this, my brother replied with tear-filled eyes, "Because I love you and don't want you to die from cancer." Hearing that was one of the few times I saw tears in my father's eyes. 

After a long silence, my dad called mom and the rest of us into the living room and told us he wasn't going to smoke anymore. My brother gave him the cigarettes (he'd hidden them in the fireplace behind the logs) and dad took them to the trash can in the kitchen. After that day I never saw him with a cigarette again in the nearly 40 years he lived after that day. 

As you know, there's always irony in life and this story is no different. By the time my brother was 17, he was a regular smoker himself and still is to this day (the only one of us 6 children). And the real irony is that my father was aware of my brother's smoking and never called him out about it. I even remember my dad buying my brother a pack of cigarettes at a gas station once. The rest of us kids were always like "WTF" when it came to the things my brother got away with, but we all knew that my brother Darrell was my dad's favorite. My dad loved us all, but there was something special about my brother Darrell.

I'm always remembering...