Smoking cigarettes was an easy way to fabricate a little cool out of boarding school uneasiness. I particularly liked to smoke late at night, alone. The boyish fantasy of subterfuge was empowering and hermetic. At seventeen, tobacco tasted sweet on the inhale and bitter on the exhale. I even taught myself to blow smoke rings. I formed my lips into an ‘O’, exhaled gently, clicked my jaw just so, and a wonderful loop rolled into infinity. But after midnight, a Marlboro at the bottom of a snowy stairwell was deliciously satisfying. The crunch of my boots and the glow of the ash.

The only sanctioned time and place for the boys to smoke was after meals on one of the embankments above the soccer fields. Out there, a whiff of cool could be presumed and shared from packs of twenty. Out there, the unspoken social pecking order of everyday campus existence didn’t hold, not in the face of wanting a cigarette and having to bum one.

A few years later, in college, everybody smoked. Cigarettes cost forty-five cents a pack and they tasted good like cigarettes should. Plus, the drinking age was eighteen. We approached addiction like adults; we smoked and drank all the time. People got stitches, puked wretchedly, had bad trips, car wrecks, and romantic disasters. Still, this constituted social drinking because it took place in public and in the context of custom. Nothing clandestine about it. Not even in the car.

On the subject of clandestine activity, I should mention the billows of marijuana smoke. Another smoke altogether. It was 1970.

Years later still, I married a smoker, but she eventually quit on me. I could smoke in the kitchen, nowhere else in the house. What had been a co-equal indulgence became a solitary vice. Finally, as my wife’s second pregnancy came to term, I began to succumb to the pressure to quit. The law was closing in. Smoking at the workplace was about to be banned. What if I couldn’t puff feverishly at my desk? Filling the ashtray was the most productive part of my day.

So I quit. I said – This will be my last cigarette – and it was. I had no idea what I was in for. Without my nicotine fix, I vibrated, perspired, and chewed terrible cuds of sugarless gum. Sometimes I felt like my central nervous system was being yanked out of my body from the base of my neck. I became both easily startled and impervious to stimuli. My life began to feel homicidally spectral, in a Mr. Hyde kind of way, with pools of ground fog and crashing organ chords.

By early winter, my shrink began looking at me over the tops of the eyeglasses she didn’t wear. Once a week we would sit opposite one another, while she said very little and I occasionally looked up and muttered. The only rise she could get out of me was when her hearing aid went into civil defense feedback mode and I would holler over its piercing shriek, “Jesus Christ, Helen, you hear this, don’t you?”

Clinical depression, aggravated by my bid to stop smoking, was her diagnosis. She suggested that I might be well served by a twenty-eight day program at one of those newfangled codependency treatment centers. They dealt with everything.

Several years ago, I went with my mother to a ceremony honoring the deceased uber-boss. A mountain in the Hudson Highlands was to be named after him. I took the 8:45am bus from Port Authority and was picked up on Route 17 by Mom in her Prius. I had volunteered to drive both my parents to the event, as my father’s back was giving him mucho discomfort. Though I might earn brownie points in heaven by pushing the good-son altruism envelope, he wisely decided to stay home due to miserableness.

“Would you like me to drive, Mom?” She proved incapable of relinquishing the steering wheel, so I became the designated navigator while she observed the speed limit and less.

This boss, who died just several weeks short of his 98th birthday, had been the prime mover behind the establishment of 4,000-acre nature preserve bordering West Point and the Palisades Interstate Park. The celebrants gathered at the Lodge building for several minutes of muted conviviality, then were bused to the foot of the formerly anonymous ridge. Respectful words were spoken into a light breeze, then a bed sheet was flung aside and an inscribed rock revealed. This was followed by aimless milling, fly-swatting, idle chitchat, and even a couple attempts at crypto-hiking as people wandered to the top of the ridge. One such hiker was my mother who took off up the hill, oblivious to her recent bout with Giant Knee Syndrome. I didn’t realize she had bolted until my gaze wandered and I saw her gimping down the rocky path held up between two strapping gents. Presently, we were herded back onto the school buses and departed the shadow of what will be known in perpetuity as ‘Old Jew Mountain.’

Back at the Lodge we were feted with canapés and video testimonials, a combo designed to simultaneously promote and defuse conversation. Images of gratitude and appreciation were underscored by placid munching. Had all this nonsense occurred at any other time than the most perfect day of the year so far, there might have been an epidemic of crabbiness among the assembled multitude. It was classically gorgeous – cloudless sunshine, seventy-two degrees, and the endless yellow/green froth of the mid-spring forest. The party dissolved around two and I was back in New York by four o’clock.

Postscript.

We pulled up to the bus stop with fifteen minutes to spare.

“Good-bye, Mom.” I gave her a peck. “This was a lovely day.”

“I’ll just wait for the bus,” she said.

“Mother,” I said, “I’m a fifty-eight year-old man. I can wait for the bus by myself. And if by chance one doesn’t come, I can figure it out.”

She let me out and drove away, not because I asked her to, but because she was getting honked at by a line of cars trying use the highway exit ramp.

A dog can provide a tremendous distraction, all furry affection and simple responsibility. We did the research and settled on a bulldog, the breed I had grown up with. In the back of the dog magazine we found an available litter out on Long Island. A phone call got us a time to visit the brood. Kiffi, Jocelyn, and I decided on a demure, tan and white bitch we named Mercy Jelly, the given name of one of Kif’s obscure New England ancestors. Mercy was sweet and powerfully ridiculous. Her economical body language and open expression underscored her tender disposition. Her drooly, farty, inert years lay in the future.

When she was but a young dog and volatile, Mercy attacked a honeydew melon that had escaped from a grocery bag and rolled across the kitchen floor. She growled and barked as it retreated, then lunged, gnawing on it with the side of her giant mouth. With guttural, slobbery determination, Mercy pushed the sphere along the wall in an attempt to gain purchase. Perhaps her strategy was to trap the evil orb in a corner, but it would just roll away. The three of us collapsed at the table, weeping with joy. We had to wait for Mercy to expend her fury, for she would brook no interference. The honeydew prevailed, but at what cost?