My Grandfather Smoking

My maternal grandfather, a German immigrant who arrived in this country a few years before WWI, smoked for all his life, or at least for all of my life while he was alive. He smoked cigars, pipes, and cigarettes. This was back before smoking was a health and social sin. My earliest memories of baseball games are with him at Lawrence Stadium watching a Wichita Braves game, the stench of his cigar smoke the fragrance of the game. In his later years he would fall asleep in his chair with a cigar or cigarette in his hand, burning holes in the arms of the chair. My grandmother made him stop smoking cigars and cigarettes, but he would fall asleep with a pipe in his mouth, it falling out and spilling into his lap. He was banned from pipes as well. I smoked myself in college, cigarettes mostly, a pipe in grad school. When I’d come home occasionally on weekends, I’d sit alone with him in the living room of my parents’ home and slip him cigarettes as we talked about his youth in Germany and how I was doing in school. He wouldn’t fall asleep then, of course, and even if so I was there to catch any ashes (and if he’d forget he had a cigarette, I’d offer him an ashtray to flick them off).

I haven’t smoked cigarettes in almost 40 years, and I stopped pipes about 25 years ago, mostly because of health but also because of my stepchildren. My grandfather didn’t die of lung cancer, though he did have a daughter (my aunt) who did a few years ago (she smoked most of her adult life). But it’s difficult still for me to be as harsh on smoking and smokers as our culture is. So much of my memory of my grandfather is connected to smoking, and in a positive way, that it’s difficult for me to see it as an evil. I know smoking is bad in any number of ways. But memory can hang like a cloud over better judgment.