My grandfather told me this story when I was very young and I still remember it because it is such a beautiful story about love and how it can help you get rid of an addiction, especially tobacco addiction.
When my grandfather was around 11 or 12 years old and grew up in the Caribbean, he got into the nasty habit of smoking. He started smoking with friends as it was something almost everyone did. I don’t think there is any law on the sale of cigarettes to children. In fact, the way these kids started smoking was by going to stores to buy cigarettes for their uncles or step-dads.
Store owners would never think twice about asking for identification before selling cigarettes to minors. As I said before, it was okay to sell cigarettes to children, and consequently these children started smoking at a very young age.
So my grandfather smoked and his mother smoked and probably the rest of the family smoked too. My grandfather’s name was Oscar. By the time Oscar turned 17, he had been smoking and occasionally drinking for several years. I do remember that he said that he never smoked or drank in front of his mom.
These days they used to have social dances on the weekends and with those social dances comes good home cooked food, homemade cakes and ice cream and of course girls. The girls at that time would not go out alone, they would always be accompanied by their parents or guardians in all social events.
Although many of the children, mostly boys, smoked, it was wrong to smoke in social gatherings, especially if you were a boy. In fact, it was frowned upon as a parent to have a child who was a known smoker. However, the boys continued to smoke, because they were considered macho. After all, tough actors in movies smoked, so boys thought they would look good and handsome on girls if they smoked.
Oscar at one of these social gatherings met a girl who was about 2 years older than him. Being that society was not as liberal as it is today, meeting a girl at a dance, rather seeing a girl at a dance and starting to think that she was easy on the eyes and maybe the only thing to do. to do about it was to have a dance together, which means that everyone is involved in the dance. No decadent moves like kids do these days.
Anyway, he said, Oscar had seen Marie, the girl from the ball, and had feelings for her. What can be described as the beginning of love. Before long, he was writing letters to her and telling her how good she feels about her when he sees her and wanted to know if she felt the same way about him.
His answer was rather vague. She liked to see him too, but there was something about him that she didn’t like. She wouldn’t tell him what he was. She thought that if a young man smoked, that young man should be smart enough to pick up the little subtle hints from girls. Women can be so complex and sophisticated, Oscar said, that it takes him a long time to get to know a woman or to know what a woman wants.
Oscar could sense that Marie wasn’t crazy about him, so he started changing his clothes to see if that would change things. He first changed the way he dressed, then the way he walked and the choice of words in his letters. Meanwhile, he continued to smoke with his friends and saw himself as some kind of cool guy who enjoyed smoking.
The feeling he felt for Marie grew stronger every time he saw her. For the life of her, she couldn’t see why Marie wasn’t falling in love with him the same way he was with her. That started to drive him crazy and made him smoke even more.
What started out as maybe 5 or 6 cigarettes a day quickly turned into 20 to 25 cigarettes a day. Now all he could think about was Marie and the more he thought about her, the more he smoked. What can I do to make her fall madly in love with me? He thought.
By this time, Marie had moved away for college and was only back in town every other weekend or so. Oscar was really feeling the agonizing pain of slowly losing his girl. What if he falls in love with another boy in college? All these thoughts would keep him awake at night.
Finally, one day a letter arrived from Marie saying that she had decided to move permanently to that other city where she would find a job after college. She also told him that she could no longer bear the thought of falling in love with someone who might die from a smoke-related illness. She’ll see her, her mother had died two years earlier of a smoke-related illness because she smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for the past 25 years.
When Oscar found out that smoking was keeping her from falling in love with him, he instantly developed a deep hatred for cigarettes and anything that looked like a cigarette. She later joined a group fighting the sale of cigarettes to minors and also became an advocate for a smoke-free world. He was still involved with the group when he died 16 years ago.