Musings on a Passing

A friend of my ex died this last week. I had known him as well as he had worked with her at an adolescent treatment facility in the seventies. My younger son posted about him this week too, talking about how he had been helpful when my son was in his teens.

I liked B. He was amusing and witty and quite smart. My real first trip out of the country (not Canada or Mexico) was because he offered friends of his family as host in London. We had a great time. He had a pilot license and once took me up with him. That we nearly flipped porpoising on landing didn’t diminish the experience. In fact it probably made it more memorable.

After my wife and I divorced, he became part of her close support network. I never thought much of it because by that time I was pretty sure that B was gay. I’d never known him to date. I’d never known him to be in any romantic relationship.

That got confirmed in the mid eighties when B showed up on local television news as a spokesperson for NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association. I was both shocked and somehow not surprised. It did prompt me to say something to him the next time I happened to see him to the effect that “If I find out that you have acted improperly with my sons, I will come after you.” Not a threat I could have carried out, but I was pretty concerned.

In my late teens on my own in Boston I had been the target of grooming efforts by older men that sometimes proved difficult to fend off, and I viewed and still view NAMBLA as justifying that kind of predatory behavior. And I know my cultural history and am aware that such “mentoring’ was a common feature of elite Athenian society, among other places.

I supposed that my wife would not have found B acceptable if he had been inappropriate with either my sons or the patients at the treatment facility, but seeing him on the evening news jolted me.

I moved away, married and divorced again, and then settled down where I am now with a lovely partner, friend, spouse. My connection with my sons is somewhat attenuated by the miles, and certainly that with my ex. News about B showed up on Facebook where I stay in touch with old and new friends and my sons and their children. B was living in Thailand.

I never asked my ex about it but I had my suspicions about why he was living there, and it raised all my hackles again.

Sometime during this last year my ex posted something about B having cancer and coming back to the states for treatment. He had been treated then returned to Bankok and not very long ago was readmitted to a hospital and then to a hospice where he died earlier this week. I called my ex-wife to offer condolences and then read a post from my son that talked about B encouraging “a shy teenager to come out of his shell,” or something to that effect.

My son is married with a son of his own. My other son is married with two daughters. I don’t have much question about them knowing who they are and living the lives they want to live.

As for B, I’m ambivalent. I think he was a good person. I’m pretty sure he behaved appropriately and responsibly with my sons, and I’m not about to ask them about it at this point. If there is something to tell, they will if they want to. The ex had said something about B “having his quirks, but don’t we all,” and I understood her, though I think of older men pursuing relationships with under age boys as off the appropriate scale.

I understand the aspect of mentoring in that kind of relationship. I think I actually may have benefited. I had a teacher who took me in so I could finish my third year of high school without being disrupted by a move to another city. I didn’t think so at the time, but now I am pretty sure he was gay. He lived with his elderly mother and worked two jobs to provide for her in case something should happen to him. His closest colleague at the school where he taught was a flaming queen. He also appears to have known my father in other contexts. My father was living with a younger man and had worked part time as a waiter in a gay bar. My teacher was never inappropriate and was very helpful in providing some useful life lessons.

So I wonder why B was living in Bankok, and I wonder about his relationship with my sons. I’m pretty sure he was responsible about his orientation, but there is the smallest doubt that nags a bit. Most adults do manage themselves responsibly in this area, and most, as my ex suggested, are probably not in a place to cast stones.

Yet despite my doubts about him, I still feel like a small piece of me has passed on. Rest in Peace.

And We Are Worried about Children at Our Borders

A couple of different things are intersecting for me right now as our once hopeful land of opportunity remains frozen in partisan gridlock, maybe more than a couple.

Krugman’s column in my local paper today is about corporate “inversion,” which is about as obscene as it sounds. It is the practice of corporations declaring that their off shore subsidiaries are now the corporate owners in order to avoid corporate taxes. Apparently Walgreens is about to do it, so I guess it is time for me to consider changing my prescriptions to a small locally owned chain. [Scratch that. Walgreens backed away from it. I still may change, just because they floated the idea.]

And speaking of corporations, those friendly church going neighbors of all of ours, and Big Pharma in particular: I’m getting really tired of all of the medication ads on the network nightly news shows. Apparently we are like one of only two or three countries that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers. On vacation recently I was talking to a doc who works for NIH and he was telling me that doctors hate them, too, that they tend to make for bad medical decisions. So who wants them? Big Pharma, the same people who have instructed their Congressional delegation to prevent Medicare from negotiating price with them.

If corporations are people just like me, how come I don’t get to own a few dozen Congressmen? Really. It hardly seems fair.

So with this as background I am about 2/3 of the way through an interesting piece of speculative fiction—the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson—I’ve read Red Mars and most of Green Mars. It’s extrapolative sci-fi. It takes current science and scientific trends and extrapolates some time in the future. Red Mars begins in 2026 with the expedition to colonize Mars. It’s 2114 now and the members of the first one hundred not killed by murder, war, or accident, are still alive thanks to restorative gene therapy they invented on Mars.

This has been exported back to Earth which was already a disaster of overpopulation, pollution, and armed conflicts between haves and have nots, now exacerbated by the new division between those who can afford the longevity treatments—the wealthy and those who work for the big corporations—and the rest. And those corporations have changed, too.

Ongoing consolidation has led to the creation of a very few “metanational” corporations which now run things, the UN being shunted aside, and multiple countries actually owned by the megacorporations. Even the largest countries are an insufficient counterweight to the metanationals that actually have armies. What has resulted at this point in my reading is a kind of feudal plutocracy. The democratic idea has become meaningless, and the thirty-some odd who remain of the first hundred Mars colonists, now in their 130s, and their children and grandchildren plot revolt.

I described it as extrapolative fiction and it believably is an extension, and not a very far one, from where we are now.

Corporations, now declared in multiple Supreme Court decisions to be people, essentially own Congress. The huge expense of the eternal campaign and its associated fund-raising makes that inevitable. Given that many of those corporations cannot even operate in the interests of their owners and employees, but instead serve the interests of the small cabals that constitute their boards and the C-suites, it is silly to expect that they might operate in the interests of the people.

The hope at one time was that government could supply the counterweight, but the phrase “too big to fail” probably is now completely synonymous with “too big to be regulated and controlled.” And the spin doctors have convinced the social conservatives and their allies that government must be shrunk to the size where it can be “drowned in a bathtub,” as Grover “the pledge” Norquist has famously said.

The irony is that it is plausible to oppose government since it no longer seems to be “us.” Remember, government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

And the irony for me is that I was educated to be a member of that corporate leadership class. I made choices to alter that, as I was committed to the idea of making workplaces be healthy and affirming for all of their constituents; but perhaps I was, as we used to say, “shoveling shit against the tide,” or “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” Now I’m thankful to be done with it and thankful that there are not longevity treatments yet.

But really—we have the little people all stirred up about the children running for their lives who are here to destroy our Amurrican Way of Life. It’s theatre. It’s theatre like the security crap in the airports 13 years after the event that prompted it. It’s theatre like the elections that we think will influence things and make not much difference in the long run. It’s theatre like the medical industry controlled by corporate hospital chains, big pharma, and the insurance industry. It’s theatre like the sacrosanct pork barreled military budget. It’s theatre like the cops armed like paramilitary, primed to SCOTUS approved no knock entry. Deadly, persistent, toxic fucking theatre, with 500+ channels and facebook to serve as bread and circuses.

The “Man/Woman on the White Horse?” That’s Don Quixote.

I want to apologize to my children. Really, I am so sorry we have left you this fucking mess.

I Knew It Was Coming, Didn’t Expect It to Feel This Way

Over the last dozen years or so my wife and I have made an annual road trip to Montana. For Western Washington folk, a trip to Montana is a little like a trip to the Cape for New Englanders. We go ostensibly to fish, though each year we have done less and less fishing as much as we enjoy it. Mostly we hang out at a little streamside cabin we rent and go and do things or visit people, and do a lot of reading. We take our two Blenheim Cavaliers and they get to run about more than they do in the city.

We go to a little town in southwestern Montana, a few hours north of Yellowstone. There are a number of good rivers to fish in the immediate vicinity. The reason we go there is due in part to my wife taking a three month sabbatical in 2002 and spending it in a camp on the Jefferson River with a friend’s dog and the works of and a biography of Wallace Stegner. She became an adopted citizen of the nearby town—the one we now visit—and in the process became friends with a couple of people we both came to know a bit over the years.

One you might know if we mentioned her by name, the other was a local man who had a kind of crafts shop and did some weaving. We went to the ranch the woman owned in 2004 to get married in a restored schoolhouse on a bluff overlooking the Bighole River with the weaver officiating.

Last year is the last time we will have seen either of them in Montana. Our minister/weaver had a heart attack the previous year and in the process of recovery wrought some changes in his life. Last year his shop was closed the whole time we were there.

Our other friend showed up last week in my wife’s office. She was in town closing out some business about the sale of her ranch. She had had it on the market for several years. It was not easy to keep it going and Montana winters are hard. I wouldn’t want to face one in a small cabin miles from anything, and she has a few years on me.

I think it is good for her to have sold it despite deep attachments that must have made it very difficult. She will probably revel in the freedom to go places.

She’ll miss it, too, as will we. Once this happened, I realized that she has been a very big part of why we trek to that particular little town in that corner of Big Sky country. We didn’t spend a lot of time with her, but the time we spent was special.

And as if to put a cap on the whole thing, the couple who rented us the streamside cabin we used for the last several years announced their retirement this year. Someone else will be managing the rentals they had so the cabin is still available, but it really feels like our annual pilgrimage is over. Time to go somewhere else.

The Art and Music List

People are fond of posting lists on facebook of books or music, but I started thinking the other day of art I have seen that touched me or moved me in some way. So here's that list sort of in order of impact.

Van Gogh — Starry Night — MOMA — 1981

The first thing that struck me was how small it was. In a corner a couple of rooms away from the Waterlilies in the pre-redesign of the MOMA, it was surrounded by other works of other artists and seemed almost postage stamp-like. I have gone back specifically to see it more than once.

Botticelli — La Primavera — the Uffizi — 2007

The room was crowded and filled with a babel of language but there it was on the far wall. I cried. I literally cried. The Venus was to its immediate left but I had eyes (and heart) for nothing but Primavera. No amount of having seen reproductions in books prepared me for it.

Renoir — Bal a Bougival — Boston Museum of Fine Arts — 1962

This is the most beautiful of Renoir's paintings. It's in the museum's permanent collection. It is part of a trio of related paintings and is clearly the best of the three. The movement of the couple, the swirl of her dress, the insistent push of the man, and her coy turning way — the painting seethes with romantic tension and you can almost hear the music play.

Monet — Waterlilies — MOMA, L'Orangerie — 1981, 2012

The first time I saw some of these at the MOMA I just sat for probably 20 or 25 minutes as people drifted by. It was soothing to see them, to be in their presence. The ones at L'Orangerie are much bigger and almost implode inside you. We saw those the same day we had returned from the gardens where they had been created and I can no longer separate the images.

Degas — Dancers — Cincinnati Art Museum — 1958

Off of Eden Park, a majestic swath of green at the edge of downtown, I could walk from where I lived, the museum collection wasn't huge, but they had two or three of these Degas. I was instantly drawn to them and came back quite a bit in that one year.

Michelangelo — David — the Academy in Florence — 2007

It seems lonely in its place in the great hallway. Michelangelo's paean to the young male body is erotic and serene at the same time, with a sense of intention you don't quite expect.

Picasso — Guernica — La Reina Sofia, Madrid — 2012

I was exhausted the first time we saw it. I couldn't quite let it in. The traveling exhibit of other Picasso works I had seen back home had included a series of photographs of the mural in progress. After a second visit to the painting a few days later, I could see it and not the photos. There is something cold and almost clinical about the black and white piece, as if you look at it from a far distance. It was the 75th anniversary of the bombing the week we were there.

Rodin — The Gates of Hell — National Museum in DC and again in Paris at the Rodin Museum — 1980, 2006

Many of the well-known individual sculptures (e.g. The Thinker) are in these monumental doors. I think you could examine them for hours. It is a study in la Vie Humain. A close second for me was outside in the garden — The Burghers of Calais.

Velasquez — Las Meninas — the Prado — 2012

Until I saw it in the flesh, so to speak, I could never quite understand why my wife liked this one so much. Now I do. It's an amazing painting, full of nuance and meaning. It was fun to see several of Picasso's cubist variations on it later on in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.

unknown — Winged Victory of Samothrace — the Louvre — 2006

For me, the highlight of the Louvre. Yes I know those great ladies Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa are there, but this one just leaps at you with great power and great grace and is superbly located on a staircase that lets you see it from all angles including from below looking up as if it is a figurehead on a ship. Magnificent.

Tiffany — the wisteria blossom window — Metropolitan Museum of Art — 1982

Louis Comfort... what else to say. This is just simply beautiful.

El Greco — Christ Bearing the Cross — a visiting collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum — 1958

It was part of the Lehman Collection traveling through the country and a school class made a special trip. I remember the exhibit for a number of things, among them a wall of Renoirs, and a tiny copy of a Vermeer by Dali, but the El Greco struck me hard. It was hung so that you faced it straight on as you entered the room full of the Greek's paintings, and for a moment it was all you could see. It was the first painting I had ever experienced almost solely as an emotional reaction.

Classical Music

I am not a musician or an artist, but often experiencing great art or great music I have this overwhelming feeling of gratitude that somehow the piece or that work was created just for me, and just for the moment of my first encounter. It is a kind of love at first sight or first hearing. Something changes and I am different in that moment and after. It isn't about taste, but about what the music evokes.

Richard Strauss' Til Eulenspiegel — Cincinnati Symphony — 1958

I had never been to a live concert and had little access to recordings of classical music. My exposure was very limited. Given bus fare and the price of second balcony seats ($0.20 + $1.50!!!) this was the first piece of live symphonic music I had ever heard. I was blown away. At intermission I begged the head usher to let me join the Conservatory students who ushered the balconies (I was a junior in high school) and I ended up seeing a whole season.

Beethoven's 7th Symphony — the Esplenade Pops Concerts — 1959 or 60

The Pastorale is, I think the most moving of the Beethoven symphonies. I love the 9th and the 3rd, but I always come back to this. Hearing it outdoors by the Charles River seems somehow most appropriate. A recent performance in Benaroya was lovely.

Bizet's L"Arlesienne Suites — I don't know where I first heard them, probably a recording

Now having been to Arles and Provence the music has a place in my mind. I can feel in it the Mediterranean ethos, full of life with all its underlying tensions.

Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition — Cincinnati Symphony — 1958-59

This is such a delicious piece of music, so evocative; even the original piano version, and the Emerson, Lake and Palmer rock version fully in the spirit of the Ravel orchestration. The promenade may be one of the most memorable themes in music.

Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue — probably a recording but since, at least one live performance with orchestra

The opening clarinet puts me right in the center of it. But I didn't miss that in the remarkable four hands two pianos version (how it was written before scoring for orchestra) by Katia and Marielle Labeque. Gershwin seems to me underappreciated.

Liszt's Les Preludes — probably as the theme for an early TV sci-fi show in the 50s

It still evokes rockets taking off. It's kind of schlocky and I have never heard it performed live but it is one of those things I like to play with the volume turned up all the way.

Mendelssohn's Incidental Music for a Midsummer Night's Dream — recordings, film

I think my first experience of this was as the music in the schlocky 1935 film with Dick Powell, Olivia de Havilland, James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, and others. The most interesting version I have heard is a Tanglewood performce with chorus by Seiji Ozawa and the BSO.

Ives' The Unanswered Question — Cincinnati Symphony — 1958-59

I didn't quite know what to make of it, and this is one of Ives’ slightly more approachable pieces. I've come to look forward to hearing Ives done live.

Bach Cello Suites — many times but most recently live at Town Hall Seattle by Joshua Roman — 2012

Joshua did all six in a single concert with a dinner break in the middle. (Easier than the Ring cycle.) He's an immensely talented young man who clearly loves what he does.

Handel's Water Music — BSO in the 1960's

One of these, the second one in the second set, is embedded in my brain as the theme music for "Afternoon Symphony" on WHRB. I think they still use it. I wonder if they still program five pieces from five periods alternating chamber and large orchestra pieces, all to time out to exactly 3 hours. Programming to those constraints was an art form all of itself.

Verdi Requiem — not sure where I first heard it, probably records in the 60s, live in Seattle around 2000

There is something electrifying when the Kyrie rises out of the chorus and orchestra. There's a lot of Verdi that is moving and emotional, the slave's chorus from Nabucco, which I have heard from the wings wearing a Babylonian archer's costume, the quartet from Rigoletto, but the Requiem is first to mind for me.

My Relationship with Tobacco (with thanks to Rudyard Kipling for “The Betrothed")

Open the old cigar-box, get me a Cuba stout,

For things are running crossways, and Maggie and I are out.

We quarreled about Havanas—we fought o’er a good cheroot,

And I know she is exacting, and she says I am a brute.

Open the old cigar-box—let me consider a space;

In the soft blue veil of vapor musing on Maggie’s face.

Maggie is pretty to look at—Maggie’s a loving lass,

But the prettiest cheeks must wrinkle, the truest of loves must pass.

I was in a small Kentucky town hanging out with the other kids from my not quite nice neighborhood. 9th grade? Maybe 14? I don’t think 13, but certainly before 15. Smoking was an initiation rite, required for membership in the crew that sat on the high curb across from school during lunch breaks. Though we called them cancer sticks even then, no one condemned it or even scolded us. My mother, a smoker wasn’t happy about it, but she hated worse the idea of being a hypocrite.

Cigarettes were about 40 cents a pack. I smoked unfiltered Pall Malls. I quit once for about 6 weeks to try out for the basketball team [note: my athletic ability is noteworthy for the wrong reasons, but basketball was the only extra-curricular activity, the town school was that small]. I went right back to smoking when I failed to make the cut.

There’s peace in a Laranaga, there’s calm in a Henry Clay,

But the best cigar in an hour is finished and thrown away—

Thrown away for another as perfect and ripe and brown—

But I could not throw away Maggie for fear o’ the talk o’ the town.

Maggie, my wife at fifty—gray and dour and old—

With never another Maggie to purchase for love or gold!

Smoking was somewhat frowned on at the next school I went to. I was living with my father. He smoked. Oddly his “roommate” did not. At school the smokers congregated on some steps on a wooded pathway down below the school building. It was a varied crew because of changing schedules. One was a girl who had a car. She asked me to go to a French movie with her.

That year was ragged. My father was out of work, had always been a troubled man, and I am sure the parenting of a 16 year old was beyond him. Nor was it in the wheelhouse of his “roommate.” Fortunately they had friends, most of them school teachers, who provided help and counsel. One sheltered me during a difficult night and when I woke the next day offered me a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

And the light of Days that have Been the Dark of the Days that Are,

And Love’s torch stinking and stale, like the butt of a dead cigar—

The butt of a dead cigar you are bound to keep in your pocket—

With never a new one to light tho’ it’s charred and black to the socket.

In Boston for my senior year my father took me to Erlich’s for my birthday at the beginning of the school year. A pipe would be better for me he said. I went. Seemed like a neat idea. He bought me a pipe called a “Canadian” or “Lumber Jack.” It was a design with a cylindrical bowl and a long briar stem with only a short black rubber bit. The length of briar supposedly cooled the smoke. It was a bit of a bitch to clean and prone to break as I found out. He also gave me a couple of pipes from his father.

My grandfather, a doctor, had smoked a pipe all his life. He had even taught his nurses how to fill them so that when he had smoked a bowl he would set that pipe down in the ashtray and pick up and light the one that was waiting. I’m told that the only time he smoked cigarettes was when he was in formal wear that didn’t have the necessary pockets for the various supplies and implements pipe smoking requires. Then he tucked a bag of Bull Durham in his cummerbund and had the art of rolling a cigarette in one hand while managing a cocktail in the other. Maybe it is apocryphal but it is a neat story and image.

Open the old cigar-box—let me consider awhile—

Here is a mild Manila—there is a wifely smile.

Which is the better portion—bondage bought with a ring,

Or a harem of dusky beauties fifty tied in a string?

Counsellors cunning and silent—comforters true and tried,

And never one of the fifty to sneer at a rival bride.

Thought in the early morning, solace in time of woes,

Peace in the hush of Twilight, balm ere my eyelids close.

I smoked a pipe for a number of years after that, smoking cigarettes as a convenience. From time to time I’d smoke a cigar but I was never an aficionado. Alas, pipes were an early target of smoking restrictions because they could pretty seriously smog up a small space. They were a definite no-no on airplanes and quickly so in restaurants. Sort of a shame because there was nothing quite so satisfying as a contemplative bowl after dinner. So I tended toward smoking cigarettes more and more, though I would still smoke the pipe when I could. I had maybe a half dozen that had broken in well and were very enjoyable.

When I transferred to our local prestigious U and entered a fairly exclusive concentration (major) the first meeting of the group was at the headmaster’s residence in one of the houses. Sherry was served and the “gentlemen” were offered cigars. How thoroughly sexist!

Smoking was ubiquitous during the next few years before the campaigns to raise awareness began in earnest. I think cigarettes were a couple of bucks a pack. My wife smoked. We used to buy them by the carton at a discount store I passed on the way to grad school. In my MBA class of 20 guys it became a custom to light up cigars during our Friday afternoon policy class and turn the air blue. It was still okay to smoke in offices, restaurants, classrooms, even elevators! We were relegated to the back of airplanes, which has to be something that is recreated in hell as punishment for smokers and non-smokers alike. I must have reeked for weeks. By then some of my non-smoking friends were prodding me about quitting.

  

This will the fifty give me, asking naught in return,

With only a Suttee’s passion—to do their duty and burn.

This will the fifty give me, when they are spent and dead,

Five times other fifties shall be my servants instead.

The furrows of far off Java, the isles of the Spanish Main,

When they hear my harem is empty, will send me my brides again.

I will take no head to their raiment, nor food for their mouths withal,

So long as the gulls are nesting, so long as the showers fall.

I will scent ‘em with best Vanilla, with tea I will temper their hides,

And the Moor and the Mormon shall envy who read of the tale of my brides.

By this time the pipe was an occasional thing. You can’t smoke a pipe on a smoking break, and as noted carrying all that stuff was a pain—pipe, tobacco pouch, tamper, wooden matches or a fairly serious lighter, pipe cleaners. So I was channeled into cigarettes at certain times of the day, which is when they began to become time markers for me.

My smoking survived three serious relationships with non-smokers. I had stopped smoking in the house or apartment. I didn’t smoke in the car when someone else was in it. That gave way eventually to not smoking in the car, which felt at the time like a major sacrifice. Now with a four year-old car that has never been smoked in, I have come to appreciate it.

For Maggie has written a letter that gives me my choice between

The wee little whimpering Love and the great god Nick o’ Teen.

And I have been a servant of Love for barely a twelve-month clear,

But I have been a Priest of Partagas a matter of seven year;

And the gloom of my bachelor days is flecked with the cheery light

Of stumps that I burned to Friendship and Pleasure and Work and Fight.

I made attempts at quitting, some fairly serious. I did Smoke Enders while I was working in the most stressful place I ever worked, failed in the last week and was scolded by the substitute teacher who was covering the last session for “lack of willpower.” Those of you who don’t, especially those who never have, sometimes make it about will. It is and it isn’t, not solely.

Nicotine gum worked a bit but I had a tendency to be chomping away all the time and that didn’t work at work. I am not a pretty gum chewer anyway. Besides it is pretty pricey. Handy for long flights though.

And I turn my eyes to the future that Maggie and I must prove,

But the only light on the marshes is the Will-o’-the-Wisp of Love.

Will it see me safe through my journey or leave me bogged in the mire?

Since a puff of tobacco can cloud it, shall I follow the fitful fire?

Two docs really pushed me. My internist made the case that it was the single most important thing I could do for my health, and my urologist really got on me after a scare from a scan that suggest a bladder cancer. It wasn’t but he had seen me lighting up in the COSTCO parking lot a couple of weeks earlier and took the moment of the scare to have a chat about the connection with bladder cancer. More recently an eye doc enlightened me about the connection with macular degeneration.

All stuff a smart guy should know, and of course I did. But cigarettes in particular are intensely addictive. They had become for me a major instrument of self-soothing. Stressed? Struggling with a problem? Go have a smoke. It was even enough when one of the people I ended up with in the smoking area in my last job, who shared my nickname, was diagnosed and died within weeks of lung cancer. With classic denial I had a host of reasons that I would escape.

Open the old cigar-box—let me consider anew—

Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you?

A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;

And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a Smoke.

Light me another Cuba—I hold to my first-sworn vows,

If Maggie will have no rival, I’ll have no Maggie for spouse!

I don’t know if Kipling gave up tobacco. I’ll bet he gave up at least some of his cigar habit. Me? A few years ago a new drug came on the market—Chantix. It doesn’t contain nicotine but it blocks the nicotine receptors. My internist suggested I try it.

The regime is to take pills twice daily for three months. It’s not cheap, but with cigarettes in this state at $8 or $9 a pack, it is cheaper than smoking by about 60% for a pack a day smoker. It has an odd side effect—very vivid dreams. For me they were kind of fun. My wife didn’t much like hearing about them though.

It has taken about four tries. I would take the Chantix and be off the weeds for five or six months and then think I could have just one. Or in the last major fall from the wagon I got laid off and was really upset because I was pretty sure full time work was no longer in the picture. I did a course again about 14 or 15 months ago having smoked for a month or two after over half a year without. Late this summer I did the just one thing and immediately called my doc to get a new scrip, and did the 3 month course. What that means is that I have had fewer than a couple dozen smokes in the last two and half years, and probably less than half that in the last year

The drug helps a lot, and it does take some willpower to stay the course. When cigarettes have been part of your self-soothing regime and part of the way you mark time for decades, willpower alone won’t break the habit. But it takes willpower to set aside the occasional thought that I’d really like to have a cigarette right now.

I think I have got this now. I enjoy not smelling it on me and I find myself annoyed rather than attracted when I smell a smoker in the street. It’s too hard to keep quitting so I think I can make it stick. I doubt I will ever be a non-smoker, but I can be an ex-smoker. Good enough for me, and my “Maggie” likes it.