Smokin’!

By Mary Ellen Pollock-Raneri for Hometown magazine

Ihave lots of wonderful memories of my mother. She was a baker, a seamstress, a math whiz, a carpenter, a singer, and an amazing parent. She could make something out of nothing for our dinners, and she made me lovely coats for Easter, doll clothes, paper mâché pots. She paid for all my music and art lessons and my tap dancing instruction (I can still cut a mean rug thanks to mom’s efforts). Yes, my mother was perfect. Well, almost. Everyone has a vice or two. Mom enjoyed smoking cigarettes. She also collected the coupons that were on the back of the package. I can still see the kind of yellowish-colored pack with the picture of some old guy from history on the front. My mother would tear off the protective crinkly plastic from the pack and toss that. Then, she smoked the cigarettes inside. I think she especially liked saving the coupons on the backside of the pack, too. I remember browsing in the cigarette company’s catalog that had all the free stuff. There were all kinds of neat stuff that she could get, simply with coupons: kitchenware, bedspreads, lamps, jewelry, and even toys could be had by simply smoking and saving the coupons on the cigarette packs. For instance, a two-slice toaster took 1,000 coupons. That’s about 500 cigarettes that you could smoke and then toast something with a free toaster. Nevertheless, Lucy loved to get free stuff and the idea of saving something really appealed to her.

We had some interesting ashtrays, too. I remember the fancy one in the living room. It was a stunning, standing brass smoker’s ashtray. That big ornate brass ashtray was positioned right by my mom’s chair. Sure, we had little ashtrays made from clear or green-colored glass, but I think she really enjoyed her cigarettes when she sat in her smoking compound in the living room.

Typically, my mom would wheel the station wagon up to her favorite local grocery store and send me in for a pack or two of her smokes. I liked going into the store alone to buy cigarettes because I felt like an important adult on a mission. Sadly, I was only around 7 or 8 years old so the clerk would always smile at me and ask me where my mother was. Then, she would turn from the cash register and wave to my mom who sat directly in front of the big plate glass window of the grocery store. Mom waved back when the clerk held up the pack of cigarettes for my mom to see. Then, Mom beeped the horn. I paid for the cigarettes and trotted off to the station wagon with them.

Now, please don’t judge. It was the early ’60s and the cat wasn’t out of the bag yet about cigarette smoking. Even when the smoking cat did escape, my mom Lucy didn’t believe it at first, I guess.

One cigarette compound in our house was located at the organ that we had in the corner of the living room. It was a huge, beautiful instrument and my mother spent hours on it, trying to teach herself how to play. She did a great job with her self-teaching and played Ramblin’ Rose and The Tennessee Waltz over and over until she got them right. In addition, Mom sang along to all the songs she mastered while she smoked.

My mother sat on a nice, padded bench that stored the music. The top of the organ had a few crocheted doilies on it, a small plaster statue of Sebastian Bach, one of Ludwig van Beethoven, and a big green glass ashtray for her lit cigarette. Mom found it relaxing to take a puff between songs.

My father smoked too. Dad, however, was shocked and appalled when the announcement came out about cigarettes’ health dangers, and he quit immediately. Not only did my dad quit, but he also tried to force my mother to quit smoking. My mother would have none of it.

Although my dad repeatedly presented new smoking hazards literature to my mom, she wasn’t buying it. Consequently, he decided to switch her cigarettes with lettuce leaf cigarettes. Yes, one day, as my mom prepared to have her afternoon musical serenade at the organ, Dad sneaked into the living room and replaced a few of her unlit cigarettes with lettuce leaf smokes. That fateful day, after my mom did a fabulous mini-concert with My Wild Irish Rose on the keyboards, she lit up and flipped out – in that order. She was hugely angry that Dad betrayed her with faux cigs and stomped out of the room. She didn’t even do an encore.

Sadly, my mother continued to smoke cigarettes for a few years until she had an unexpected epiphany. One day, when her good friend and she sat at the kitchen table in the afternoon for one of their gab sessions, her friend noticed something weird.

“Lucy,” Mom’s buddy stared at my mother’s neck. “Do you have an Adam’s Apple?”

Mom kind of looked puzzled. Then, she ran her hand over her throat.

To make a long story short, Mom made a trip to the doctor the next day and after a few tests, she discovered that she had a growth on her thyroid. A surgeon at a big hospital later removed it, and happily the tumor was benign. Mom never smoked again. Fortunately, she got her singing voice back (she said she was hoarse for a while and said that she couldn’t reach the high notes when she sang in church), but she once again crooned her favorite tunes. This time sans cigarettes.

So that’s how it was in the ’60s when my mother smoked, saved cigarette coupons, and sent me into the grocery store for her favorite vice. Everything worked out pretty well; in the end, and my father was very happy that she quit. Also, the only lettuce leaves we ever had in the house again came on the head of iceberg! Me? I kind of missed going into the grocery store and shooting the breeze with the check-out lady. It was kind of fun pretending that I was a grown-up. And my mom Lucy? Well, she was blessed with many more decades and lived a long, beautiful life.