The Happy Cigarette

From Musings of a Dysfunctional Life

It was the winter of 1992, a winter of discontent indeed. I was now living back with my father and stepmother in Western New York while trying to rebuild my financial life.

When I arrived my father told me they'd put a roof over my head and food in my stomach, but nothing else. That was fine with me, but perhaps a little bit of love and support wouldn't have hurt either. I was a successful engineer for seven years and it wasn't like I was responsible for the poor economy. Still, they had no sympathy, and my father kept referring to me as a failure. I was now living back in hell.

Up in the attic room where they stowed me, I tried to figure out how to reclaim my life. This wasn't easy to do as the room never got above fifty-five degrees. It was literally too cold to think, and I wasn't allowed to have a space heater for the possibility of "starting a fire."

I didn't have a single penny to spare—not even in the bottom of my pencil holder where stray change often finds its way. I craved a Mountain Dew, but couldn't afford to buy one. The credit card companies tracked me down and threatened to take my car away. I had only six payments left and knew that if my car was taken away, so would be my freedom.

For Christmas that year I received just socks and underwear. With the remaining gas in my car, I drove to Eastern Hills Mall in Buffalo and returned them for money to buy resume paper. That was the day I stopped in at the nearby Kinko's, saw they had an opening for a desktop publisher, and landed the minimum-wage job that would begin my recovery.

During my darkest moments I would drive away from my parents' house and spend the day anywhere else. Often I'd sit in my car in the parking lot of a shopping center. I couldn't afford to buy anything, but what I needed was more than material. I needed peace of mind.

One day I found myself in front of a K-mart. There was just a hint of snow on the ground, but the sun was out and quickly melting it away. I watched the people moving in and out.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw this teenage kid smoking a cigarette while making his way across the parking lot. I'm guessing he was around 17 or 18. It became obvious to me that he was developmentally disabled by the expression on his face and by how he walked.

It's not wrong for me to admit that I recognized this, or that it made me want to look at him longer. I think all of us do this. We look for peculiarities in others, and often those are the people who intrigue us the most. I also wanted to see that he got along safely since nobody was with him.

When he was directly in front of my car and one aisle over, he dropped his half-smoked cigarette on the ground and began to put it out. What caught my eye right away was the smile on his face. He was happy. Extremely happy. He began crushing the cigarette with his left foot over and over again. He'd twist and turn his foot several times while maintaining that beautiful smile. When he was through, he took two steps away, looked back to make sure it was out, then returned to crush it some more. Surely the cigarette was far from being a fire hazard at this point; the fragments of unsmoked tobacco and filter were already smeared about the pavement.

I wondered why he kept coming back to the cigarette. I imagined that someone had strictly warned him to make sure he put out his cigarettes when he was done. And from what I saw that day, he was darn sure he was going to follow through. I watched him return to that cigarette on the ground at least three more times.

What remains in my mind today from that incident, some seventeen years ago, was that smile. He didn't have a look of this being a bother, or that he was in any hurry. This was one moment in time that, regardless of how small, he was going to enjoy to its fullest. There was nothing to worry about.

He was free, he was on his own, and he was happy.

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