A long, long way

The past is a foreign country!

♫ "You've got your own cigarette now baby/
You've come a long, long *cough hack wheeze * waaay" ♫

I was too small to even be "playing with matches," when I fished one of my mom's cig butts out of an ashtray and lit it up and took a hit.

Cig butt. Menthol!

There was never any danger, after that, of my getting hooked on tobacco!

One plus on moving back to Oklahoma was to be near Mom, but it was hard to take our kids to her smoky house. Not long after that, Mom got all wheezy and it scared her, so she just gave up smoking. After fifty years. (That's WILLPOWER!)

Hah. "Why didn't anyone tell me what a nasty habit it was?" she jokes.

Twenty-two years later, we're glad she quit. Now she spends two days a week working out at the gym. We're gathering later this month to celebrate her 97th birthday. And her breathing's fine.

Sure hope I got part of that chromosome.