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the recent history of cigarettes
Wednesday, March 4 2026
Our niece Sadie had, I think, driven to our house from Rhode Island, where she'd been hanging out with her theyfriend. (I say "theyfriend" since the partner in this case wants to be referred to as "they" instead of "he" even though "they" are unambiguously male.) Her next destination would be Philadelphia, where she goes to college, and she would be driving there today. First, though, she wanted to hang out in Woodstock while Gretchen (and, today, both dogs Charlotte and Neville) worked at the bookstore. Before leaving this morning, Sadie grazed on some foods we had available, including slices from a sourdough loaf that, we'd learned only after reading its label, was not vegan. Gretchen kept referring to it as "animal cruelty bread," perhaps part of her propaganda campaign to get Sadie to transition from vegetarian to vegan.
After Sadie mentioned how much she liked her roommate, Gretchen brought up the subject of Suzanne, her first college roommate in Oberlin (in Room 203, Harkness, in 1988). Suzanne had claimed to be a non-smoker, perhaps in an effort to quit, but of course she'd just continued smoking, doing so in the room she shared with Gretchen. In an attempt to cover the smell, she would burn incense that somehow smelled even worse than cigarette smoke. The idea of just smoking in a dorm room was a bit alien to Sadie, so we told her how things used to be, when people smoked everywhere. Gretchen mentioned working as a labor organizer in Milwaukee in the early 1990s, when it was acceptable to smoke at your desk in a workplace. I said that the smell of cigarette smoke was such an important part of that period of history and that smelling it these days gives me flashbacks (not especially negatives ones, as it happens). We asked about how smoking works among the youth of today, and Sadie said that it mostly takes the form of vaping, and this led into a discussion of how wasteful disposable vapes are. Gretchen then mentioned our neighbor Andrea, who vapes marijuana. Was that wasteful? I said that her vaping devices probably have replaceable batteries and that even I have a marijuana vaping device with a replaceable battery. I then went on to explain how I grow my own pot. This might've been a kind of bold admission for our niece, who was raised in a goody-two-shoes home and had to go to college to discover alcohol. But it seemed like the kind of sharing that was appropriate after she'd told us last night about the joys of underage drinking. I went on to say that I don't really smoke pot these days and prefer to eat it, but that when I do so I'm always a little surprised when it kicks in.
As Gretchen and Sadie were about to drive their separate cars to Woodstock, I went out to the end of the driveway with a snow shovel to remove a mound of slushy sleet plowed left by the snowplow.
This evening I made my usual Wednesday-night spaghetti meal, this time with broccoli cooked with the pasta. When Gretchen returned from work, she said she was definitely coming down with something, perhaps a cold or the flu that she'd been exposed to on our recent travels. So I did my best to keep my distance in hopes that I will somehow be able to avoid catching it from her. So far, neither of us has ever been able to do this, but it was worth trying. I even ended up spending the night on the laboratory beanbag instead of sharing a bed with my wife lower my risk of being infected.
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