My father often spoke of his growing-up adventures with his younger cousin Jim, and one such adventure that comes to mind today is his experience hiding out behind a shed and smoking uncured rabbit tobacco out of a corn cob pipe. Although many people apparently smoke, chew, and make tea from rabbit tobacco, and swear by it, in its green state it made my twelve-year-old father ferociously ill. But that could be considered a good thing, because the experience must be part of the reason that he grew up to be a non-smoker.
I tried smoking at about age fourteen, and one time I came home from school with a single cigarette inside my notebook, which then fell on the floor of the truck, where my father later found it. “Hmmmm,” he said, shaking his head dramatically. “A cigarette on the floor of my truck! How strange. I wonder where it came from. . .” I did my level best to look as puzzled as he appeared to be.
The few times I smoked a cigarette I experienced something not unlike the rabbit tobacco debacle of that earlier generation. I recall leaving biology class in the ninth grade, smoking about a third of a cigarette in the bathroom, and coming back to class to lay my reeking, sick-and-dizzy head on my desk. Why, you may ask, did I do this? Well, consider that time I wandered into the same bathroom to find some other girls preparing to smoke. They were making motions to hide their supplies, when one, who had been privy to my extra-curricular activities in biology class, piped up, “It’s ok. She’s cool.”
As a teacher, I spent four years in a classroom that had a vent directly to the outside of the building. This vent came out in a sheltered spot that was not often visited by faculty; therefore, kids would sneak out there to smoke. They didn’t know, however, that as soon as they lit up, I would smell it, and send a message to the office: “You’ve got another one.” The principal would wander out there casually, as if he had some other errand, so that the guilty parties never caught on as to why they were getting busted.
Why smoke? I remember when cigarette advertisements disappeared from television, and when Joe Camel was forced into early retirement. I know about the warning that tobacco companies must place on their packages. I have witnessed the price of a pack of cigarettes increase from forty-eight cents to something like ten dollars, probably much more by now. A fourteen-year-old may feel cool smoking in front of a bunch of other fourteen-year-olds, but the feeling won’t last, and will perhaps be replaced by such things as addiction and illness.
There but for fortune, and a fierce allergy to tobacco smoke, may have gone I.
For your further edification:
Some information about rabbit tobacco: Darryl Patton: The Southern Herbalist
Joan Baez – There But For Fortune – Bing video
I did not know about “rabbit tobacco”. Thanks for that. I do remember that as a teen ager in the mid 1960s suburbs of New York I was fascinated with smoking and acting on my misunderstanding of the trends of the times I experimented with a variety of combustibles – tea (as in Lipton), the little stringy filaments of a banana – dried, some long beans that grew on trees in the neighborhood, standard cigarettes, and of course the popular smokables of the times. I remember being sent to the deli by a neighborhood grandmother to buy her cigarettes for $0.25 a pack. I smoked for a couple of decades. It seemed everybody did. And now when my eyes burn and my sinuses twitch at the irritation of 2nd hand smoke I just cannot understand what we were thinking. I only got busted once at school, for smoking at lunch by the lake on school property – three days detention. It was a right of passage.
Hi, Terry, I remember growing up in the Richmond Va area, aka the home of Phillip Morris–in the sixties and seventies. In those days, the clerks wandered store aisles, smoking away. I worked several summers at Triple A, and would sometimes sit in the back working on projects. Another worker would come back, light a cigarette, and leave it burning in the ashtray near my work station. One time I put it out when she wasn’t looking, and stayed quiet when she started trying to figure out who did it. Times have changed, for the better in this case. But yes, the rite of passage was important.