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• SEDARIS: Reflections: Letting Go 

When I was in fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the American Tobacco plant in nearby Durham, North Carolina. There we witnessed the making of cigarettes and were given free packs to take home to our parents. I tell people this and they ask me how old I am, thinking, I guess, that I went to the world's first elementary school, one where we wrote on cave walls and hunted our lunch with clubs. Then I mention the smoking lounge at my high school. It was outdoors, but, still, you'd never find anything like that now, not even if the school was in a prison. . . .

The cigarettes I bought that day in Vancouver were Viceroys. I'd often noticed them in the shirt pockets of gas-station attendants and, no doubt, thought that they'd make me appear masculine . . .

I didn't much notice my fellow-smokers until the mid-eighties, when we began to be cordoned off. Now there were separate sections in waiting rooms and restaurants, and I'd often look around and evaluate what I'd come to think of as "my team." . . .

When New York banned smoking in the workplace, I quit working. When it was banned in restaurants, I stopped eating out and when the price of cigarettes hit seven dollars a pack I gathered all my stuff together and went to France. . . .

It is here that I'll identify myself as a Kool Mild smoker. This, to some, is like reading the confessions of a wine enthusiast and discovering midway through that his drink of choice is Lancers, but so be it. It was my sister Gretchen who introduced me to menthol cigarettes. . . .

I don't know what got her started again: stress, force of habit, or perhaps she decided that, at sixty-one, she was too old to quit. I'd probably have agreed with her, though now, sixty-one, that's nothing.

There were other attempts to stop smoking, but none of them lasted more than a few days. Lisa would tell me that Mom hadn't had a cigarette in eighteen hours. Then, when my mother called, I'd hear the click of her lighter, followed by a ragged intake of breath: "What's new, pussycat?"

My last cigarette was smoked in a bar at Charles de Gaulle airport. It was January 3, 2007, a Wednesday morning, and though Hugh and I would be changing planes in London and had a layover of close to two hours, I thought it best to quit while I was still ahead.

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