Tobacco has gotten a bad wrap of late. But when done correctly, smoking is a lovely way to pass an evening chinning with a friend or tussling with a bit of writing. Cigars and pipes, those ancient methods, are exacting and conservative pleasures that we should separate in policy and cultural perception from their fleeting relative, the cigarette. Cigarettes are a populist and modern form of tobacco — spiritually nutritionless, and addictive for their own sake. Leave cigars and pipe-smoking be, for they are not the same as cigs.
A distaste for smoking writ large is the understandable sum of personal experiences. My first memories of tobacco involve my dad taking me to the Ponderosa buffet before Awana on Wednesday nights. The restaurant squatted in the asphalt demarcation zone between the Big Lots and a Ford dealership. Upon our entering, the hostess would query, “Smoking or nonsmoking?” The Abels, a fusion of Baptists and Wisconsin-synod Lutherans, abstained from drinking and tobacco. Thus the exchange between the indifferent Ponderosa lady and my father was a test of our morals: Would we sit with the sinners or the righteous?
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