How women started to smoke

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

18. There was a time, which lasted to the mid or late '60s,

that airlines included a small pack of two or three cigarettes with the meals they served.

The issue of future health is huge.

My older sister died two and a half years ago at age 70 from the effects of lifelong smoking. She started at age 13, in 1960, when smoking was still glamorous and the accepted thing to do if you were an adult. The Surgeon General's report was still four years away.

Despite having a VERY serious heart attack at age 42, she was never able to quit completely or permanently.

She was only 18 months older than me, and by the time we were in our 50s people who didn't already know us and know how old we were or our age difference, were totally amazed to learn that she was only a year and a half older. She looked much older, thanks to the smoking.

I'm now 71. I tend to think I look my age, but when I tell new people how old I am they are usually completely astonished. They think I'm as much as a decade younger, which sort of surprises me. But at least two things are in play here. One, and probably the more important thing, is that I don't act 71. I have a liveliness more commonly found in someone a lot younger. The other is that because I've never smoked, I'm relatively unlined, and of course I don't have the gray skin seen in smokers.

It feels as if smokers never quite get it. They don't get the health implications. They don't get how much it ages them. They don't get that when they step outside for a cigarette, we can smell it on them when they return. Sigh.