THE SMOKER IN THE STORE (June 17, 2020 column)

I have a funny story about Father's Day and this newspaper column, although it's possible I've told it before. It's also possible it's not funny. I'm pretty sure about the holiday.

Eighteen years ago, I decided to write a column about my dad for Father's Day. I managed 4-5 creaky paragraphs, the bare beginnings of an idea, then saved that to a folder and let it sit for a couple of days. I then started from scratch, wrote something I was pleased with, polished and rewrote, and when all was said and done I emailed my editor the draft.

The draft. That's the funny part. It was the horrible, barely coherent first run, and apparently no one really noticed that it was much shorter than usual and didn't actually make sense. I certainly didn't notice until the newspaper was published, and so on. Now I'm thinking it's not all that funny of a story.

It's just easy to remember, as all sorts of friendly merchants like to remind me that Father's Day is around the corner. I've got coupons for razor blades if anybody needs one.

Dad liked both versions, as it turned out, a nice thing as cancer cells were probably already crawling through his body. He wasn't diagnosed until the following spring, and he passed away in December of that year, a few days after his 67th birthday.

I'm reminded of my dad every Father's Day, of course. I'm reminded of him every time I pick up a screwdriver, too, or do yard work or wonder why the car sounds funny. I miss my father. I think about him all the time.

It's just that this year, I'm thinking about what killed him, and why.

My father started smoking cigarettes around 1950, I think, when he was barely a teenager, having grown up in a smoking culture. Everyone grew up in this culture, and if you were born before 1970 so did you. Fifty years ago, Congress banned cigarette advertising on television, which feels like a good place to put a marker. America began to turn against smoking and smokers.

My dad knew all of this, but the tide began to turn as he clocked his 20th year of the habit, and he dug in his heels. He was irritated when smoking was banned anywhere, spotting the slippery slope he was about to head down. He griped about this for the rest of his life, long after smokers were relegated to alleys and their own vehicles.

I know both of these worlds, then, before and after, seen from the perspective of a child of a chain smoker, a man who lit a cigarette every 10 minutes.

I've thought for a long time that if you picked us all up and somehow transported us back in time, back to the mid-1950s, the first thing we'd all notice would be the smell. It seemed as though everyone smoked, and they smoked everywhere.

Can you imagine wandering through the produce section, stepping over cigarette butts on the floor? That's what I remember. People smoking in the grocery store.

And now, in 2020, this is what I see. You are the smoker in the store. You. The one without the mask.

I get it. I hate masks. They make me claustrophobic, and slightly short of breath. I feel a little like a smug, judgmental virtue-signaler. I also feel like I'm about to rob a stagecoach. It's a complicated feeling.

And we've been given conflicting, evolving advice. Ineffective, sort of effective, very effective but only if everyone wears one, and good luck with that.

I understand all of this. I also understand that a year from now, we'll have a clearer picture of what we did right and what was wrong. Maybe all the virologists and epidemiologists and ICU physicians and nurses will be embarrassed by their former pleas to wear masks and wash our hands a lot, because people are suffering and dying, and it's not getting better. Maybe they were wrong.

And maybe all those people in Arizona, where new infections have jumped 200%, crowding into bars and clubs last weekend without even a whisper of a mask, will be just fine. I hope so. I don't wish illness on anyone, even to make a point.

This is the only point I'm making: You are the smoker in the store.

I'm eyeballing it lately at around 90% compliance around here, maybe more. We make faces and gripe, but we wear the masks.

So you stand out. You, yapping on your phone, ignoring the one-way markers on the floor, speaking loudly and spraying everywhere.

It's easy to reimagine you as a smoker. You wander the aisles, wearing your shirt that says, "Cancer is a lie, sheeple!" You blow smoke in the faces of other shoppers, unaware or just obnoxious.

The rest of us watch you silently, trying to back away, faces covered, eyes wide. We spot the smoke rising above the coffee aisle, and decide we can skip coffee this week.

So I wonder about you. Sometimes I wonder if you just forgot your mask, and planned on shooting in and out quickly rather than going back home for it. Mostly, though, I just imagine the cigarette. The smoke, the ashes, the smell. The death.

And, you know. Happy Father's Day. Give the guy a call if he's still around. He won't always be, take my word on it.