This week’s writing prompt: Feeling Independent

In honor of Independence Day, I asked writers in my memoir classes to come up with 500-word essays about a time in their lives when they felt particularly independent. ”What circumstances left you feeling that way?”

Writers came back with stories about riding a bike without training wheels, camping with friends during high school, their first car, heading to college, getting divorced.

One writer, Carol Abrioux, took the assignment in a different direction, and her piece got such a positive response when she read it out loud in class that she readily agreed to let me share it with you Safe & Sound blog readers here, too. Happy Independence Day!

A loss of dependence

By Carol Abrioux

Smoking cigarettes had me by the throat since I was seventeen and wouldn’t let go. By the time I was in my thirties, two packs a day just about satisfied my really bad habit. I spent a lot of time on the phone working for the French Government, so I may not have really smoked all of the 40 cigarettes right down to the butt: I’d be talking, waving my cigarette around, putting it down in the ashtray as I spoke. Probably half of each cigarette burned away.

Today’s writer.

But I wasn’t on the phone all the time, and I smoked at lunch and at home — except when I was cooking. No ashes fell in my good food.

Fact is, whether just one-half, or the whole damn thing, I smoked forty of them each and every day. My office smelled of cigarette smoke — ditto my apartment. My clothes reeked. Even my two Siamese cats seemed to smell of smoke, but I didn’t really realize it at the time. Most smokers don’t.

Dire warnings began to appear in cigarette ads in magazines and television in the 1960s. In 1966, they leapt to the packages and cartons themselves :

• OMG Cancer!
• OMG Emphysema!

Everyone I knew who didn’t smoke became a tenacious nagger. But did I give up my filthy habit? No, no, no…a thousand times no.

I was so protective of my habit that I chose my Chicago doctors by finding out first if they smoked. That effort really backfired. Soon they all quit and became far worse anti-smoking proponents than doctors who had never smoked.

I tried everything to cut down. No packs were kept in my office — I had to walk to the reception area to get one. That lasted three days.

Then I found a cigarette case that locked. You could set it to open in 30 minutes, or an hour. Days I set it for an hour led to me banging my fist on the thing when it refused to open. That, or simply going out and buying another pack.

None of these efforts worked, mostly because I wasn’t really ready to quit.

Finally one morning after waking up and reaching for my first cigarette of the day, I said to myself and the cats, “This is the last cigarette I will ever smoke.” And it was.

I left the pack and the rest of the carton on a shelf in my closet in case my withdrawal symptoms included hallucinations. I didn’t think I could go through having hallucinations, and fortunately I never had to face that.

I never, ever smoked another cigarette.

For those next few months after I quit, I wouldn’t want to be working for me. But the employees were so happy that I quit that they cheerfully put up with my insanities and bad behavior.

My cats took to hiding under the bed.

It all got easier and better. Clothes were washed and sent to the cleaners. Apartment and office were aired, and, unfortunately, food tasted much better than before.

I was walking with a friend one day and he asked me to hold his cigarette while he tied his shoe. Without thinking I raised it to my lips and took a drag. Nothing before had ever tasted that awful. I knew at that moment I had truly gained my independence.