An ADHD fueled ramble of no particular direction.
So … let’s time travel.
I quit smoking about 4 years ago. Not easy, and not the first time I’d quit, either. Just the one that seems to have stuck.
I started smoking when I was 12 years old. In the early 80’s, there was a weird thing happening where parents of unruly kids were sending them to family in Utah to straighten them up. A lot of it was migration from California, but occasionally, it was from other places.
I met Jason and Dennis the year after my parents split up. We had moved in with my grandparents, my mother’s parents, for several months while things worked their way through court. Once mom got the house, we moved back in and dad got an apartment. I was an unhappy kid, made more so by the loss of my dog Tinkerbell due to my mother’s fear and allergy of dogs.
Apartments didn’t allow pets, so my first dog, that I’d had less than a year, went to live with family far away, and I got pissy.
Jason and Dennis were twins from South Carolina. They had thick accents, wild hair, and were unruly as hell. They swore, the smoked, they always seemed to have access to well weathered dirty pictures. The kind of stuff that Gen-X’ers from certain areas called Forest Porn. More on that some other time.
Young angry me fell into the influence of the southern twins almost immediately. One of my vivid memories of the time was, after an afternoon hang out that consisted of smoking myself sick, pushing my way into a pine tree in our front yard and jumping up and down with my eyes screwed shut in the belief that the smell of the pine would transfer to my clothes and cover the stink of the cigarettes. Genius. LOL.
I ran away a lot.
Mostly I would get on my skateboard and head to dad’s place across town. Google Maps puts it at 8 miles, but it seemed like a lot longer. Dad would always welcome me, bring me in and feed me, and then drive me back to the house. The court had granted custody to my mom, and that was all there was to it. One time mom wouldn’t let me back in. After waiting an hour in the driveway, dad had enough and took me home. I never saw Jason and Dennis again.
Dad and I moved from Salt Lake to American Fork, Utah. We rented a little house just a couple of blocks from my grandparents, dad’s parents. I fiercely loved Myrtle and Josiah Bell. Most days after school, I’d stop by their little house and spend an hour or more just hanging out, talking too much, getting in grandpa’s way. As I got older, I stopped by less often, caught up in early teen relationships with new friends and finding trouble to get into.
Dad met someone while we were in American Fork, my soon to be stepmother Dolly. Truly one of the kindest, sweetest individuals to ever walk this Earth. After they married, we moved to Spanish Fork, Utah, where I told my dad that if we stayed there, I’d try moving pack in with my mother. We ended up in Pleasant Grove for my high school years.
My high school years, even my last year of junior high, were a dichotomy of behavior. On the one hand I was keeping my grades up so I could be on the high school swim team. On the other, I was a girl crazy dork with a Star Trek obsession that smoked, swore like a sailor, and got in a lot of fights.
I ended up the only 9th grader with a letterman’s jacket for a sport that most kids my age thought of as sissy. Nevermind that water polo was my deepest competitive love, and that my natural delight in fighting was perfect for the sport. I was a loud mouthed skinny brawler with a coat that pissed off the high school football players.
Three years. 12 to 15 years of age, summarised into a handful of paragraphs with no more depth than a sunken sidewalk pond after a heavy rain. I’m having flashbacks. There is so much emotion tied to these few memories, but I lack the time to delve deep and wallow in heady nostalgia. So many hours, so many feelings, poured into a life that is well behind me.
I know we call this middle-aged, but statistics show different and it really is getting me down. I know, I know. It’s no big deal, right? That’s what I keep getting told by people who didn’t smoke their whole life.
I’m not obsessing, I don’t think. I’m just hyper-aware of how poorly I’ve treated myself, and that consequences for bad behavior are unavoidable.
Wednesday is inevitable.