In my tender years of fourteen, I admire those who smoke. In school dormitory, I, the youngest of the class, used to smoke with older, rowdy friends. The knack of flicking off ashes is the pearl of this time-honored pastime. How delightful, how proud it is when I finally learned to do it right. In later, more confident days, I developed my own style : holding the tawny filter with thumb and middle finger, and fillip the tube with strong index. Looking up from the dropping ash, I see my friend's kind, smiling eyes.

In the blue-smoky drawing room, my girlfriend's mother smoked her brand avidly. A large woman, only ten years my senior, her hair tousled, her makeup unkempt, she liked a local brand. She had her daughter when she was only twenty.  Seven years later, she divorced her first husband, moved to a foreign country, bringing along her little boyish daughter like a little toy. She unhurriedly married her present husband. I liked this woman of coarse feature and vulgar, confident carriage. I cringed before her with my timid love of her daughter.

I learned another trick of dealing with cigarette from an old friend. In his backyard of mid-autumn leafage, he tapped a cigarette's mouthpiece end against the hard surface of his thumbnail, dexterously, lustily. The tobacco at the other end became tighter and firmer, sank in the shallow circular rim of white paper. The paper rim ignites easy, and this solves a long-standing nuisance : now my cigarette can be evenly lighted, and this saves a lot of tobacco, and prolongs the time a cigarette is smoked.

I smoked in the gloomy room against my father. Night falls. In the air smoke suffuses and expands. With puckered brow, I tapped on my cigarette with a professional gesture. This professionalism is noticed by my father. He praised it with a loving smile. He said my smoking manner is very dashing.