At least we have freedom of choice and taste, unlike Kiwi children

Leonard Cohen, the poet of life, has one quote in his book of poetry before his death: An acquaintance told me that the great sage Nisargadatta Maharaj once offered him a cigarette.

“Thank you, sir, but I don’t smoke.”

“Don’t smoke?” said the master.

“What’s life for?”

In his Book of Longing, on page 70, Cohen titles it simply: What did it – and I get it, I think. An acquaintance once simply told me: “Just live it; the way you know and want it” – and that’s what did it for me.

His “it” became “life” – and I still, every day, drag deeply on it.

Not that I advocate smoking, before you crucify me. Especially to the Kiwi kids who, in a decade or so, won’t be allowed to legally buy smokes – ever.

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But I am unashamedly a puffer and loving it. I remember my first time like yesterday. Picture it: small town,1975.

Boyfriend’s head is buried somewhere under a Triumph’s bonnet while I hang around with my big hair and platforms.

“Please light me a skyf,” the head mumbles, holding out two fingers ready to receive it. I wish I can tell you there was a moral debate; inner struggle; a

“Should I?”; “No”; “Maybe”.

There wasn’t. Without thinking twice, I lit up his Lucky Strike plain and passed it.

I wasn’t hooked then. That only came months later when he left for the army and I really missed that smell of Zippo fuel on tobacco.

I got my “Give a girl a Lucky, Lucky Strike” at the corner cafe with coins scavenged from the bottom of my mom’s bag and empty “family-size” Coke bottles (and there weren’t many then. You got a small glass poured at supper
once in a blue moon).

But yes, I’ve had a struggle with smoking: at varsity people tilted their heads at this girl with her “plains”.

So I conformed to thin, white gold-tipped filters – briefly, because, after all, what’s life for?

So throw the book at me; even the lovely movie Thank you for Smoking, telling me how the industry hooked me. But I thank my lucky stars that I, unlike the New Zealand children, had the freedom of choice and taste.

Allow me to drag deeply.