Non-Fiction Sundays: Letting Go

It was, I later thought, as if I’d been carrying a bouquet and he’d asked me for a single daisy. He loved flowers, I loved flowers, and wasn’t it beautiful that our mutual appreciation could transcend our various differences, and somehow bring us together? I must have thought, too, that had the situation been reversed he would have been happy to give me a cigarette, though my theory was never tested. I may have been a Boy Scout for only two years, but the motto stuck with me forever: “Be Prepared.” This does not mean “Be Prepared to Ask People for Shit”; it means “Think Ahead and Plan Accordingly, Especially in Regard to Your Vices.”

Given my reputation as a strident non-smoker, it was funny how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life were a play, and the prop mistress had finally showed up. Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill and then empty. My hands were at one with their labor, the way a cook’s might be, or a knitter’s.

David Sedaris, Letting Go

“Letting Go” examines David Sedaris’ experience with cigarettes . From disdain for the ‘scent of neglect’ in childhood to an almost fanatic love for the act of lighting up as an adult, Sedaris examines the culture and the effects smoking has on himself and, more closely, those around him . An expanded version of this essay appears under the title “The Smoking Section” in his 2008 collection, When You Are Engulfed in Flames.