I became a smoker while I was just an infant, without ever putting a cigarette to my lips. My grandmother smoked; my mother smoked. My father was a notorious chain smoker, who puffed away four packs a day most of his adult life. I can recall ashtrays around the house, full of tobacco butts. The air in the living room was often so cloudy that I could "see" drafts of it passing through the room. And much of that smoke found its way into my little lungs.

I remember my father's fingers, stained brown with nicotine. His teeth had gone from yellow to black, and his breath always stank of tobacco. He used to brag of striking a single match a day. After lighting up his first smoke in the morning, each cigarette after that would be lit from the dying glow of the preceding one.

"Just think of all the money I save on matches," he would joke. When he was in his early forties and I was in my teens, a doctor told him that if he did not stop smoking and drinking, he could be dead within three years. My father just laughed. "If I stop smoking and drinking, " he said, "I'll be dead within three weeks."

To his credit, he once tried nicotine pills to wean himself from his tobacco addiction. But the "cure" didn't last a week. At times, he would switch brands in an effort to cut down. He even checked into a hospital once and tried going "cold turkey." But the poison had him in its grip; there was no escape for him.

By the time that , against all odds, he reached his fifties, he had developed chronic smoker's cough. He would hack and hack, unable to draw a full breath, till his face turned red and he would nearly pass out. This would happen several times a day, scaring the daylights out of me. I would often pound on his back to help him breathe.

A doctor finally told him, "It's a race between your lungs, your liver and your heart to see which organ will kill you first."

As it turned out, he lived to the ripe young age of 56. Smoking didn't kill him; a ruptured aorta took care of that. I sometimes tell people he died of a broken heart.

One encounter with his smoking habit stands out in particular for me. I may have been about eight or nine years old at the time. He was sitting in his favorite chair, filling the living room with his smoke, when he called me over to his side and asked, "Would you like to have a cigarette with me, Tommy?"

I think he blew some smoke rings and made it look like fun. Of course I was curious. I had grown up around cigarettes and had an adolescent interest in smoking. I figured anything my dad enjoyed so much must taste and feel pretty good.

He gave me a cigarette and showed me how to light up. Then, he inhaled his own and told me to do the same. The acrid smoke burned my lips, tongue and throat. I choked and gagged on it as it entered my lungs. Coughing hard, I handed the cigarette back to him, virtually unsmoked.

"You could get used to it," he said as my coughing subsided. "But let me show you something before you smoke again."

From his pocket, he took a white handkerchief. He took a long drag on his cigarette and then exhaled the smoke through the clean white material. It left a yellowish-brown stain, which he showed me, saying, "If this is what comes out of my lungs, imagine what stays inside. The doctors say my lungs are pure black. They can never be cleaned. Tommy, if you can avoid it, never smoke another cigarette." I heeded my father's words. I have probably smoked a dozen cigars in my adult life. But I have avoided smoking cigarettes t

o the best of my ability. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to avoid it completely. I was at a poetry reading the other night, where half the audience had cigarettes in hand. I left early because I had a cold and couldn't handle the smoke. I was in a bank lobby yesterday, where two elderly men were puffing away. I had to step outside to avoid smoking with them. Of course I sit in the non-smoking sections of restaurants and airplanes, but the smoke often gets to me there, too. It really is difficult to stop this secondhand smoking.

And now the sins of my childhood family are mine as well, because my wife smokes and I do nothing to stop her. I don't feel I have the right interfere with her enjoyment of cigarettes. She respects my nonsmoking and has cut down considerably from when we first met. Our youngest daughter has asthma, so she confines her smoking to the kitchen or late evening, away from our child's tiny lungs. But the toxins are present almost everywhere. Even in the park or walking along the street, we encounter them daily.

My daughter runs the risk of becoming like me, a lifelong sidestream smoker, unless I can somehow teach her to be stronger than I am, to actively resist smoking until it is eliminated from our environment. Perhaps she, with her asthma, will have that passion that I lack, to become an anti-smoker, not just a nonsmoker. Perhaps she, and the world, will someday stop smoking.

TAJ is the publisher of Legacy Memoirs. He can be reached by EMAIL HERE.