29 September 2003

Smoking in France

It is practically impossible to go to a restaurant in small towns in France and not feel like I am smoking.  If the weather is good we sit on the street at the sidewalk café or restaurant to escape the cigarettes.  Even though people also smoke outside, the fresh air keeps my lungs and sinuses from going crazy.

If we are lucky enough to eat at a restaurant with a nonsmoking section we still have to walk through a wall of smoke and sit right next to the smokers.  I actually had one waitress tell me that three women smokers were about to leave so not to worry.  My big mistake was not looking to see what course of the meal they were on.  If I had bothered to notice I would have realized that a two-hour lunch is just that.  Cat and I suffered through another 45 minutes of all three women smoking.  My clothes reeked of the smell, and my sinuses acted up for four days afterwards.

On the day after Thanksgiving in 1982 I quit smoking cold turkey.  This was the umpteenth time I had quit, but this time I was determined because I was mad at myself for continuing to do something that was killing me.

As a woman who has paid her dues I have made it my personal mission in life never to be subjected to cigarette smoke unless I am dying and can’t stand up for myself, OR I don’t speak the language of the roomful of people I happen to be in.

On thing that strikes me as odd is that none of the French people I know smoke cigarettes.  I think they must be the only people in France who don’t.

Of course smoking when there are children in the room is bad enough, but guess where they smoke in France…the school playground.

Everyday the women who stand at the school playground gate light up one cigarette after another.  They sit on benches while the children play, and they smoke.

One afternoon I got up my courage and asked one of the mothers what the rule was for adults smoking around the children at school.  She said she hated it that the school workers smoked right there as the children passed by, inhaling the smoke, but that many of the parents smoked too and they were not going to stop adults from smoking at school.  Even the music teacher smokes right in the school room!

Sometimes when we are in the car sitting at a light we will look over at the car next to us and the driver is smoking with the windows rolled up.  The entire family, including the dog is in the smoke filled car. 

In this day and age when every media outlet has told us that cigarette smoking is bad for our health, and that second hand smoke kills, how can people continue to smoke?  I know in my head that it’s an addiction, but I just can’t understand.

Jay says I should just keep quiet.  That might be all right if Cat wasn’t nine years old and watching the whole stupid scene of adults trying to look cool by taking a hit from a lighted cigarette.

I am threatening to take up studying French fulltime just so I can lobby against cigarette smoking at school.  It would seem kind of strange to be in French class just so I could raise my hand to ask how to say things like, “If you don’t stop the teachers from smoking I am going to bolt myself to the school gate and refuse to leave until you change the school policy.”  Oh well.  After all I am an American.  They expect me to be crazy.