LET'S BRING SMOKERS IN FROM THE COLD

THE HOUSE WAS clean, a spaghetti sauce bubbled on the stove and Presto logs
burned brightly in the living room. My sister and my dad were coming over
for dinner. Bill paused at the door of the living room and said, ``By the
way, please tell your dad he has to smoke in the yard.''

I must have looked surprised. It was 40 degrees out, and raining hard.
There's nothing to stand under out there. And my dad is 76. I grew up
smelling his cigarettes, sucking on his empty pipe, later watching him tap
a measure of tobacco into a paper and roll it into a cigarette. He smelled
so much like tobacco that I grew up associating the smell with him. All
dads, I thought, smelled like sawdust and tobacco and almond crunch bars.

Besides not really minding the smell myself, I hate to tell any of my
relatives they can't smoke. They think it means I'm putting on airs.

I looked up, pointedly, at the 13foot ceilings. A little smoke wouldn't
hurt us. ``I can't tell him that,'' I said. ``You'll have to tell him
yourself.''

``He's your dad,'' Bill said. ``You tell him.''

Then the doorbell rang. It was Adrian, who had volunteered to swing by and
pick up Dad. ``He decided not to come,'' she said.

I was annoyed, but I understood Bill's position, because it's practically
everybody's position these days: You want to smoke, do it out there. We
all, unconsciously, enjoy a little moral surge as we point the way outside.
The message is, we want you to quit for your health's sake, so it's good of
us to make you stand in the rain, which will hasten your decision to quit.

STARTING ON THURSDAY, we will all be able to enjoy this moral surge, as
bars all over California will be doing the equivalent of throwing old Dad
into the garden.

My exbrotherinlaw, Rick, who owns the venerable Silver Peso bar in
Larkspur, says, ``It could materially affect the business. Only 9 percent
or so of people in Marin smoke, but all 9 percent of them come here.''

Somebody called Rick to talk to him about helping his biker patrons through
this change. ``Lady,'' he told them, ``we throw people out of here all the
time. We'll just throw them out if they break that rule.''

So, at last, after subjecting them to every indignity we could think of, we
have smokers where we want them: out in the rain. We made them huddle in
drafty stairwells and eat at the back of restaurants, but it wasn't enough
for us. My friend Dee Dee moved 10 feet away from a Muni stop to smoke a
cigarette, and a man, undeterred, came over to yell at her. When another
friend, Lewis, and I were standing on a sidewalk so he could smoke a
cigarette, a woman he knew drove up and said, ``You're smoking! That's so
disgusting!'' We feel free to talk to smokers like that.

ONE WOMAN SUGGESTED to me that smokers either keep it in their own houses
or hold their cigarettes directly in front of their faces when walking
outside on windy days. At a company called Kimball Physics, people cannot
enter the building if they have smoked a cigarette within two hours. If
visitors smell as if they've been smoking, the receptionist asks them to
come back later. And an employee of the Ford Meter Box Co. in Indiana was
fired after a company drug test found nicotine in her urine.

Smokers accept this. They think, ``Yes, I smoke, I am weak, I'll just stand
here in the howling wind of your back yard. I know you're right, you who
don't stick leaves in your mouth and set them on fire 10 or 20 times a day,
you who therefore are the Light, the Way, the Path.''

So here's my notion: We've had our fun with smokers. They're whipped. I
propose this is radical, so stay with me that we start being nice to
them again, treating them with the ordinary civility we accord to ordinary
people. Hell, go all the way. Go out to the sidewalk and hug a smoker
today.