No Smacking

“It says there’s no smacking here!”

I’m on the airplane next to the almost six year-old. He’s a pretty good flyer — now that he’s old enough to help carry his own stuff, go to the bathroom in the terminal, and entertain himself. Now that he’s reading anything and everything, it also makes things more interesting as we can occupy his time more constructively by having him look for our gate and our rows on the plane.

While we were taxiing and waiting to take off, he mentioned the rule about no smacking. I looked in front of him at the latch of his tray-table, at the time upright, and saw the words. He was pretty close. Oh — and he recognized “seat belt.”

And I told him just that. And explained that the word is “smoking” and that people couldn’t do that on the plane. Although the no smacking idea wasn’t necessarily a bad one.

Then he asked me the inevitable question: “Dad, what’s smoking?”

And, of course, I told him. “Smoking involves taking a cigarette, lighting it, and sucking on it a bit. Kind of like a lollipop. Or an ice cream popsicle. And you look really cool when you smoke because you appear all grown up. And believe you me — the girls totally put out for a guy with a pack of Camels…”

Well, no. Not quite that. It’s a nice question to hear. Neither His mom nor I smoke. Same goes for his grandparents, his uncles and aunts and other close relatives. Restaurants around here are smoke-free, and we don’t let him go to cigar bars (except on weekends). School is smoke-free; so are his favorite TV shows on PBS, Noggin and Disney. There aren’t any smokers in the movies or books he chooses, either.

I remember when I asked my mom about the “no drinking and driving” sticker in her 1972 Dodge Coronet I would ride in at around the same age. I didn’t quite get the concept of alcoholic beverages because we simply didn’t have anything to drink at home where the beverage habits of the adults were different from us kids. Every Friday night we would have a very, very, very small amount of wine for Kiddush* and that was it. My parents didn’t drink beer or other alcohol, nor did they drink caffienated coffee. (We were allowed decaf — but didn’t like it until much later.)

So — my mom told me about some stuff that adults sometimes drank that made them sleepy. Like medicine. I didn’t quite understand why people would take medicine if they weren’t sick — especially since I was told earlier that too much medicine (probably something yummy like Dimetapp).

She probably did a pretty good job at the time. Better, I think, that my grandmother did. A tough lady from Brooklyn, I recall reading one of her phone books when I was about eight. (I was a weird kid.) In the introductory section there was a reference to what to do when reporting crimes to the police, and there was a word I bad never seen before. When I asked my grandma what “rape” meant, I was told that it was “when a woman gets beaten up.” I suppose it wasn’t a bad spontaneous answer for someone my age…

I told him what smoking was – it’s something that sometimes people do with their mouths. Kind of like when I chew gum. Except smoking is less healthy for the people around the smoker than chewing gum is for those in the vacinity. Both are not allowed in certain places (school, synagogue, for example) and some people don’t like the mess made by both. It used to be that smoking was allowed in more places, but since then people started to realize that it wasn’t very good for people so they decided to make rules prohibiting it on flights in the USA.

I also told him that we, his parents, do not smoke — nor do his grandparents. And that the people who own the house get to make the rules about if smoking is allowed.

I didn’t have time to campaign to him not to start smoking. Maybe that’s for another day…

I can’t wait for him to ask me about roofies…