What Do We Breathe?

Coffee drinkers and smokers and Sabbath day breakers are all against our values, I was told repeatedly as a child. Not only my own parents, but my primary teacher on Wednesday, the school teachers and principals who were all Mormon too and whomever was standing on the pulpit Sunday mornings.

Even though nothing smells quite as nice as French Press in the morning, as a teen, the smell of someone ahead of us smoking on the ski lift was best, out in the expanse of frosted fairytale forest, the blue and bright skies breathed in like thin mints after gargling with Scope wintery fresh. Such positive associations compared to being drilled on health, the backs of our naked knees, always in dresses, pinching as we shifted on metal foldable chairs circled in painted white cinderblock rooms with rust-colored carpet. A three-hour forced sit with no downhill-run to make up for it.

As a child, I related the smell of cigarettes to freedom and fun because I smelled them at all of the exciting places away from church, like at Lagoon where we ran from white rollercoaster to Dracula’s castle, or my new, best friends in ninth grade Jochen and Thomas, the German foreign-exchange students who came with exotic packs, later sharing the .89 cent Benson & Hedges I’d spent my lunch money on.

My own non-member grandpa had smoked a sweet smelling pipe, but he lived free or die across all of the states and I’d only met him a few times, the smell of smoke and candied apples, my brother and I throwing dime after dime in order to win our own glass-blue-ashtrays at the park during Onion Days, or when Hollywood had come to film Footloose and the eye-liner wearing camera guy French inhaled as he asked my younger brother and I about our lives in this weird little town.

My great grandparents are the set I had the most contact with and they would occasionally have a real “cup,” but most of the time they had Postum the drink they’d drop two sugar cubes into, the coffee stand-in, the same with near-beer and my Dad, for that every-once-in-a-while, I can’t take it at the steel mill any longer, the foreman with a head of ham who has seniority, the mill which employed half of “happy valley,” the glowing slag pour made its own smoke, the kind that made us all hate the EPA, only knowing they were the army that would take away our Dads’ paychecks, back-to-school jeans.

We plugged our noses as we passed the plant during winter, the dead atmosphere of the inversion, the exhaust of 1-15, everyone requiring station wagons and ram vans in order to travel to Trafalga for miniature golf on family night.

A valley in which most all were Mormon if only by association, descendants of the pioneers, married one, neighbored by on all sides, baptized at eight, or name and a blessing because there’s almost nobody, active or not, coffee cup in hand or a pack hidden in the garden shed, who doesn’t bless an innocent baby, just in case, and who hasn't heard the admonishment of the Prophet Joseph's words of wisdom.

Please reference the church video below if you'd like a greater understanding of the Word of Wisdom and/or also, if you want a link into my own childhood psychological make-up :)

https://www.lds.org/media-library/video/2010-06-32-chapter-31-the-word-of-wisdom-february-1833?lang=eng#

Photo Credits: Shwa Hall & Nik MacMillan/unsplash
Video Credit: LDS media library