An impressive new video on Facebook, the social medium on computers, aims in setting the right example for children. The brief video is quite graphic, something I wouldn’t recommend showing my youngest granddaughters.
It shows a woman going up an escalator, being tagged by her daughter. As they reach the upper level, the mom discards a cigarette butt, and the child, probably no more than 5 years old, does the same. (I seriously doubt the child ever took a drag on the cigarette — it was probably just a prop. Nevertheless, having the child shown holding the smoked cigarette, and then littering with it, makes a point).
The video includes a potpourri of “things parents pass on to their children.” It features a domestic beating, road rage, more littering, the use of obscene language and gestures, and more. The message is that children learn from grownups.
Coincidentally, about two weeks ago, I stopped to take a group photo of some youngsters. The photo wasn’t for publication but for the group’s personal collections. What did I see in the back row? It was a kid flipping off whoever would eventually look at the picture.
Now what would have happened when we were kids if we’d graced the picture we appeared in with such photographic classlessness?
Yeah, it’s easy to condemn all of the “me” generation, the children who never knew life without a cell phone, X-Box or Play Station. Granted, on average, kids today have infinitely more “stuff” than we had. And we needed to make our own fun.
One of my closer friends in the Railroad barrio was Billy Martinez, who — as long as I live, with reign as the perpetual holder of the description, “Anything for a laugh.” Even today, some 20 years after Billy passed away, I find myself chuckling over some of his antics.
He introduced me to smoking — of a sort. No, none of us in our pre-teens could ever afford the 21 cents needed for a pack of Luckies, available at a gas station on Grand, on the site of what is now La Cocina de los Aragon’s. Billy came up with a cheaper way of helping us pretend we were grown-ups. He’d roll up copies of Life magazine until they had about 20 plies.
He’d light his new creation just enough to make the tip glow, and he’d puff away. I watched, all the time fearing that the smell of slow-burning magazine smoke would remain in my clothes, causing a Level Three Interrogation when I got home. (More on L.T.I. in a future column).
In spite of my fear of retribution, I joined in. And here’s why: If I’m going to be blamed for smoking, when all my inhalations were passive, I might as well join in.
Big mistake. Billy said he was able to smoke “three or four magazines until I felt real drunk.” My first inhalation caused a gagging reflex that lasted the rest of the day. Now whether that experience was the impetus for the 25 years of smoking I later undertook, I can’t be sure. But I wish that the first jolt would affect people so profoundly that they’d never pick up the habit/addiction.
Well, my anything-for-a-laugh buddy rehearsed some outlandish tales for when his parents came home. Among them: “Mannie and I were just sitting in the house, talking, when a meter reader came over to check our circuits. Man! Did he ever smell like smoke.” And another favorite, which he said was sure to convince his parents, was, “The oven door flew open all of a sudden and some logs fell out, and Mannie and I had to push them back in.”
The sardonic looks on his parents’ faces convinced me they didn’t believe a word of the meter-reader fabrication. And he paid for it after Billy’s parents suggested I go home.
• • •
A 40s movie appeared on Netflix the other night, featuring some of the long-since-passed-away actors like Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Betty Grable and Clark Gable. I hadn’t even noticed that I was viewing a black-and-white flick.
Rather the more impressive — if “impressive” is the right word — thing about the movie was the amount of drinking and smoking that took place. My, how they could drink and smoke! It makes you wonder how they could afford such vices.
I was raised in a family in which all eight of us smoked at various times. Today, the five offspring of J.D. and Marie Trujillo, never touch the stuff. Through the years I enjoyed a beer with my sons on Super Bowl Sunday, a custom that has disappeared. And none of us Trujillos has lit up a cigarette in decades.
My mom was a pack-a-day smoker, Luckies, without a filter. Her friends urged her to quit the weed — probably more to save money than for any health reason. Remember, even doctors smoked in those days, and many of them appeared in cigarette commercials and magazine ads.
Mom quit long before she died. I once asked her about her travails with nicotine. “Once I threw them out the window as I was driving to work,” she said. “But later that day I drove by that spot and picked them up again.”
The clincher, she said, was through her decision to chain-smoke a whole pack — literally. The ordeal made her so sick — light the second cigarette with the first — that she never went back to that habit.
And that was good. Not only did the cigarettes had a deleterious effect on her lungs; they affected her pocketbook as well.