There was an unexpected self-consciousness during my exchange with the twenty-something year-old paramedic: What's your name?
Peter Smith
What's your birthday?
August 23rd, 1960
That would make you...49, then.
  This Q and A session served the dual purpose of eliciting crucial statistical information about me, his latest patient, while  simultaneously confirming my level of orientation. 'That  would make you...49, then'. It was spoken with a tone of novelty, as if this young man rarely had the need to decipher figures that high up on  the numeric register. For the several months leading up to this exchange, I'd been enjoying a rather peaceful co-existence with '49'. Yes, sure, 49 year olds  are pigeon-holed by insurance companies and auto-makers as part of the over the hill 'cautious' demographic. But these are just arbitrary Madison Avenue profile markers. Actually, I've enjoyed a small sense of exemption and pleasure with '49'. I'm still shy of 50, after all. And it was just months ago that  I attended a concert with 'Wolfmother.' OK, so it was an acoutstic concert with a number of artists on the bill, my preferred of which was Neil Young. But still...'Wolfmother'!!!  The only thing that's 'old' about any of this is the played notion that 49 is over the hill.
  Why then, did 49 suddenly feel so old upon hearing this young man breathe sound into it? I mean technically, I was still only a possible myocardial infarction. It was only later, after the paramedic wagon descended the snowy mountain and crossed a state line that my heart attack status would be confirmed. And even then, there would be a good, I dunno, twenty minutes more before the cardiology team would perform a cardiac catheterization and insert a stent into that artery of mine which had occluded to 100 percent. Paramedic boy had none of this information. What at first sounded like a tone of novelty began sounding ultimately like fatalism: 'That would make you...49, then'.
  As the above passage would indicate, I suffered a heart attack on February 27, while on a ski weekend in Tahoe. As I'm sure it's  easy  to imagine, I've had endless thoughts about this life-changing event. There's much  gratitude to be expressed, but I'll probably pick other forums in which to do it. The profuse thanks to family, friends and ultimately, the medical staff attending  to me will come in the appropriate time and place.     
  Meanwhile, 'Heywhateverhappenedto' remains dedicated to glancing back in  the rear view mirror to take experiences of the past into newfound consideration. In the context of a heart attack's aftermath, I'm inspired  to devote the balance of this post to a cherished - and now former-  old habit: smoking.
  In the currently cigarette-hostile world we inhabit, the easy thing to do here would be to echo the prevailing societal sentiment, voice my contrition, and swear off any future engagement in the Satanic ritual which co-opted  my soul for years. As the comedic interpreter of a former U. S. President would've put it, 'Not gonna do it'.  Since an unapologetic love of smoking is so seldom expressed these days, it occurs to me that our current antiseptic culture would be well served if I gave voice to the thoughts shared privately among smokers. Those sentiments are best exemplified by:

My personal favorite L&M moments:
 
  Walking into the Dan Lynch Blues Bar on Manhattan's east side on a Friday nite in the spring of 1980. The image emerging from the cloud of blue smoke was that of a lanky blues singer, his size overwhelmed the pinched space between  the raised stage and the drop ceiling. To the rhythm of a 12-bar blues progression, the room filled with lyrics of wounded love, lonely taverns, and cigarettes by the bedside. Leaning against a column at the back of the room, I lit up and let the drag off my own cigarette carry the music into the reflective chambers of my interior.
 
  2AM on a Saturday in 2005, completing the final  draft on chapter seven of my book.  After struggling for weeks to achieve just the  right evocation, the words came, and kept  coming, like I'd tapped into the richest literary vein known to the writerly world. For the 60-plus minutes of this creative strobe, a cigarette stayed fused  between the digits of my left hand, the orange ember growing more luminescent with the frequent drags I took.  
 
  1AM on  a weekend  nite in the spring of 1983, behind the wheel of a late-generation Checker Cab, cruising south on 2nd Ave in Manhattan and glimpsing the lights of the 59th Street Bridge. My fare was an aloof and beautiful woman who struck a pose consistent with  the lyrics of 'Drive' by  The Cars, which was playing on my  transistor radio. I lit my cigarette, swallowed the beautiful burn, and let the song lyrics tell the story of our otherwise silent 10 minutes together. 
 
  I could throw in, for good measure, any number of cigarettes smoked with friends under a canopy of stars during summer evenings in the '70's, invariably while 'Stairway to Heaven' played on WPLR.   
  
  Equal appreciation would go to any cigarette smoked to the musical accompaniment of 'Cigarette' by The Smithereens, 'Black Coffee in Bed' by Squeeze, or 'America' by Simon and Garfunkel. 

  And this will sound like an old skit from the original cast of Saturday Night Live (que Laraine Newman and Dan Akroyd), but  the after-sex cigarette really is a helluva nice moment.
 
Second Hand Satisfaction
 
  Not all of my favorite cigarettes were smoked by me. My Godmother, Mary, was a quintessential product of the hi-ball generation. At cocktail parties, I'd be captivated by the way she manipulated her exhaling smoke into silky billows. Since she multi-tasked in such circumstances, engaging the men in her orbit with flirtation, she'd alternate the billows of smoke with symmetrical space-aged streams trailing  from her nose,  affording her the chance to occasionally purse her sultry lips. For added effect, she'd maintain a dangling ash to the point where the laws of gravity were called into question. Her performances in these salon-type situations carried an aromatic dimension as well. Medium grade perfume of a certain era, in combination with the martini on her breath and the chestnut-like smell of the cigarette smoke would transport me into an intoxicating grown-up galaxy.
 
Favorite smoke from the stage and screen:

Any cigarette seen on the lips of:  
Jackie Gleason
Bette Davis
Keith Richards
Mickey Rourke  
 
  Silly Smokes: Two of the drop-dead funniest cigarette scenes in movies or television are:
Oscar Levant in the cafe scene of 'An American in Paris'
Michael Richards in the season 5 episode of Seinfeld called 'The Sniffing Accountant'.
  
  For most of my life, cigarettes have been my gateway drug of choice to the more addictive intoxicant known as passion. Given the risk that our currently dry and insipid culture places upon our society, I consider my promotion of passion, through cigarettes or any other means, the fulfillment of a civic duty. I've stopped smoking, at least for the moment and maybe for good, even though the ample risk factors I had leading up to this heart attack suggest that cigarettes weren't culpable in and of themselves. Trust me, I only decided to address this one risk factor  because  it was the  only one I  had control over. I wish I had the same control over my unfortunate gene pool, my epic level of stress, or my baldness (Yes, believe it or not, there is a correlation between male pattern baldness and an increased risk of heart attack. How did I earn such a bounty of blessings?). So, I'll quit...smoking cigarettes. But for as long as I yearn to taste the passionate side of life, I'll never really...quit cigarettes.