An Ashtray Gets a Breath of Fresh Air

No one smokes anymore. It used to be so seductive. Actors in the old black and white movies blew billowy smoke rings. Old cigarette advertisements declared that most doctors preferred to smoke Winstons. Camels were as cool as my Uncle Jim’s Lucky Strikes.  Real men didn’t need a filter. The “Marlboro Man” was the sexiest man alive. Yes, smoking was cool!

As a kid, I remember “candy cigarettes”. The box looked like a cigarette pack. The white, minty sticks resembled the real thing. We wanted to be just like our dads. Why didn’t anyone invent little juices that resembled booze bottles? That would have been fun. We could have pretended to stumble around like our drunk Uncle Charlie. Now that I am a parent, I understand all too well that the kids just want to act like the grownups.

About 1969 I remember my mom declaring that she was giving up the cigarettes. My brothers and I cheered and jumped up and down. Why? Because our house stunk! Those glamorous movies couldn’t show how smelly the house was.  The ads never showed the “doc who preferred Winstons” dragging his oxygen tank down the sandy shoreline in his golden years.

When I was student teaching in the 80’s, we had to lobby to make one of the two teachers’ lounges non smoking. When I worked at a residential treatment facility in the 90’s there was already one designated smoking lounge and one non-smoking lounge. Today, in order to take a smoke break, you have to drive 500 yards away from your place of work and promise to not exhale in your own car. My point here: it is getting more and more difficult to smoke.

As smoking became less and less desirable, one very important decorative accessory started disappearing from our homes: the ash tray. Remember the big, fancy art pottery ash trays? They looked beautiful & matched the household décor, however, they held about 10,000 cigarette butts. Those classic movies never showed a hostess with a hangover cleaning up the day after an elegant party. The only thing nastier than cigarette smoke is an ash tray full of stale butts, hence, the decline of smoking, especially inside our homes.

The last time I went home to California I came across my mom’s enormous aqua glass ash tray. It has to be about 45 years old. It had been repurposed under one of the bathroom vanities to hold cleaning products. I got permission to take the tray and the matching vase back to my own home in Michigan. This particular tray must have been able to hold at least 12,000 butts.

I (once again) repurposed the ash tray. It now holds shells and sea glass from both Atlantic and Pacific beachy family vacations. So, very ironically, now when I look at my mom’s old ash tray, it reminds me of relaxing and breathing the fresh ocean air.