On the first day of the new restaurant smoking ban, I took wife Brenda and daughter Jess down to McCabe Pub for a late lunch. The place smelled good, like hamburgers and onions, chicken and cheese, cakes and casseroles. Even with my omnipotent nose, which can pick up the smell of ants climbing up a creosoted telephone pole, I couldn’t pick up a whiff of cigarette funk. The folks down at McCabe don’t just cook, they can by-God clean, too.
My craziest dreams are coming true. Six months ago, I was freed from coaching high school softball. Even better, I was freed from attending summer softball tournaments, where I’ve always been troubled by swarms of sticky, squalling, Cheeto-eating toddlers fresh from arm-yankings and ass-whuppings. But best of all, on Oct. 1, I was freed from the noisome smell of cigarette smoke in my favorite neighborhood restaurant. Life is good—real good.
Now, when we Jowerses travel in Tennessee, we can pull into a Steak ’n Shake and not have to put up with their lame smoking-section trick, in which the smokers would be seated in a booth so close they could reach over the tiny Plexiglas wall and actually burn the nonsmokers with their cigarettes if they wanted to.
In Cracker Barrel, I don’t have to make my old speech to the seater, which went something like this: “Don’t you put me up next to that fake lattice. I know people are smoking just inches away. And don’t put me next to that big-ass opening in the smoking section, where the smoke pours into the nonsmoking section like there’s a pile of tires on fire. I want to be as far away from the smokers as you can get me, even if that means setting up a table in the country-store section, next to the colorful sweaters.”
I know, I know. The poor smokers are being treated like second-class citizens. They have to endure ugly looks from the uppity nonsmokers, watch their hard-won smoking rights get trampled, and miss out on the fun of making everything and everybody in the building stink like they did in the good old days when America was a free country, a smoke was a smoke, and exhaling plumes out of your nostrils was kinda sexy.
Well folks are just going to have to adapt. These days, we don’t let the kids break thermometers so they can play with the mercury, and we don’t let them stand up on the front seat when they’re riding in the car. Heck, you can’t even dose the incorrigible children with paregoric or laudanum anymore. I feel your pain, smokers, but it’s the 21st century now—zero-tolerance time. It’s just not cool to put your poison into other folks’ air.
So I wonder: what happened last week to cause the Metro Parks board to give indications Wednesday morning that they were going to ban smoking in city parks, then, before nightfall, decide that smoking in parks was OK for now? And now that the parks board wants to ban smoking on park playgrounds, did they ever decide how much distance there would have to be between a smoker and a playground? I guess the parks board will take another look at these issues when they reopen the debate over the next two months.
In the meantime, let me point out the obvious. This is going to bring us more scorn and ridicule than the Roadkill Bill and the Dildon’t Bill. Smartass Yankees are going to start up with a new round of dumbass hillbilly jokes. Would-be Foxworthys will come up with a whole new list of “You might be a redneck if…” jokes. And don’t you know, our smoker-coddling ways will likely fill up quite a bit of space in next year’s “You Are So Nashville If…” offerings.
Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind folks smoking, as long as they don’t hurt anybody but themselves. Smoke from one person’s cigarette really doesn’t belong on another person’s clothes or hair, and it surely doesn’t belong in another person’s lungs. It’s fine with me if people eat cigarettes, cover themselves with nicotine patches, roll naked in tobacco leaves, or even chew fist-sized wads of nicotine gum and snuff all rolled together.
I’ve got no personal gripe against smokers. Love the smoker, hate the smoke, I say. Well, I do make an exception for smokers who throw their butts on the ground. Those people ought to carry an empty Prince Albert can and dump their butts in there. Or maybe just eat the butts. There really shouldn’t be any smoker-slobbered cigarette butts on the ground in a city park.
Nashville has excellent parks and plenty of park police. If the park police have a good reason to enforce no-smoking rules on the playgrounds, they have the very same reason to enforce the same rules in the rest of the parks. Unwanted smoke down Granny’s or Bubba’s lungs is the same as unwanted smoke down a toddler’s lungs.
Nothing bad happens if Metro Parks get a little cleaner. I say make it a law and start writing tickets for smoking in the parks—the sooner the better.
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