I want to send an important message to our new president: Please quit smoking.

President Obama said he would quit smoking when he started his run for president, I think as a promise to his wife. According to a recent NPR report, he hasn't totally quit. He is an "intermittent smoker" or just a part-time addict.

Mr. President, there's only one way to quit: just do it, not for yourself, but for your kids, Malia and Sasha, those two beautiful girls who don't want tobacco smoke in their lives.

I know, because that's how I quit smoking, and I couldn't have done it otherwise. My twin girls were born on Feb. 2, 1979, and that's when I ended 20 years of tobacco addiction. And now it's their 30th birthday and my 30th nonsmoking anniversary.

I didn't want my kids growing up as I did with a haze of tobacco smoke at our family gatherings. More like an undulating layer at about the nose height of a 4-year-old.

Two parents smoking in a closed car in cold weather was even more intense. One grandfather smoked cigarettes and the other smoked cigars -- enough so that his favorite TV room had to be repainted every year.

Perhaps it wasn't surprising when I took up smoking after my 14th birthday in 1958, putting away three Camels at a teen party and promptly throwing up in the bathroom. I knew it must be good to blow smoke.

And a year later, as sophomore class president, I was impeached for leading groups of students to secluded places to smoke during school hours. Not quite understanding that possibly no student body president had ever been impeached in the history of the world, I realized that perhaps politics was not my strong suit and that I had only won because the other two candidates had split the electorate, allowing me to come out ahead.

Yet, as class president, I had organized a successful "sock hop" in the fall, a "Spring fling" (predictably) the next spring, and a groundbreaking Christmas prom where champagne punch was served to all grade levels with appropriate faculty approvals gained through my sophistry.

This was possible because it was the American School of Paris and Paris was a place where even a 14-year-old such as I could walk into a bar and order a beer or a drink of any kind. Smoking fit in very well in that environment.

My impeachment was instigated by Bill Wright, the smooth-talking supercilious junior class president, who thought I was an immature punk (he was probably right there), and endorsed by headmaster Ernest A. Wedge, a big-time smoker himself who had a Gauloise hanging off his lips every minute of the school day, it seems.

There was no more due process than the average Guantanamo detainee, so I was summarily relieved of my duties. Yet I felt I had accomplished all that I had set out to do as class president: successful events and a budget surplus. I was just as happy to be a spectator at the ridiculous class meetings we thought we should have each month.

But I continued to smoke through high school, college, my years of employment.

In fact, in my first job as a reporter on a daily newspaper in upstate New York, smoking was almost a requirement. Everybody smoked as they pounded away on Royal manual typewriters, deadlines looming.

A peek into the modern newsroom of any daily today reveals ... virtual silence and clean air. No wonder newspapers are going down the tubes (just kidding!).

Nonsmokers never objected. They were outnumbered. All of us smokers wondered why everyone didn't smoke. Cigarettes were great with breakfast coffee; great after lunch and dinner. Even, iconically, in bed as a symbol of total satisfaction. Such is the power of addiction, backed by government legal sanction and hugely powerful advertising and bogus health claims.

For me, the break with cigarettes, but not with tobacco, came in 1976 when I no longer could afford 75 cents a pack while working at a job that paid less than $10,000 a year -- editor of the Island Ad-Vantages in Stonington. So I adopted pipe smoking -- a little more messy and self-absorbing but cheaper and capable of delivering prodigious amounts of nicotine and equally prodigious amounts of smoke in our home and at my office.

Finally at age 34, on the eve of the birth of my twin girls in Ellsworth in 1979, I resolved to stop. When they were born five weeks early on Feb. 2 and I saw the second born, Eleanor, rib cage winging out as she fought for breath in an incubator, I was sure no smoke of mine would enter her fresh, new lungs.

I now don't remember how hard or easy it was. I do remember breathing deeply a lot -- and enjoying the new smell of fresh air and the new taste of good foods. I knew that any going back would be a fatal error.

I still smoke in my dreams, usually a cigarette that just happened to appear and get a light. It seems normal if not a little awkward. Still it's better than the real thing.

For Malia and Sasha, Mr. President, put smoking in the realm of dreams.

 

Denis Thoet, with his partner Michele Roy, own and manage Long Meadow Farm in West Gardiner, www.longmeadowfarm maine.com.