It's the Last Day of Fall, I Want a Cigarette

And, Happy Solstice

“But now it’s time for me to go, the Autumn moon lights my way. For now I smell the rain, and with it pain, and it’s heading my way.”

Ramble On, Led Zepplin

This is an essay from my book “Running In Shadows: A Non-Memoir.” I will be publishing my memoirs in essays exclusively here on Substack. To read more, please become a paid or free subscriber. If you missed it, here are the previous installments:
Running in Shadows - Introduction
My Secrets Have Secrets
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Every autumn, I want to start smoking again. Correction, I want to have an occasional cigarette, not relapse into smoker. It’s not worth the $10 a pack, the smell, the second-hand smoke, the addiction, not to mention the horrible example for my kids. Just one cigarette on a mild, fall day. A slight chill. The warm glow. Fall smell, like things falling apart, resignation in the air. The tobacco fits right in.

I began smoking in fall 2000.

Twenty-one years old, junior year in college. That was the year I lost my virginity and took my first drink of alcohol - my preferred drug for the next ten years. I accepted a cigarette at a party, and set off to the metaphorical races. In one lap I graduated from the “party” cigarette everyone else pretended to smoke to half a pack a day. The next lap, stole from my roommate. Skipped classes, pierced my belly-button, cut my hair pixie short, slept around. A life-long prude, I figured that once I had broken one rule, I might as well break them all.

It’s November, the year 2000. I lay on a stone bench, cigarette in hand. The concrete is as hard as the shell of obedience encasing my soul. The cold seeps in, cracks it open. Pretty curly-ques of smoke rise and dance among the dappled, changing leaves. Everything is dying, and something within me has died.

Fall, 2009

I graduate from college. Get a good job. Marry my first husband. Stop smoking. I try to be a well-behaved Christian girl again, this time as a suburban housewife. When everything goes to shit, the nicotine helps. And, of course, there’s the alcohol. A whole bunch of fucked up things happen (you can read about it in a previous post, A Marriage of Secrets), and I find myself smoking on the porch of an Alcoholics Anonymous club. It’s raining. I share lights and stories with a community of people just like me.

The fall chill once again marries my warm cigarette.

It’s not really the nicotine that I savor as much as the experience of sitting outside, doing nothing, breathing deeply of the dying earth. Because, at the same time that I am fighting against the deepening depression, the pull of addiction, something in my soul lifts at the prospect of sleep. Fall can be a time for death, but it can also be a time for rest. My bones long for the relief of the depression, as much as I fear it. It’s a warm blanket on a rainy day. It’s an old friend that always brings bad news, with a bittersweet comfort.

Labour Day, 1993.

I am fourteen years old. I start high school the day after Labor Day, like they used to, in the old days. Northern California is still smothered in the heat of summer.

That summer, my mother took my four siblings and me on a camping trip. Without my father. Then, my father took us to San Francisco. Without my mother. Mom won a trip to Cancun through work. She brought a single friend instead of Dad. Strange things to add to the running list of strange things happening for the last two or three years.

I am the only one to notice that there is a secret brewing with my parents. They don’t know that I know. To this day, 30 years later, neither of them have ever found out how much I knew about the inner workings of my parents’ sex lives in that period of time. And yet, my pre-adolescent skills of deduction had only uncovered half of the story.

That is why, when they take us to McDonald’s, a rare treat for my impoverished family, I am immediately suspicious. I don’t eat my hamburger. I don’t look at my parents. Instead, I look at my brothers and sisters, ages four to eleven, playing on the old Hamburglar bouncy cage, spinning on the Ronald McDonald carousel, all innocent and beautifully, blissfully, ignorant that this is the moment. The beginning of the end.

My mother and father agree on something for the first time in my known life. They are getting a divorce. My father is moving out. I feel my life coming to an end.

The memory is vivid, the acute feeling of protection and sympathy for my little siblings; it rushes over me like a wave. Threatening to drown while quenching my thirst for control. As the oldest, I was responsible for them. My parents made sure of that. I had felt responsible for them since I was five years old and first realized that they needed protection from my father. But that’s another story for another time.

That turning point, ending point, the first sad autumn, I held my secret resolution close. Protect my family, support my family, keep it together in this time of disaster, regardless the cost to me. That directive drove my life for the next twenty years. Until the, almost, final moment in 2009. When I landed in the deepest hole, at the end of the line, torn apart, in a psych ward on a 72-hour suicide watch.

Back to McDonald’s. I start high school in a daze. It is shameful to be Mormon with divorced parents. Hell, not just shameful, but damning. Mormons excommunicated for divorce, at least in 1993 they did. And if they didn’t literally kick you out of the church, you were definitely shunned for this heinous sin. I was guilty by association. Tainted by exposure. Mormon marriage is for life and all eternity, simple as that. End of discussion.

Whatever the final outcome, I walked into high school rife with not only hormones of puberty and your run-of-the-mill social anxiety, but with the responsibility of the world on my shoulders and the weight of a secret tied to my legs. Had I known at that time the relief that comes with a nicotine addiction, I would have picked up smoking right then and there.

But I did not know about that. Probably for the best. All I knew was that I had to be the absolute best daughter, best sister, best Mormon I could possibly be. The most pious, most respectable, most perfect teenager that ever existed in the history of piety and respectability. I walked on a tight rope. Terror at being exposed, that at any moment someone at school, someone at the church, or just someone in the world, would discover my parents’ secret and I would bear the consequences.

November, 1993

My father brings me to my favorite park, up the street from our house. It’s raining, as per usual for a California November. On a bench beneath an awning, he tells me that he is gay. He is speaking, saying words that I hear but do not process. My Mormon father, now not only separated from his wife and family, has committed a sin so unimaginable and atrocious that I cannot comprehend it. He tells me that his father abused him as a child. That everything he is, his sins, and his unnatural predilections, is a result of the abuse he withstood at the hands of his Mormon father.

My grandfather, who died while I was in utero. Whose memory is shrouded in mystery and half lies. My grandfather, whose ghost I was sure haunted my grandmother’s basement. Who died of cirrhosis of the liver in his fifties, but the family swears he never touched a drop of liquor. Even at fourteen, my father’s confession makes sense to me. It puts into place every loose puzzle piece and half-discovered clue I’ve been gathering for three years. In fact, it solves all the mysteries with which I have been grappling my whole life. My grandfather, a man I never knew but still feared, abused my father. Sexually, verbally, physically, emotionally abused my father.

And this, my father explains to me on my favorite park bench in my favorite park, is why he is gay. Why he has to divorce my mother. Why everything that I know is over.

All I can think is, “He just ruined my favorite spot.” I can never return without the memory, the downpour, of this confession.

A decade later, when I go back to visit that spot, I discover condos in its place.

Just as well.

December 20, 2024

That was the first fall, from which everything flows, downhill all the way to today. I hold pain and fondness in my heart, next to each other, reunited lovers.

This October, I let myself have one cigarette, while away from my kids, at a time and place I can wash the smell off my clothes and brush my teeth, just enough to breath in 31 years of autumns. At my daughter’s softball game, my sister-in-law offers her vape, if I really need a nicotine hit. No, I say, that’s not what this is about. My six-year-old son digs in the dirt with his cousin. My husband helps coach the team. My father has long passed out of my life, even if he hasn’t passed out of life itself. My mother sits behind me with my step-father, supporting her granddaughter. If I close my eyes, in a moment I am back in the McDonald’s on Sycamore Drive, Antioch, California. I am on the park bench, watching the raindrops fall, one by one, off the edge of the awning. I am smoking cigarette after cigarette on campus beneath the turning oak trees. I am sitting on the back porch of my suburban home, trying to hold it all together while my husband’s secret silently kills me.

And then. I bring myself to the present. The cottonwood leaves turn and fall in my backyard. I think about the good years - reliving drives through the Colorado mountain backroads in my first Jeep, awash in golden aspen trees and bright green pines. The pumpkin patch with my kids, first as infants and toddlers, now school-age, and soon (too soon) teenagers and young adults. Fourteen happy, and sober, Thanksgivings. I order pumpkin spice lattes for me and pumpkin chocolate chip bread for my son and daughter. I put on my favorite sweater, take a deep breath of chilly air, and snuggle with my husband and kids.

Leaves are falling down. They fell a month ago. A bluejay perches on the uncluttered limbs; tiny buds of next year’s growth peek out.

Today is the end of the earth’s death. Tomorrow is the start of its rebirth. Tonight will be the longest night of the year, tomorrow the shortest day. And yet. The night after that, the darkness lasts a little bit less. And a little bit less the next night. The light returns, inch by inch, minute by minute. The beginning of winter is the beginning of its demise. The end of autumn is the nadir from which everything, literally, turns and rises.

Life gets bad. Then good. Around and around in endless cycles. The earth must go to sleep every fall in order to wake anew every spring. Things must fall apart to be rebuilt.

Happy Solstice everyone.