Jun 30, 2023 4 min read

As I was walking my morning two miles around the neighborhood this week, I was picturing Canada up there all ablaze. My eyes and throat were a reminder that this thick air we’re enduring is floating our way from the forest fires across the border.

Up here on my Mount Crumpit, the breeze is steady and reliable, making the air less thick and gray than it is down in Whoville. But still, I can smell the smoke. I’m reminded of what it was like when I was growing up and smoke hung over everything.

Twice a year, we would drive from Finleyville, all five of us, to downtown Pittsburgh to visit our dentist in the Gulf Building. The walk from the parking garage, even at noon, felt dark like bedtime, the smog was so heavy. Social media is awash this week with photos from that time, comparing our current air emergency with the everyday industrial pollution back then.

And then there was all the cigarette smoke. My first newsrooms allowed employees to smoke, and there were times I felt like the only one who wasn’t. Cigarettes were awful, but the cigars were worse; my first years at WTAE were shrouded in the odor from the cigars of a few senior newsmen. We non-smoking newbies put up with it because, well, those men were here first. Some mornings I’d open my closet doors and be smacked in the nose by the lingering smell of the newsroom smoke, carried home on my suit jackets and panty hose.

Airplanes had no-smoking sections, but what was the point? We shared the air. When I was 14, I went with my grandparents on a two-week trip to Slovenia. Everyone on that plane was smoking – except my grandparents and me. I don’t remember suffering through the smoke, or even really being bothered by it.

Nobody smokes in public buildings anymore; I don’t think I could work in a place where it was allowed. The people who live in the condo across the yard from me are smokers. Even from inside my bedroom, on the other side of my house and with the windows shut, I can tell when they’ve lit up a cigarette those 80 feet away. It’s annoying, every time. The person who lives on the other side of the wall from me also is a smoker, something made evident only when I’m outside and he opens his garage door to drive away.

Last fall I took some clothing to the home of a seamstress for some alterations. While there, I sensed that someone in the house was smoking a cigarette. A week later, when I was driving my newly tailored clothing home, I could smell the smoke in the car. One of the jackets still smells like it. In old movies from the ’40s and ’50s, everyone’s holding a cigarette; living room tables had little silver boxes filled with them. When I watch the films, I think about how everyone’s clothing and closets and cars must reek. Their hair, too.

I grew up in a house where nobody smoked, but we had ashtrays for visitors who did. I can’t imagine allowing any visitor to smoke in my house, nor anyone ever asking to do so.

It’s good that we have become more sensitive; it means we’ve progressed past the time when we just accepted that smoke would be around us. I hope the firefighters in Canada can get the forest fires under control and that the breezes keep doing their thing, to finally clear the air, for all of us.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.