Instead—and I'm aware that this might be a driver of my lingering heat, so stow the armchair analysis—we ... did little. We moved the kid. We fanned the smoke. We waited for her to shift her hand, which she eventually did. When I look back on that incident, I chalk up my inaction partly to my natural lack of social aggressiveness. But also to something else: a curious moral back-and-forth with smoking that, first, argues that smoking is a right, and that only a flinty Presbyterian scold would make a fuss under such non-life-threatening circumstances. I don't entirely disagree, either—I've never liked militant efforts to scrub the culture clean of dubious behaviors (smoking, R-rated TV). A little flexibility in the matter of other people's annoying behaviors is the mortar of western civ, after all. But even as smokers insist that lighting up is a right, they also say they're victims of the habit, unable to quit no matter how hard they try. And so in the interplay between right and victimization, an ambiguity has grown. So we let the old bitch off the hook.
Fast-forward several years, to another cranky old gal with a cigarette. We're at a big family gathering—brother got married, something like that. Everyone's milling on a back patio when two things happen at once: 1.) the old lady drops her butt on the concrete and makes a half-hearted attempt to stub it out but fails; and 2.) my wife, who's been on her feet all day, slips off her shoes. You can see where this is going: burn on the bottom of her foot, a little zap of melted nylon. Yowch! But, hey, it happens, right? Here's where the incident bends toward my theme: The old lady gets in my wife's face about it! "You shouldn't have taken off your shoes," she gripes, as if her ability to toss her butts without a second thought automatically and unquestioningly trumps my wife's desire for unbound feet. The incredible presumption of that moment is writ small every time some jackass throws his butt out of his car window-—contemptuously, it always seems to me—or in the way my neighbors light up as they stroll for their mail, then stub it out by the group mail box, which just happens to be by my house, leaving the sidewalk strewn and ugly. That's why I have little sympathy for the persecution smokers feel about being exiled to smoking decks and back alleys in corporate America.
I'd like to say I threw down with that second woman, but she was my grandma. Within a few years, she'd be dead of lung cancer.