DEAR GRANDPA

Dear Grandpa:

Most kids I know have tried smoking. Many who are 16 like me, smoke a few cigarettes every day. Why are grown-ups so against smoking? Sam, San Antonio.

Dear Sam: Good question.

I thought the same as you do when I was 16. We would smoke behind our high school during breaks. It was the "in thing" to do. It made me feel grown up, like I felt when I got my driver's license. I and most of my friends did sneak a smoke away from our parents.

I probably got hooked on cigarettes when I was in coUege. I should have known better. I tried out for the swim team. While competing for a slot on the team I gave up smoking. Immediately my endurance doubled! But I didn't make the team and stupidly went back to smoking.

Smoking is unhealthy, dirty and expensive. After I was smoking for more than 20 years I quit. I used a three-step method to quit:

First, I quit for one day at a time. Not forever.

Second, several times per day, I would hold a cigarette between my finger and thumb and say out loud: "You are NOT my boss." Again, "You are NOT my boss." Sounds silly, but for me I had to reassure myself that the cigarette was not my boss.

The third thing I did was to car~y an article in my pocket which described a smoker dying of lung cancer. He had such bad lung cancer he was breathing through a tube in his lower throat, upper chest. All that was sticking out of his body was a donut shaped piece of plastic with a hole in it.

He craved cigarettes so intensely he would place a cigarette at the hole, light it up and puff on it through that plastic protrusion sticking out of his chest. Reading the article influenced me not to light one up. I never wanted to be in that awful shape where I would light up a cigarette sticking in a tube in my chest.

Visualize someone smoking a cigarette through the tube in his chest. It's an ugly situation.

Clip this column and carry it with you.

When you crave a cigarette, pull out this article. Read it. You don't ever want to be sucking on a cigarette sticking in a tube in your chest, do you? Visualize yourself some day sucking cigarette smoke in that man-made hole in YOUR chest. You don't ever want to be there. So, don't light one up. You do and you could have that tube.

Smoking can hook you. Once you're hooked it's really hard to give it up. It's easier, healthier and cheaper to never start.

Use the 1-2-3 method to quit smoking. It works. It helped me quit 32 years ago.

If you have a question for grandpa, send it to: Dear Grandpa, Jackson USA Signal; 108 E. Hope Street; Jackson, MO 63755, or ~e-mail direct to grandp~atw@juno.com.