by Ram Maxey
The Old Year is coming to an end, and soon enough will give way to the New Year. The year 2009 has been an eventful year, as if you didn’t know. It has had its share of the good, the bad and the ugly, like for example Manny Pacquiao’s scintillating victories in the ring that did his countrymen proud. Oh, boy, that was really good. Then the series of devastating typhoons like Ondoy and Pepeng, that brought death, destruction and misery . That was bad, really bad. And the ugly? None was uglier than the Maguindanao Massacre. May they rest in peace who now rest in pieces – including my friend and Manila Bulletin correspondent, Bong Reblando of General Santos City.
Every year that comes and goes is a milestone in many ways to many people. December 31, 2009, as far as I am concerned, will bring back the memory of what transpired at midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1964 back in General Santos, exactly 45 years ago. Cigaret in hand, I was lighting firecrackers one after the other and exploding them on East Roxas Avenue just outside my sister’s residence. The whole city was a bedlam from noise-makers of all sorts as well as firecrackers of various sizes while pyrotechnics in the form of mini rockets (kuwitis) wended their way lazily skyward to explode and disintegrate into showers of golden sparks.
It was then I remembered that people usually mark the occasion by coming up with so-called new year’s resolutions on whatever comes to mind at the moment. Mine was that I would swear off smoking, a resolution many a smoker before and after me had made, only to break it, sooner than later. After 18 years of being hooked to the vice, I lit one last firecracker at the stroke of midnight and after it went off with a bang I flicked the cigarette stub into the night air, watching the glowing end land on the pavement. It was a spur of the moment decision, more to keep faith with the tradition of making a new year’s resolution than actually keeping it. Anyway, I was already feeling sleepy. I walked back into the house and to bed.
And to think that only five years back, in 1959, my younger brother, Charles, a smoker like myself, had died of cancer of the lungs (they removed his right lung in Manila and gave him one year to live despite the cobalt treatment he underwent. He was dead in ten months). Did his death cure me of my addiction to nicotine? It did not. I still smoked an average of 30 sticks a day. So, why did it take me five years after Charles (the family called him Chas, but was Charlie to his friends) died at age 29 and still a bachelor, to make what seemed to me at the time was such a silly resolution? Ask me no questions. Anyway, here it was New Year’s Eve 1964 and I resolved on the spot to quit the habit. The die was cast as it were and the ordeal of withdrawal began when I woke up the next day and craving for that first smoke of the day. No such thing happened. I wanted to see how far I would go without lighting up. I held my ground, discovering for the first time what others before me must have felt after swearing off the habit of a lifetime, only to be challenged by the craving for just one more puff — and failing to sustain their decision to let go completely.
Friends had doubted whether I had really been a smoker. One night back in Manila, while reviewing for a quarterly exam at the Far Eastern University (AB Journalism), I ran out of cigarets. It was about midnight and, horrors of horrors, the corner store on V. Mapa St. in Sta. Mesa where we lived had shut down for the night and I could not buy a pack of Chesterfields. I panicked, sort of. If I could not smoke, I could not concentrate on the subject I was reviewing. I saw some cigarette stubs in an ashtray, placed them end to end, rolled the stuff in a strip of newsprint and lit up…ughh! But it sated my craving somewhat as I went back to my review notes. If that’s not addiction, I don’t know what is.
Back to the present, many, many years after quitting my addiction to nicotine. I hadn’t had a puff since. My brother Chas would have been 79 last September. A host of my male relatives and friends who smoked are no longer around to enjoy this Christmas season. I’m glad that my three sons – Charles Raymond, Alan James and Ramil Anthony – don’t smoke and have families of their own. I remember the name of the sweepstakes dealer, Manuel Uy, who sold the first winning ticket to a 17-year-old girl who won the P75,000 first prize (a fortune at the time). Uy’s advertising slogan was: “A Winner Never Quits; A Quitter Never Wins!”
Well, this writer was a “quitter” (smoking) in 1964 at age 42, and is still pounding away at this keyboard at age 87. Some “quitters” also win, you know. MERRY CHRISTMAS, HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!
