“Smoking Makes Your Lungs Turn Black. And it Kills You.”
Why can’t we all be as honest as an 8-year-old child?
Growing up, I was never, ever allowed to call adults by their first names. It was always “Mr. So-and-So” and “Mrs. So-and-So,” period. No exceptions.
Well, okay, there was one single exception: a man named Ralph Jacks. Mr. Jacks — err, “Ralph” — was a man with dark black hair and a mustache. He was about my dad’s age, and he was fat. Really fat. I didn’t know what he and my dad had in common, or why Ralph would come to our house in Stockton sometimes. But one thing I knew about him was that he smoked cigarettes. A lot.
This was so weird: he was an adult, and surely he knew what we all knew about smoking — that it’s a terrible habit that kills you. Right? I mean, as a grown-up, he had to know about this. Everybody knew about this. Didn’t they?
As I now know, Ralph was one of my dad's coworkers. They probably met up to talk about business. But at the time, he was just one of the many people who came to our house to meet with my dad and seek his counsel. I didn’t know much other than that, and the fact that we were only allowed to call him “Ralph” because he hated the idea of being called “Mr. Jacks.” Why? I suppose it made him feel old. I’m not sure. He didn’t tell us. But my dad gave us special dispensation to break one of the most fundamental rules in the Stauffer house, just for him and said we could call him by his first name.
I wonder sometimes if that’s why I felt like I could be brutally honest with him. Maybe being on a first-name basis made me feel like “he’s one of us” — like he was a grownup, but still approachable, and friendly.
For whatever reason, though, I told him something I’ve never forgotten. Something that changed my life, and, allegedly, changed his. One day when I was eight years old, he was at our house meeting with my dad, and he stepped outside for a smoke break. I walked out of the house and followed him to see what he was doing. I saw him standing out on our driveway, lighting up a cigarette, and said what I felt was so ridiculously obvious it was barely worth mentioning.
“You know, smoking makes your lungs turn black. And it kills you.”
That’s it. That’s all I remember. I have no recollection of how he responded. Or what I might have said next. Or if he even acknowledged me at all. But what I do know is what my dad told me about how it affected him a few years later.
“You remember Ralph Jacks? He quit smoking. Because of what you said to him.”
This. Blew. My. Mind.
A grown man? An adult — a friend of my dad — decided to quit smoking because of what I said to him? As an 8-year-old child?
“Why?” I asked my dad.
“Well,” dad said. “I think he figured, ‘Here I am, this successful businessman, making a living, and getting by and doing well. And here’s this little kid telling me what I already know to be true, and I’m embarrassed by it. Smoking does make your lungs turn black. It will kill you. He’s right. So what on earth am I doing smoking?’”
I have pondered this many, many times over the years. Of course, at the time, I wondered why nobody else was willing to say the obvious to a fat man who was going to kill himself either with his poor diet or his smoking habit. Why didn’t people care enough about him to say what they were all thinking? It was so simple in my mind.
The terrible truth, as I learned later, is that adults (at least in America) don’t like to broach awkward subjects like this, even if they know and like and care about a person. “He has an eating problem that he’ll probably die from,” I imagine them admitting. “But I don’t want to say anything about it because that would be weird.”
This has never made any sense to me. If you care about someone why would you NOT tell them what they need to hear?
Many times, over the years, since then, I’ve seen people lead destructive lives, and I’ve wondered: “Why are their friends and family not telling them about that which is painfully obvious; that which they need to hear? It’s the first thing everybody else notices when they meet this person. We’re all thinking it. Why can’t the people who love them tell them?”
It’s a bizarre phenomenon, and I even acknowledge now that our culture has almost completely destroyed my ability to be honest with people like this. And that is an awful, horrible reality that should not be.
Many times, I see people engaging in harmful or self-destructive behaviors and wonder: “Why doesn’t someone just tell him or her the truth?”
I aspire to be as honest now as I was then. I wish we could all just state what we know to be true to the people we care about. I wish we could all just come out and say, “Smoking makes your lungs turn black. And it kills you.” Because it’s true.
It’s not just true, it’s right. And it’s loving. And it works. At least it did in the case of an 8-year-old Ronny Stauffer and an adult man named Ralph Jacks.
