True Confessions (10 of 11)_ The Camel Days

As I was walking on campus today, I held my nose with two fingers as I walked right past a smoker.

It's a bit ironic since I used to be a smoker myself!

For a brief while in 1989, I did actually indulge in this very bad habit.

My cigarette of choice was mostly Camels.

The habit formed purely from peer pressure. In the summer of 1989, I traveled to my father's country Turkey for the usual summer trek.

While there, my friend Muzzafer and his gang of friends would all smoke. After a while, it seemed socially appropriate to fit in and smoke with them.

I actually brought a whole carton of Maltepe-brand Turkish cigarettes from Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul which I brought with me to Roanoke, Va.

I would smoke these cigarettes and share them with friends who smoked when I attended Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke.

The story of how I quit smoking is perhaps the more interesting one though. A few years later, when I was attending Radford University, my friend Bahadir and I went to a bar in downtown Roanoke.

Though we were both smoking Camels, we told a couple of attractive women who saw us that we weren't really smokers. They didn't buy it. I quit smoking after that.

Alas, I now live in an area along the Virginia-North Carolina border where many people still smoke regularly.