Drinking and smoking are lifestyle habits that can bring you down. Dad wasn’t a drinker and didn’t permit alcohol in the house while my two brothers and I were growing up. Family legend had it that his mother’s brother hurt someone while “under the influence” and spent time incarcerated for it.

Smoking, however, was a different story. Too many of Dad’s role models used tobacco for him to turn away from this vice. As a young man, he occasionally imitated a professional baseball player by putting a wad of chew inside his cheek. But Mom didn’t like him spitting tobacco juice in the yard. So, like his own father, Dad most often smoked cigars — foul-smelling White Owls. He didn’t inhale the smoke, but puffed on them and chewed their ends.

After removing the cellophane wrapper from his cigar, he’d give the gold paper ring around it to my brother, Jerry, or me so we could pretend we were royalty bedecked in fine jewels. An empty cigar box took a prominent place in the top drawer of his bedroom dresser. In it he kept loose change and a series of odds and ends.

When Dad smoked, a blue haze developed and hung in the air in the living room, and the disgusting odor imbedded itself in the drapes, upholstered furniture, carpet and our clothes. I hated it when friends asked, “Who smells like a cigar?”

As he got older, Jerry was less tolerant about his friends’ remarks and asked Dad to stop smoking in the house. Acquiescent, Dad began puffing on his cigars on the concrete stoop just outside the front door. He kept the half-smoked butts in the mailbox, which must have dismayed the postman.

Then in the mid-1980s, a sore appeared on the right side of Dad’s lower lip. Even though it wouldn’t heal, he refused to see his doctor. “It’s only a burn from eating a French fried onion ring,” he insisted. Eventually, he was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma, a skin cancer resulting from longtime sun exposure and his habit of resting a cigar on that bottom lip.

“My Dad smoked cigars all of his adult life, and he never got cancer,” Dad said. Frightened, he immediately stopped smoking, and the cancer was surgically removed. Within a year-and-a-half, it reappeared as nodules under his tongue and lower jaw bone. Dad drove himself to the hospital, so they could be surgically removed. Upon discharge, he walked to the hospital parking lot in the snow, scraped the ice from the car’s windows and drove home.

After the Christmas of 1988, as I was preparing to return to Buffalo, Dad found several lumps in his neck. I stayed in Indiana through the new year to see him through a radical neck resection for the metastases. Radiation therapy gave him two more years of quality life before he began to experience tingling in his hands and feet.

During his fight with cancer, Dad contacted the American Cancer Society for supplies and travel reimbursement for radiation therapy in the nearby city of Kokomo. He and Mom found solace commiserating with high school friends about all the various illnesses and disabilities that accompany growing old. Eventually, Dad lost the use of his arms, and Mom had to feed him. Even later, he could walk only with assistance.

Once diagnosed with cancer, Dad never smoked or used tobacco products again. He learned, first hand and a bit too late, how dangerous those stinkin’ stogies can be.