When a Picture is Worth a Thousand Lives

My generation did not "kick the habit" because for every "We Mind Very Much If You Smoke" jingle, we had another one about coming a long way. Those acoustic memories intermingle with memories of friends and loved ones whose lives were extinguished by the tobacco industry.

There is a global movement underway toward graphic warnings about disease on tobacco packaging. What follows is my letter to the editor of a North Carolina newspaper.

Sunday, May 31st is the World Health Organization’s annual World No Tobacco Day. This year’s theme is the implementation of pictorial warning labels on tobacco products. Other countries, including India, Canada, the United Kingdom and Brazil, already place pictures of diseased patients on tobacco packages, making the health risks of tobacco use hard for the consumer to overlook. The United States lags behind. Currently textual warnings are all that are in place on tobacco products.

Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death in the world. I witnessed this firsthand at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, where I diagnosed thousands of cases of disease caused by tobacco.

World No Tobacco Day is an ideal time for all individuals to consider their own possible contributions to the WHO’s MPOWER initiatives to “Monitor tobacco use and the policies to prevent it; Protect people from tobacco smoke; Offer people help to quit tobacco use; Warn about the dangers of tobacco; Enforce bans on tobacco, advertising, promotion and sponsorship; Raise taxes on tobacco.”

Let us act responsibly and proactively for the benefit of our country’s children by advocating for picture warnings on tobacco products.

Dolley Madison and Maureen Dowd

We were having dinner with some friends on Saturday night and I was enjoying the company of a bright 5-year-old who sat to my right at the dinner table and held forth with me on the topics of his selection, namely, the war that won’t end, Dolley Madison, and Hotel for Dogs. When he mentioned Madagascar 2, I said I thought the plot was a little too similar to The Lion King. I told him I felt like I was back with Scar and the hyenas all over again. Because the boy is an accomplished writer, who had shown me several books before dinner that he had written on first grade paper, I introduced him to the word plagiarism.

Plagiarism. Well first, he wanted to spell it. You know the schools are really creating brave spellers these days because now there is a theory called something like experimental spelling in usage in the Chapel Hill Carrboro City Schools whereby students are not penalized for using a word that they cannot spell correctly in their writing. Thinking back to my days of typing term papers at Sacred Heart Academy on a typewriter, I wish this educational coup would have occurred decades earlier.

So the experimental speller gave it a crack: P-L-A-Y-G-E-R and so on. This spelling makes plagiarism seem like child’s play. A quick check on Webster’s online says that the word is from the Latin word for kidnapper.

And the taking of the idea must be willful. I made that point very clear at the table.

Did Maureen Dowd willfully take from another and fail to credit him in her NYT column? I personally find it doubtful. According to an AP article I read this morning, she told the Huffington Post that the material she wrote was an acoustic memory. She did not use my term acoustic memory. That might have gotten my goat. She did say it was something she heard and then wrote. The AP article does not go on to say if she intended to credit the speaker or if she didn’t feel it was necessary.

I am such the idea purist that I do fault people who steal others' ideas. But what under the sun is new today? Still I think there is a line that does get crossed too often. Having been around many writers in the past five years or so, I once witnessed a writer discussing a topic at a coffee and then saw a very near exact quote of his concept in another writer’s work, uncredited, the very next day by a writer who was at our table.

But what of aging brains and acoustic memories during the creative process? For example, have I heard someone posit this question and failed to credit him? Does Maureen Dowd sometimes forget she did not create an idea and then fail to credit it? At my age it would be plausible. My son constantly tells me that I forget because I am OLD. His caps. His emphasis. There, I gave credit.

The Dalai Lama and My Mama

I've been reading Barbara Walters' memoirs, Audition. An elderly friend of mine bought the book for two dollars from the Chapel Hill Public Library and passed it on to me.

Every time I think of Barbara Walters, I think of my dad. My father was on his deathbed in Baptist East Hospital in the fall of 2003. I had flown to Louisville to visit him. I had plans to meet two friends, Susan Ward and Kim Maddox, for lunch. My dad was short of breath because he was dying from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. It was my second day in his room, and we'd been over the important stuff. It didn't seem appropriate to waste breath on small talk, so my dad asked me what I would like to watch on his television in his hospital room. I said The View.

"That damn Baba Wawa," my dad said, in an exasperated tone of nearly benign disgruntlement, "I never did like her."

After reading Barbara's memoirs, I realize one thing: Men hate her or they try to seduce her. Harry Reasoner--hated her. Fidel Castro--tried to seduce her.

I'd been reading the memoirs in a fairly linear fashion, which is something that I do on rare occasions when I am entirely fascinated. On Mother's Day weekend, I had asked my husband to read me the chapter on Monica, so I had already skipped ahead a bit. Last night I chose to read the chapter on celebrities. Barbara writes of her visit with the Dalai Lama in that chapter.

Now two friends of mine, Troy Campbell and James Protzman, have recently spoken of the Dalai Lama to me. Troy mentioned the Dalai Lama when he told me about the movie Happiness Is (Troy is an associate producer of the film)and James said that he would most like to interview the Dalai Lama when I interviewed James about his first book, Jesus Swept. So I was clearly at attention while reading this passage from the book, even though it was about thirty minutes past my bedtime of ten o'clock Eastern Time.

I got to the part toward the end of the chapter where Barbara interviewed the Dalai Lama, and he told her that the purpose of life is "'to be happy.'" I had to put the book down. I had an acoustic memory.

It was January of 1987, and my mother was on her deathbed. We were both on her deathbed, actually, because I was lying with her in her bed in her bedroom. I was getting ready to leave Louisville to return to Lexington for the spring semester of my first year of medical school. My mother, realizing that the breast cancer was going to win, turned to me and said, "I want you to always be happy." That was it. The last piece of wisdom my mom ever bestowed.

And yet, it did not seem profound to me. I was climbing, climbing, up and up toward a dream of becoming a physician, and my mom was advising me to be happy. The advice seemed so cliche at the time that I filed it away into my memory archives and never really thought of it too much. To be honest, the advice she gave me one day in the Brown Cancer Center, upon watching a rather plain jane physician walk past us ( "Heather, when you are a doctor, at least put on lipstick in the morning") is advice I have mentioned to my daughter and to my friends because I thought it was clever. It was slightly more directive than, be happy. At that age I really craved substantive advice and lipstick seemed more substantive than happiness.

When I was able to pick the book back up, I mused that Barbara seemed fairly surprised that such an important man gave such simple advice.

Upon reflection, my mother's advice about happiness was much harder to follow than her advice about wearing makeup.

And so on this spring day, when the dog took one look at my inbox and whispered, "There's nothing to edit yet, take me on a walk," I did. We saw a mockingbird chasing a crow away from his turf. I felt amused. When the breeze whispered, "This may be the last spring day," I headed to Southern States for soil and fertilizer and worked on my patio garden past noon without sweating. I found the first tomato on the tomato plant. I felt happy.