I’ve always felt that I was much loved. People loved me. My mother loved me. My father loved me. And when he sat me on his knee and blew smoke in my ear I knew that he loved me.
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That’s why I don’t exactly believe this thing about second-hand smoke. Of course I might still get cancer, but I’ve been around smokers all my life.
My father said, “That isn’t what I want. I want paper to make my cigarettes.” So I went back. It was a little book with an orange cover. It had a rubber band around it, and inside were all these little papers that he’d put his tobacco in. The tobacco was in a red can, Velvet Tobacco. He would put tobacco in the paper and then roll it and spit on it to seal the ends.
So the sister wrote, “To Josephine Ryan for the highest percentage in arithmetic, December, 1922.”
