10-2-01, Voice in the Crowd, 545 words
So, what's wrong with dipping snuff?
By Pete Chaney
IPS Features
“My mother dips snuff.”
That’s the way I started a column some years ago.
My mother and father were alive then and I was editor-columnist on the
hometown weekly newspaper. I wrote
about how she and her mother and sisters all enjoyed their snuff.
The powdered tobacco came in a small metal can with a screw on top.
Tube Rose, I believe was their brand name.
It has been a long time.
I do remember their going out in the woods to pick a
certain tree to cut a small branch from it.
This would be made into a brush with its frayed end for spreading the
snuff.
Historically, snuff was once sniffed up the nostrils to
promote a stimulating sneeze. By
the time my mother got to it, snuff was dumped in the mouth and brought its
nicotine to the body. There was
always the spit cup nearby, where excess fluids could be deposited.
It wasn’t exactly comfortable to swallow it.
I wrote about how my father was off on defense work during World War II and my mother was driving us home to the farm from town and she was dipping snuff. The window was open and she got rid of the excess fluids in her mouth. She forgot the window was also open to the back seat where I was riding. It looked as if I had the measles.
The newspaper came out on a Monday morning.
After working late to put it to bed, I was still asleep in the morning
when my parents read the copy I brought home with me.
From the bottom of the steps to my attic bedroom, my father’s angry
voice shouted, “Pete, you’ve made your mother cry with that column you
wrote.”
I tried to explain I wasn’t trying to embarrass or
hurt her. All I was saying was if
she wanted to dip snuff that’s okay. Regardless,
she was mother and whatever she was still my mother whether dipping snuff was
fashionable or not. Other family
members liked the column. I won a
local column writing prize that year for it.
To her dying day she kept a copy of that column in her
pocket book.
At that time I belonged to the Rotary Club.
Some of the members slapped me on the back and said it reminded them of
their mother or a relative who enjoyed snuff.
Others were disgusted and said they didn’t understand how I could write
such a column.
Dipping snuff never appealed to me.
Maybe it’s like chewing gum, with a kick.
As a reformed Pall Mall smoker, I thought of chewing tobacco or snuff,
but couldn’t see it. Either I
quit or I don’t.
Whenever I see an ad for snuff I think of my mother and
her Tube Rose. She enjoyed it.
Whether it was messy or not was of no concern.
I know she understood what I was saying before she died, that I loved her
and was saying it in an oblique way.
Also, I was thinking about the expression of the old
Popeye comic strip. “I am what I
am and that’s all that I am.”
Maybe that’s the way we should all be any how.
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