Oh Christmas Tree

Like many Americans, I find Christmas trees to be festive and lovely. The smell of pine, the warmth of lights, the ornaments with sentimental value. So I'm not going to rain on this tradition--as I so often do with traditions that have long since ceased to be reflected upon. Rather, on Andrea's suggestion, I am going to offer equally festive and lovely but more eco-friendly alternatives to our current and common habit of chopping down live trees (or buying already-chopped-down trees from Big John or Big Bubba or whomever), dragging them into our homes, stringing them with lights, surrounding them with gifts wrapped in paper, and then--after the parties and the unwrapping and the eggnogging are over, dragging them back out of our homes and into the streets to be taken off as trash.

What would Jesus do?

Well, he might purchase a potted tree that can be replanted and live a long life producing oxygen after Christmas is over. Your local nursery is a wonderful source of such trees.

Or he might go on ebay (yes, Jesus uses ebay) and order a vintage artificial tree that speaks of times and celebrations past and otherwise would end up in a landfill.

Or decorate a tree in your yard. Presents can find other places to look beautiful and await opening inside the home. Have one of your children write Santa a letter to let him know where to leave the electronics.

Or make a family project out of making a tree from scrap materials--cloth, lumber, newspaper. The new family tradition could be to see who comes up with the most creative idea.

Or bring the spirit of sharing back into Christmas by choosing one tree on your street to be the "town tree" that neighbors help decorate.

A lot of people love decorating their homes for Christmas. Some see it as a chore or an obligation. Those in either camp can make the season more fun by challenging themselves to imbue their traditions with a pinch of eco-awareness. I'm thinking of having an edible tree this year: a little rosemary cone tree for the dining room table.

If you've already bought a chopped tree, there's always next year. And remember, when it comes time to take it down--don't just drag it to the trash. Recycle it. For tips, go to www.earth911.com.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

a poem for Fall

Stomping through the ‘Hood on a Recent Evening

with apologies to Robert Frost

Whose leaves these are I think I know.

His house is not on this street though.

He cannot see me seething here.

He’s busy finding things to blow.

My little dog must think it queer

the way I’m tearing out of here,

a garden rake clutched like a sword

and on my face a boarish sneer.

The blinding dust, the deafening roar,

the Marlboro butts at my front door.

More fuel used up for easy’s sake.

I’ve had it; I’m declaring war.

Through storm of trash and twigs I quake

and give my rake a violent shake.

I find the man out near his pool

with blower that I want to break.

“I scream at him, “This rake’s a tool

you use like this: you reach, you pull,

and piles appear. It’s really cool!

And quiet too! You thoughtless fool.

On Layers on Layers

I just moved. That sound you hear is the sound of me riffling through boxes trying to find the flatware.

We downsized on this move. Less space. Fewer things will fit. I see this as a positive thing. Purging is good. Unless you just ate.

But as my partner and I went through things to make decisions like whose grandmother's china wins, I was reminded of certain customs and traditions that involve "things" that I just don't quite understand.

For instance: chargers. Nope, not the kind you juice up your phone battery with. The kind you put under plates. In fact, they are sometimes called "underplates," but even though they've been around since the 1800s, they make less sense to me than, say, underpants. My chef friends and my Martha Stewart type friends (Michele, Kate) will probably fault me for faulting the charger. I suppose using a charger under a plate would make sense to me if one used only a charger. But I was at a dinner party recently where my dinner plate sat atop a charger, which sat atop a placemat, which sat atop a tablecloth, which sat atop a tablecloth liner, which sat atop the table. My filet was touching the bottom of my chin. This seems downright silly to me. I don't even like to own a table that requires I use a little bitty coaster for my water glass. After all, isn't a table something with legs under a flat surface on which one is served food and drink, or dealt a deck of cards?

Another case in point: floor mats in cars. The floor of a car is something you put your feet on. You get in and out of your car a lot. Why do you need the floor of your car to stay pristine? When other people get in it, do you momentarily remove the mat and say, "Look, look how clean and unworn the floor of my car is under the mats! Now, let me put this skank mat down and you can get in." Mats are also a safety hazard, as accidents are sometimes caused by their getting stuck under one of the foot pedals. This is why I love my matless Honda Element. Go on, root your ratty mudcaked boots around on my car floor! I can clean it just as easily as I could clean a mat.

And that flatware I'm riffling around for? My partner insists it should go in a handy little flatware tray, which separates knives from forks from spoons from our one chopstick. Really? Isn't it enough that it's in a drawer? I recognize the forks because they have tines, not because they're in the left-most section of the tray. The spoon is the thing I'm right-side-up in on one side, and upside-down in on the other. Plus, it stresses me out when there are too many forks to fit in the fork section and so some of the forks have to move in with the knives. I get all OCD when that happens. But if all the flatware is just living communally in the drawer, resting on the bottom of the drawer itself, I relax. (Don't even get me started on contact paper.)

Some types of layering make sense. A three-layer cake, for instance. Because one layer of cream cheese icing is never enough. A down vest over your hoodie on a winter morning. When the sun comes out, you shed a layer. The case I bought for my iPhone, because I have dropped it 720 times and the case has kept it from croaking.

So have me over for dinner, please. Make me a layer cake. But don't serve it on a plate on a charger on a place mat on a table cloth . . . well. You know.

Second Home

Seems most of my friends have been spending time this summer at various "second" homes to which they have access. They don't own them, but their family members do, or friends; or they know people who know people, you know?

A beach house at Pawley's Island, or Amelia Island, or Kiawah. A condo in Montana. A mountain house in North Georgia. A place in Naples, or Destin. A friend. An in-law. A mom. A dad. A sister. A business partner. It's the summer of free places to stay. And good thing. We're in a recession.

With Labor Day approaching, no doubt more friends will be escaping, facilitated by free accommodations.

I'm headed to Tennessee for Labor Day, to see my parents and spend some time at their second home--my dad's wooden storage shed in the back yard beside the garden. I'm not taking my bathing suit, or sunblock, or hiking boots, or a case of wine, but I am looking forward to it. My folks are of modest means; "stock" to them is something before "yard" or after "live," and they never made enough money to buy a vacation or weekend home where the smell of salt hangs on the breeze or the front yard slopes into a lake. But I sure never felt I was missing anything. The one home we have always smells like bacon or country ham, warm chocolate cake or peach cobbler.

This trip home, though, I'll mostly forego the kitchen to hang out in the shed, where I'll find a few years' worth of canned goods that will long outlive my parents, mason jars of liquor hidden behind jars of home-made tomato juice, a cardboard barrel filled with old golf balls my dad collected at the driving range where he worked after he retired, shelves of half-organized tools, electrical tape, twine, car wax, leather work gloves, and a mower--dried grass clinging to its belly.

These are the things that transport me. Sure, it would be nice to be sipping rum on a beach during the holiday weekend, my mind carried away on the wings of seagulls; but instead I will close my eyes in the dark shed--blackbirds lined on its eave--and breathe deeply the scents of sixty years of hard work, yard work, engine grease, gasoline, slightly ruined winesap apples, and sweat. If I close my eyes tightly enough, I will feel, rather than the splash of a wave, the slight spray of Dad's aftershave, even though it's been forty years since I used to stand on the toilet seat and watch him shave.

That imagined sound of blade scraping wet stubble will be more refreshing to me than rain. My father was recently diagnosed with dementia, and while he has many moments of lucidity, his memory is fraught with holes. So I relish remembering.

I remember the lines of shave cream disappearing down the drain with his facial hair those mornings before work; dandelions disappearing row-at-a-time, their seed heads fragmenting and floating away as he walked back and forth with the mower in our yard on Saturdays after the dew had dried; golf balls lost in the neighbors' bushes when he hit them too hard while practicing his pitch shots; oil from the Chevy dripping into the pan on the driveway, all but Dad's feet sliding under the car as he worked; inches of scotch evaporating from the bottle between midnight and daylight. What I don't remember are the years evaporating, yet they have.

This Labor Day, I will try to collect what they left like beach glass, and to cherish the years ahead like the last hours of a summer at the lake.

You Don't Eat Asbestos

Yesterday one of my friends called me a food snob. It's not the first time I've been assigned the label. I started thinking about what that means, really, because it does not seem appropriate to me. For instance, I hate caviar. I'd rather have a hamburger than a filet mignon. The very idea of pate or foie gras makes me sick. I am not a great cook. How snobby can I be?

This friend and my other friends, and my family members, and my partner--all the folks who've called me a food snob--do so because I'm unusually particular about what I put into my body. I prefer my beef to be from cows who've grazed on grass (their natural diet) and not corn-fed in a factory doing the bump with the other cows squished in next to them. I prefer my ice-cream to contain milk, cream, sugar, vanilla, and a dash of salt rather than milk solids, corn syrup, artificial flavor, guar gum, carrageenan, soy lecithin, and maltodextrin. I would rather pay two bucks more for my collards and buy them from a local organic farmer than to buy them from a grocery store to which they've been shipped from 1000 miles away after being grown downstream from the above-mentioned cow factory and sprayed with pesticides. In short, I value knowing where my food comes from --when possible-- and knowing that the practices used to grow or raise it and get it to my table are good for the environment, good for the food itself, and good for me. 

Now, if I were a builder, or even a home-buyer, and I told you I'd rather have a house made of brick than one made of asbestos siding, that I'd prefer my foundation to be solid rather than shabby, that I thought the value and livability of the house would improve if the kitchen floor were made of bamboo or tile and not peel and stick linoleum squares, would I be a house snob? Or would I be an astute person with an eye to the future? (Note: Somewhere between two- and three-thousand people, give or take, die yearly of asbestos-related malignant mesothelioma in the U.S. 59 million Americans are obese, and suffer from all the concomitant maladies.)

If you're car shopping and you want a hybrid with great gas mileage and high safety rating over a flimsily built car or a gas guzzler, are you a car snob or smart buyer? 

I learned--and continue to learn--a lot of what little I know about good (snobby?) food practices from my friend Michele. (http://amidlifeisis.blogspot.com) She has her own example of a friend who regularly eats boxed frozen meals containing, among other things, the following ingredients: sodium phosphate, whey, citric acid, annatto color, bleached flour, carrageenan, and cheese flavor, but almost would rather die than use toilet paper that "pills." I won't point out the irony around the points of ingress and egress.

My partner is a vegetarian, which I admire and respect. I tried life without meat once and didn't feel so great. She respects that. But it's interesting to me that if she asks whether there's pork in the collards, that's fine. Yet, if I'd rather my dessert not contain fractionated palm kernel oil or high fructose corn syrup, people want to hit me in the face with a pie. 

Maybe it's my approach. I admittedly can be obstinate, opinionated, acerbic. But at least I'm not artificially sweetened. Or maybe it's that questioning people's food choices is just too personal, like questioning their sexual practices. I don't know. Either way, I'm probably not going to shut up about it completely. 

It's not just that I try to take care of my health. I am fully aware that I could be hit by a car tomorrow or die next week of stress related to my concern over hydrogenated oils. But I do feel better and think better and make better decisions when I take care of my body, when I eat well and exercise. And it's bigger than that; it's about not buying into the practices and prosperity of big agribusiness, which puts small farmers out of business, produces greenhouse gases and bacteriological contamination, and negatively affects human health and the health of the land. And that's just the tip of the melting iceberg. I'd rather not have my potato sprayed with twelve pesticide applications (that's the average number) before I buy it.  

Not everyone can afford to make smarter food choices, which is a travesty that I recognize. Hell, I can't really afford it either. But I'd rather buy wild caught fish than have a nice couch, and if you don't believe me stop by my house sometime. We all have our priorities. But the people who really cannot afford to reject the products of big agribusiness in favor of more healthful choices will never be able to if those of us who can afford it just don't bother. I'm lucky to have friends who are great cooks and share my interest in supporting local farmers, if not my adamancy. I hope they think they're lucky to have me, too--their friend the food snob.

Hump Day Manners and Friday's Poem Merged on a Thursday

I had no time for manners yesterday, and tomorrow I'll be on vacation and unable to post Friday's poem. So today I've turned to one of my favorite poets to help me kill two birds with one stone, as the saying unfortunately goes. Enjoy.

Manners

For a Child of 1918 My grandfather said to me as we sat on the wagon seat, "Be sure to remember to always speak to everyone you meet." We met a stranger on foot. My grandfather's whip tapped his hat. "Good day, sir. Good day. A fine day." And I said it and bowed where I sat. Then we overtook a boy we knew with his big pet crow on his shoulder. "Always offer everyone a ride; don't forget that when you get older," my grandfather said. So Willy climbed up with us, but the crow gave a "Caw!" and flew off. I was worried. How would he know where to go? But he flew a little way at a time from fence post to fence post, ahead; and when Willy whistled he answered. "A fine bird," my grandfather said, "and he's well brought up. See, he answers nicely when he's spoken to. Man or beast, that's good manners. Be sure that you both always do." When automobiles went by, the dust hid the people's faces, but we shouted "Good day! Good day! Fine day!" at the top of our voices. When we came to Hustler Hill, he said that the mare was tired,  so we all got down and walked, as our good manners required.  Elizabeth Bishop

Friday's Poem

Been thinking today about my feet. I have a blister from running. I need to paint my toenails. And later I'm going shoe shopping. All of which will help explain why today I've chosen to share this particular poem:

Pedestrian

The salesman's shoulder and a silver shoe horn helped me climb

into a pair of red Buster Browns with black trim and laces,

plod around the JC Penney admiring my sublime

feet. I slept in those shoes, dreamed that I was going places.

First week of first grade I got a pair of black canvas Keds

with rubber soles and three parallel white stripes on each side.

I felt balanced, could grip the waxed floors with groovy tread

that left its mark. They never knew I was petrified

of slipping into view, just as scared of disappearing.

At recess I hid in the playground's concrete tunnels,

kicked rocks at the kids playing near the openings, clearing

my escape route, imagining myself running until

the scenery changed. It did. My shoes were different

in my teens, when I tried on sex and higher heels for size,

lost my head in the halls. Still I carried an inherent

need for groundedness, gave up dresses and skinny thighs

for a chance to plant my feet in cleats and take the track,

loved the crunch of spikes striking asphalt, flinging gravel

in my wake, scared of being caught, never looking back

to see what was behind me. Even now when I travel

I watch my feet, sure only that I need to keep moving,

wear neon sneakers to which Phidippides would pray,

live as though quickness were a certain way of proving

worth, like a firefly, whose rapid light protects and gives away.

Jennifer Wheelock, 2006

Friday's Poem

On Collaboration

If you bring an umbrella, I will bring rain.

If you bring a pasture, I’ll be cricket, or cow.

If you bring shoes, I will offer my feet.

If you come with four walls, I’ll have a table, two chairs.

If you plow, I’ll follow with seeds.

If you lay a floor, I will prop palm fronds for a roof.

If you write a letter, I’ll lick the stamp.

If you come with flashcards, I’ll bring my best guesses.

If you have a canvas, I will stretch.

If you read a book, I will dog ear pages.

If only your right leg remains, I’ll hop on my left one.

If you come with nothing, I will throw a vase of clay to keep it in.

Jennifer Wheelock 2009

Hump Day Manners--Trash Talk

It's Wednesday. I think. To be honest, this week Monday felt like I was working on Sunday. By Tuesday I was sure it had to be Friday. But I digress. 

It's Wednesday, and it's trash day. Today's manners post is about not being a jerk to the people who pick up your trash. I was noticing in my neighborhood this morning how people, in general, respond in one of two ways to the men and women who are collecting their rotten banana peels, dog shit, coffee grounds, used tissues, and recycled vodka bottles. They either ignore them altogether, or they act mildly irritated by their intrusion into the neighborhood. Why is this? It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. And you'd be better be glad they do. Anybody in New York during the garbage collectors' strike?

I've always been averse to a hierarchy of treatment toward others. Why should I treat my doctor with respect and my trash collector with disdain? Both offer valuable services. Why should I coo over my hair stylist and tip him lavishly and treat the woman at the dry cleaner with bitter impatience. Oh god, maybe I'm a socialist. Or Danish.

Whatever. I suppose I do have egalitarian tendencies. One of my mother's favorite quotes is, "There but for the grace of God go I." (She's also fond of saying, "If you're too lazy to make the bed, why not just stay in it?") But it's really my father who lives by this creed. He treats everyone--pharmacist to farmer--with the same degree of respect. I worked for a while, when I lived in Hollywood, for a TV celebrity. He used to run out when the garbage collectors rolled up and dole out hundred dollar bills to each of them. And he'd say to me, "No one ever shows appreciation for what they do." Now, I'm not suggesting we all start tipping the trash men. But I do try to remind myself daily that one day I could be the garbage collector, or the waiter, or the person mowing your yard. When I walk through the park, if I speak to my neighbor who owns the local gift shop, I also try to speak to the guy who sleeps on the bench. 

Sure, there are days when I'm rude and impatient. But if it's one of those days, I don't pick favorites. I'm as rude to the banker as I am to store clerk or the garbage collector. 

So spend one day--tomorrow maybe?--paying attention to how you dole out patience and kindness. Do you treat your peers at work with deference and the maintenance workers with indifference? If so, let me introduce you to my dad.

Hump Day Manners

My friend Michele suggested I start a Wednesday advice column on etiquette for the New World. I hate to disappoint her, so today is the first installment. And, in typical fashion, I'm not going to wait for you to ASK me for advice, I'm going to offer it unsolicited. We'll start easy, with just a few behaviors I see regularly that I think--in the interest of living a better life in a better world--should cease and desist:

1. spitting on the sidewalk. Unless you're choking to death on a ball of phlegm or have swallowed a small rodent, wait until you find a toilet, a sink, or an area overgrown with ivy.

2. tossing your cigarette butt onto the ground. It is, apparently a little known fact that cigarette filters are resistant to degradation. They are made from cellulose acetate. They contain the chemicals filtered from the cigarettes, which can leach into our water supplies. And they can start fires. That thing in your car, under the radio? That's an ashtray.

3. waiting until you get up to the drive-through ATM to fill out your deposit slip and count your money. Reasons are self-evident to all but the most self-absorbed.

4. leaving your shopping cart in the middle of the parking space or lot. I mean really. Are you THAT lazy? 

5. not picking up the apples that rolled off the top of the pile onto the grocery store floor when you were fishing for your perfect, unbruised, shiny Red Delicious. Don't make me throw one at your head.

6. talking on your mobile phone while interacting with a store clerk. Okay, I admit to having done this. But it's just so rude. What if the clerk did the same thing? We'd be livid.

7. parking on or over the line and thus taking up two parking spaces instead of one. Your car is just really not THAT special. If you're that worried about door dings, leave it in the garage.

8. showing up empty handed. Do you want to be invited back?

9. not wiping down the gym equipment after you've sweated all over it. Ew. Your mother doesn't work out here.

10. Giving unsolicited advice. OOPS.

For my friend: Friday's poem. Not really Friday. Not really a poem.

http://images8.cafepress.com/product/360985638v3_350x350_Front_Color-Black.jpg

Poem for Friday

This Friday's poem is by Pablo Neruda. It is a nod to the little things that make our lives pleasurable, and tasty. And a nod to the margarita I'll surely have later.

Ode To Salt

This salt
in the saltcellar
I once saw in the salt mines.
I know
you won't
believe me,
but
it sings,
salt sings, the skin
of the salt mines
sings
with a mouth smothered
by the earth.
I shivered in those solitudes
when I heard
the voice of
the salt
in the desert.
Near Antofagasta
the nitrous
pampa
resounds:
a broken
voice,
a mournful
song.

In its caves
the salt moans, mountain
of buried light,
translucent cathedral,
crystal of the sea, oblivion
of the waves.

And then on every table
in the world,
salt,
we see your piquant
powder
sprinkling
vital light
upon
our food. Preserver
of the ancient
holds of ships,
discoverer
on
the high seas,
earliest
sailor
of the unknown, shifting
byways of the foam.
Dust of the sea, in you
the tongue receives a kiss
from ocean night:
taste imparts to every seasoned
dish your ocean essence;
the smallest,
miniature
wave from the saltcellar
reveals to us
more than domestic whiteness;
in it, we taste infinitude.

Initial Thoughts

As we were unpacking some of her grandmother's ceramic dishes and kitchen platters yesterday, Andrea showed me tiny initials etched into the bottom of each piece. These aren't the ceramicists' initials. The pieces were all signed by the artists who made them. The initials belong to Andrea's grandmother herself, who announced ownership of serving vessels by carving her own initials next to the artists'. If we name and christen yachts, why not gravy boats?

I asked if grandmother had grown up during the Depression. Yes, she had.

Both my mother and father, products of the Great Depression, have a tendency to sign their initials or names on items that belong to them. All of my mother's books--like the high school English Lit textbook she saved and gave to me--have her name written in perfect cursive inside the front covers. My dad once wrote his last name on every golf club head cover in his set, and also on the outside of the bag. He often wrote his name on the underside of baseball cap bills or inside golf hats (to say nothing of his more humorous habit of writing "front" and "back" on the appropriate ends of his golf hats--on the OUTSIDE--so he could put them on quickly and correctly). My sister and brother-in-law gave him an expensive silver lighter one year for his birthday, before he quit smoking. Within minutes of unwrapping it, he was in his workroom etching tiny initials--NTW--into it with a nail. It never occurred to him to have it engraved professionally, much to my sister's chagrin. My mother puts her name on umbrella handles, her initials on magazines she lends to friends. 

So what is this near-obsession with laying claim to things? Maybe it's the consequence of having very little in the first place and working damn hard for what you do have. Whatever the reason, it makes me think: What if we were as eager to initial our thoughts and actions? What if after every human interaction we had to take an indelible marker that writes on air and scribble our monikers on the moment? What if each time I accidentally dinged someone's car door with my own, I had to write my name beside the dent? What if we had to initial mean-spirited thoughts and hang them on our heads, or--if they're about other people--write them down, sign them, and give them to the people about whom we are thinking them? What if every person who walks by a homeless person or zooms past a stray dog on the side of the road had to sign his or her name on the body of the one in need? What if when you're too lazy to return the grocery story cart and you leave it in a parking space, you have to tie a tag around it that bears your signature?

There's something about writing it down--even if only metaphorically--that makes something more real. My mom probably thinks writing her initials on the bottom of a table lamp makes it more "hers." Once when I was teaching college writing, a student in my class muttered "faggot." I don't even remember if it was about a classmate or a character in a book we were reading. But my reaction was to have him--and every student who giggled about it--get out a piece of paper and write down every derogatory term they could think of for races and classes and types of people. Then they had to sign their names and hand it in. I explained that I didn't want terms they used or condoned, just ones they'd heard or seen in the course of their lives. 

They refused at first. They were mortified. They said that writing it down made it permanent and made them feel like they "meant it more" and that if they signed it I would have it in my files and . . . My point exactly.

So, here's to Andrea's grandmother and my parents and the idea of initialing everything--laying claim. While using a Sharpie to sign a coffee mug might be a little silly, I'm going to see what it's like to sign metaphorically everything I do and think for a while. Maybe I'll be a better person.

A Poem for Friday

My friend Mary wrote to me today and said that love is probably the most important thing in the world. Hard to contest that, I suppose. It made me think of one of my favorite poems. This will begin a pattern. From now on, Friday's blog entry will be a poem. Because poetry can help us live a better life in a better America.

Love Is Not All by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; 
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink 
And rise and sink and rise and sink again; 
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, 
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; 
Yet many a man is making friends with death 
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. 
It well may be that in a difficult hour, 
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, 
Or nagged by want past resolution's power, 
I might be driven to sell your love for peace, 
Or trade the memory of this night for food. 
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Smoking Guns

Last night I met some friends out for dinner and wine for Dining Out for Life, the annual event that sees participating restaurants all over the country donating a portion of their proceeds from the evening to the fight against AIDS. It's a popular and worthy cause.

Dining al fresco at a Virginia-Highland restaurant, in Atlanta, however, I couldn't help but be struck by the irony as we were seated next to two chain smokers. So I died a little as I was Dining Out for Life. They smoked even as they were eating. The cigarettes were long and seemed to burn forever, indelibly. One of my friends had an allergy attack. I got a headache. None of us could taste our food. Well, either that or I was eating Crab a la Ashes. 

Think I sound like a prudish pain in the ass? Well I don't give a damn. Smokers who light up in public places, particularly eating establishments, are one of two things: clueless or rude. 

I don't want your lung cancer. Keep it for yourself please. And I don't want to smell like a stale cigarette butt--that's your perfume not mine. You can blow your smoke on me without my complaining when I can play Russian Roulette with a pistol to your head without your protesting.

For those of you who share my concern about this, I have recommendations:

1. Take one of those tiny hand-held fans with you when you dine out. When people light up near you and you can't taste your food, or breathe, blow the smoke right back at them. They should thank you. They're getting twice the toxins for their money. And the fans are so small you can put one in your lap or beside a table tent beer list and barely be noticed. Here is a link where you can order such gadgets:

http://www.safetycentral.com/bapoponefan.html

Better yet--buy one of those water pistols with a fan attached so you can mist the smoker:

http://www.safetycentral.com/noname125.html

2. Or you can take a less-renegade route and appeal to your local government to ban smoking in public places. In Atlanta, where I live, Dekalb County has done just that. The powers that be in Fulton County, my county, have not yet been convinced. 

3. You also have the option of talking to the restaurateur or the manager and asking that the establishment itself do a better job of segregating smokers and non-smokers. Oddly, some of them haven't seemed to notice that smoke does not stop at the sign that reads "No Smoking Section." It can't read.

Stop Talking About It and Do It

Here's way to kill several birds of prey with one tiny stone: 

If you don't grow your own food, which many of us urbanites and suburbanites do not, order your food from a CSA instead of going to the grocery store. You will support local agriculture, thus supporting the local economy. You will support your local ecosystem, and make a positive impact--that is a lesser impact--on the environment in general. You will reduce traffic in your area and your own frustrating time in the car. You will avoid long lines. You will improve your own health astronomically. You will be getting food, by and large, that is free from preservatives, hormones, antibiotics, chemicals, and other things we should not really be putting in our bodies unwittingly. 

There are also more abstract advantages to ordering from a CSA. When's the last time you bought some greens with real grit on them and had the earthy pleasure of rinsing them clean? When's the last time you bought carrots still capped with the green flowery stem, like the one on Bugs Bunny's carrots? When is the last time you bought honey from the beekeeper, or jam from the woman who made it, or pork from someone who actually cared about the pig's quality of life and death? 

Ordering and receiving from a CSA has changed the way I walk into my kitchen. Oh, I still enter through the door, but I go in with a twinkle in my eye, excited about going through the frig and discovering things that actually look and smell and feel like FOOD. 

And it is SO DARNED EASY. Go to this link:

http://www.localharvest.org/

Type in your zip code to find a CSA in your area. My CSA--Moore Farms and Friends of Alabama--makes it so easy. I order online. I choose my pick-up location and day. I stop by on my way home from work on that day and my order is boxed up with my name on it.

Try it! For your health, for the environment, for your local economy. For the greater good and plain ol' goodness.