THINKING LIFE'S A DRAG? THIS BUTT'S FOR YOU.

Byline: Gail Tzipporah Local View

EVERY so often, a new trend will surface only to later become a scourge on the face of humanity, an embarrassment, a boil on the underbelly of mankind. Take certain celebrities. One day they are in, and the next day they are out. Life just works that way sometimes.

The current governor is another case in point. He started out as a popular guy, as did his predecessor. Both of them made some mistakes, made some people angry and barely have been heard from since.

But the most recent group to land on the chopping block is smokers, which is something up with which I will not put. Their demise came about slowly but surely. First, they had to eat in nonsmoking sections in restaurants. Now they aren't allowed to partake of their habit in public buildings, which is rather unfair considering some of the wheeling and dealing that supposedly goes on in them.

Call me crazy, call me softheaded, but I've always rather liked the lot. I believe it's because I was weaned, loved and raised by the lot. My great- grandfather was a smoker. A man of habit, he went to synagogue three times a day, drank schnapps from a shot glass and smoked filterless Camel cigarettes.

He also had a ritual we followed whenever I came to visit. Barely able to walk and in his 70s, he would reach out from his cloth-covered chair, draw circles in my open palm and then pinch my cheeks. Sometimes, just to be entertaining, he would blow double smoke rings into the air that intertwined then faded away. When he died in his 90s, it wasn't from lung cancer; it was from old age.

My aunts smoked, too. After a family dinner, during dessert, they would lean against the table and laugh and talk and smoke. I thought they looked elegant and relaxed as took drags from their cigarettes with orange and pink lipstick.

Some of my parents' friends were also smokers. The morning after one of my parents' dinner parties, after the smell of percolated coffee had filled the house, I would go downstairs searching for cake remnants and see snuffed out cigarette butts lying in china white ashtrays and know that women in fitted black dresses and men in dark suits and wing-tipped shoes had been there the night before, talking and laughing and enjoying the night away.

I am not blind to the consequences the habit. I have seen the poster of the egg yolk with the cigarette butt snuffed out in it. I know what happened to the Marlboro Man. I have been subjected to lectures about the dangers of second-hand smoke, but I also know there are things far worse for the environment than smokers. Take cars, for example.

I once lived above a freeway, and nary a year went by that I didn't have to wipe away grease and grime from my ceiling fan and from the hood of my stove. I occasionally had smokers in my place, but I know that their cigarettes never emitted that kind of black grease. If that kind of mess was landing on my fan, I could only imagine what it was doing to lungs. Here are two sets of lungs, the healthy pink ones and mine.

I know that nicotine is a drug, but then so is just about everything else that one can put into an orifice. Take chocolate. The day after a holiday like Valentine's Day or a candy sale, I am often no good to anybody, not even to myself, as I lie in a chocolate-induced coma with a cold washcloth on my forehead falling in and out of coherence.

It's no matter. To me, smokers are Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in ``Casablanca.'' They are a white-haired old man blowing smoke rings into the air to entertain his great-grandchildren. They are relatives talking and laughing at the dinner table. And they are sexy and funny and honest. But they are not like some criminal element to be banished from polite society.

And sometimes I just wish that certain people would just fall off the bandwagon so we could all just get along.