Letting Go

Yet another amusing anecdote by David Sedaris in The New Yorker:

When I was in fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the American Tobacco plant in nearby Durham, North Carolina. There we witnessed the making of cigarettes and were given free packs to take home to our parents. I tell people this and they ask me how old I am, thinking, I guess, that I went to the world’s first elementary school, one where we wrote on cave walls and hunted our lunch with clubs. Then I mention the smoking lounge at my high school. It was outdoors, but, still, you’d never find anything like that now, not even if the school was in a prison.

Comments

[Pete]

We had an outdoor "smoking lounge" at my High School (I graduated in '87). I don't think it was that uncommon. We didn't take any field trips to tobacco plants (but I didn't grow up in NC).