Ashtray

I and Lil Feather were in the supermarket buying something for dinner when out of the blue, as if remembering an ingredient for a meal, approached a stocker and followed him down to the section where the supermarket was already selling dry goods. I in turn had to follow them, pushing the orange trolley where the basket for grocery was put less I lost them. I usually know what Lil Feather wants to buy or look for in the supermarket that the pace of our steps was abreast with each other. But this time it was different. I barely had an idea what she was up to when she approached the stocker.

Several aisles behind them I saw her and the stocker veered in a section of the dry goods department. Then she emerged walking towards me and shaking her head as if frustrated.

“What are you looking for,” I asked.

“Astray.” Still looking left and right as to where we could find it.

It was days since she decided that I should get an ashtray if I could not hold myself from smoking inside the house. She said to pacify my mother and all the members of the household from the smell of cigarette butts that I usually surreptitiously put in the recesses of the kitchen.

I read somewhere that if you smoke one stick every hour of the day then you can be already labeled as a chain-smoker. I usually smoke at least a stick every half an hour so that would mean I am already a chain smoker. But the label concerning my smoking habit is begging the question since everybody would see me in the street or in the house not smoking or taking a drag surreptitiously any time of the day. I would say cigarette has been my closest companion and a very handy friend whenever I and her cousin Red Horse would create a drama out of nothing during the night. I have smoked since my teenage years as far as I remember. I hardly know whether it was due because of my environment (my father too was a heavy smoker one time of his life) or it was what they called the product of peer pressure. I recall smoking in some plushy disco house that was popular for those famous and wealthy people; I pretending to be cool or ‘in’ as I took a drag of strong Marlboro red amid the blinking lights of strobe lights and empty bottles of San Miguel beer. I recall too not getting any cravings for nicotine dosage the next day when I answered the call of nature in our house so I said to myself that smoking has no hold of me.

But back to my story, I am already held hostage by my vice and the only consolation I could give to my household was to make my bad habit not a cause of their comfort and the cleanliness of the house.

So Lil Feather could not find an ashtray for me. There was none that the supermarket/department store was selling. We had to think of an ingenious way to solve this problem as if solving this were saving our lives from some deluge or curse.

We passed by the aisle where dining plates were displayed. We thought of a ceramic were you usually put dip as a replacement for real ashtray. We could not find any fitting design: the dip holder was usually too hollow or too shallow and sold for many pieces that buying them was close to pure desperate insanity.

Now I asked myself where are those days when smoking was held as a respectable and sign of being a man of the world been that ashtray is something that you can buy everywhere like candy. The world right now was persecuting smokers left and right. You can no longer smoke inside a jeepney which when I was young me and my high school buddies would enjoy without the fear of the driver or somebody in the jeepney telling us to put the lights off.

I said we can look for it instead in the National Bookstore, which I now think was a stupid idea. We found no ashtray of course in the bookstore.

The answer only came later on when I thought of the hardware as a possible place where we could find one. And there we found one. A plastic ashtray designed like a miniature pot where you can flick your ash there and it would slide through the middle where there was a hole. Yes, it was made in China.