It was two days before Christmas and the mall parking lot was filled with tired shoppers and slush. Both had been ground to messy, tired pools by the frantic season, but somewhere amid the ugliness, something gleamed.

There. Just behind the tire of a car streaked with mud and road salt, sitting like a gem in a pool of filth, a small square box. On another day, it would have been a prosaic sight. Today, as I sloshed on toward another store filled with more desperate faces, this little box looked like a pirate’s chest stuffed with riches.

It was a cigarette pack and I could tell, through some twisted smoker’s intuition, that it was crammed full of those cancerous jewels.

I could have gotten a pony under the Christmas tree and a helicopter, too. But no gift would have been as serendipitous and desirous as this one. This was a gift from the tobacco fields and the evil-eyed, finger-tapping overlords who profit from them.

For a week or so, I’d been trying to quit the vile things with some success. I scrounged from strangers here and there, but I’d avoided the temptation to stuff a fat pack in my pocket.

Trying to panhandle cigarettes from strangers these days turns out to be a good step in the quitting process. There was a time when leeching smokes was easy. Smokers then were an easygoing group who tended to display yellow-fingered loyalty to people who shared the vice. That was before the war on cigarettes was on and the cost of them rose higher than the most tightly blown smoke ring.

Try bumming a cigarette in front of a bar or restaurant in these difficult times: You’d better have a wad of cash or a gun and robber’s mask in hand.

Which is why it was both wonderful and unfortunate that I found that misplaced pack among all the wet boots and muddy snow. I snatched it up with the stealth and speed of a gecko lapping an insect from the grass. I fondled it a little and may have uttered soft words of love and gratitude. Then I ripped the pack open, plucked out one of those killer cylinders, and lit it on the flames of craving.

Or some such drama. The point is, that ill-placed pack marked the end of the nearly heroic attempt to knock off the things for good. Willpower should transcend temptation but it is not always so. And while I will never use it as an excuse for my failure, I have occasionally ruminated quietly on the matter with the mantra: dumb son-of-a … Who loses a pack of smokes when they cost roughly the same as a compact car?

When you publicly identify yourself as a smoker, you wear your lungs on your sleeve. Different groups will come forward with varying forms of “tsk-tsk.” One group will swoon, fan themselves and gasp: “He smokes! And I thought he was a nice boy!”

Get a sedative, lady.

There are the former smokers, who quit a year ago, 10 years ago, or a half-century back, when you could buy cigarettes for a nickel and smoke them in operating rooms. They will tell you how it’s done in lectures that would make Knute Rockne tremble.

One friend gave it up for good after surgeons opened his chest and put in machinery to assist his heart. Another gave it up the white-knuckle way, going at it unaided because a medical condition prevented him from using patches, gum, inhalers or nicotine alternatives shot directly into the eyeballs. That’s the tough-guy way to go about it. That’s true grit.

And it makes weenies like me look like simpering children.

An older man I know smoked for 50 years. Then he woke up one early morning and found he could not breathe; could not take in air, could not expel any. It was a predawn horror that made him regret every cigarette he’d touched in a long life of reeking haze. He got his lungs back at last and never sucked smoke into them again.

Those people are both menace and inspiration. The idea, of course, is to stub out your last smoke before you find yourself bent over in the middle of the night praying for just one breath; before a stroke takes away the best of your years; before a surgeon has to come for your voice box.

We all want an easy ride though, so the worst of the withdrawal can be managed with nicotine sucked through lozenges, chewed through gum, outwitted with prescription medication. There are magnets you can clip to your ear that will allegedly inform key portions of your brain that smoking is disgusting.

And the yellow plague is disgusting, due as much to the hold it has over the smoker as to the stinking unhealthiness of it. Fortunately, the rules to combating the problem have remained largely unchanged.

If you don’t smoke, don’t start. If you’re already there, quit. And dude, if you’re going to drop a fresh pack of the damn things in a mall parking lot, don’t do it the one time of year I have to go shopping.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail him at [email protected].