Interesting recollections, and since I am only a few years younger than you, many that I can relate to!

With the many, many, many restrictions on public smoking, except for some bars, and some restaurants and cafés, times have certainly changed here in the U.S., and the opportunities to view smokers publicly have certainly diminished significantly.

As soon as I was old enough to drive, I spent many a weekend day at the local urban mall in high school, and I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to shop in the ubiquitous presence of countless attractive women puffing away freely as they walked from store to store; the fond memories abound...of being in a perpetual faint haze of smoke and baseline arousal at so many turns...

Now that I am older, and live in a world filled with paranoia over the presence of second-hand smoke in virtually any public place, I find that my interests have also gone somewhat "underground", and now often dwell in a realm of the inner places of my mind and imagination.

For me, the attraction of The Fetish has always been more about the psychological symbolism of smoking than the actual act of smoking itself, so I have found the public restrictions less troubling than some, and find something as simple as the mere presence of a pack of cigarettes in a woman's purse standing in line with me at a store to be enough to provide me with an abundance of fantasy material, since I suddenly bring all of my own "psychological baggage" to bear on the experience of seeing her.

But I am also glad to have had the experience of being in the presence of such an omnipresence of female smoking as I grew up...

I also often wonder if the present multitude of restrictions on smoking will serve to either increase or decrease the numbers of those who share in our Unusual Desires...since I personally believe that treating smoking as a "Taboo Behavior" is largely responsible for much of the *Erotic Charge* of smoking in the first place; i.e., when it does happen, the act of seeing smoking these days takes on much more "signigicance" for a young girl or boy than it might have for either you or I when we were children and adolescents...