Another Public Service Announcement from Dr. Loman and the Truth Council

Outside Barbara Holland's little house in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a cold drizzle falls through a thick fog. Inside the house, it's warmer and drier and the fog isn't water vapor; it's cigarette smoke.

Smiling, she offers her visitor a choice: "You want to go outside and get pneumonia or stay in here and get lung cancer?"

She's a wisp of a woman with short white hair and a face that's weather-beaten enough to be called craggy. . . .

When a little old lady writes an ode to booze, it behooves a local reporter to drop by for a visit, bearing a bottle of wine. She breaks out a corkscrew and two wineglasses, which are quickly filled.

"Cheers!" she says. Glasses clink and she takes a sip. Then she lights up a Tareyton 100.

"Stuck up here on this mountain, I have only two hobbies," she says. She raises the cigarette: "This is one." She raises the wineglass: "This is the other."

She already wrote her ode to smoking in an earlier book, "Endangered Pleasures," . . . . That book, still in print after a dozen years, turned her into a quirky spokeswoman for an older, slower, less driven, more gregarious way of life.

"I'm in favor of a little more sociability, a little more merriment, maybe even a little more singing and dancing," she says. "Jeepers, I'm so old that I remember when we all used to sing all the time."

Really? How old are you?

"None of your [fucking] business," she says.

She's 25. How many times do we have to tell you? Don't smoke.