I began sailing in 1973. I attended sailing school, learned how to sail and purchased a 27-foot sloop on which I made frequent mistakes.

Thankfully, the boat was solid, the seas were mostly kind, and so I didn’t kill myself through inexperience.

As the years passed, I continued to log miles under my boat’s keel. With each ocean mile, my hand on the tiller grew steadier, my knowledge of wind and weather more intimate, my ability to handle my boat and trim its sails grew and gradually, sailing began to flow like the undulations of a beautiful ocean wave.

These days, I think of my journeys at sea often. I suppose I see it as an analogy to what we are experiencing in Southeast Michigan right now. In my head, the lessons are loud: in order to do well, in bad weather and in dangerous conditions, you need a solid, stable, well-built boat, a captain with a steady hand under tough conditions, and a willing and able crew ready to give one hand for the boat whilst hanging on with the other.

Under such conditions, the boat and its crew weather almost anything.

So what is my point here, on my grocery blog? Who am I, but a local grocer, a man at the helm of one company in a nation of thousands of companies? I am a father among millions of fathers. I am a man among countless men. I am neither exceptional nor unique. Lest I sound preachy with my metaphors and my musings, let me say that in the midst of a busy day and a tough economy I cannot help but think of the sea, to learn from my experiences in its strong embrace.

Riding breaking, white-capped waves, steering over and around the ones that can destroy the boat and then back on course again once danger has passed. It’s a ready metaphor. Metaphors float all around me, all day long, and if I’ve built any momentum on this blog at all it’s that I want to connect with you my readers, because we are one and the same. My metaphors can become yours or maybe you’ll share yours with me.

So the metaphor of a boat captain? Sure, I am captaining the Hiller’s boat and I am hoping that in some way I can turn Hiller’s into some kind of a local lifeboat for us all. But I know I cannot really save anybody except maybe the people who work for me, maybe my family, maybe myself. Or maybe I have no power at all and just believe in the stories of the skies and the ocean that I have learned to read quite well. And maybe I know – and impart to everyone who wants to listen – that the lessons of the past are the building blocks of the future.

I’ve seen some very stormy times at sea, days when the mackerel skies and mares’-tail clouds foretold something frightening that was on its way and unavoidable. I’ve been lucky more than once.

And yet sometimes I prefer the storm to the calm. Charcoal-painted skies, a ripping breeze, twilight-blue as far as the eye can see. In the toughest times it is the sea that calls me, that takes me away from my desk of piled papers and my hometown’s economic woes. And just when I sink into a dreamy memory of a smooth sail, I remember that even the smoothest sails can turn deadly on a moment and either you’re prepared to survive or you’re not.

When my eldest son Justin turned 21, he and I took off on a little sailboat named Cyrano that I specially built for the occasion. We spent a month riding the seas between Florida, the Bahamas and the Keys.

On a day dark as night, we encountered some very rough weather–but by the time it happened, we had been together for a long time, we trusted the boat, we trusted each other and everything worked out fine. The storm passed while we rode with the waves side by side rather than fight them or each other.

Hiller’s is not just a grocery store; we are a metaphorical lifeboat riding out the storm of this time until we can once again see gentler seas for miles around.

Anything can happen when you’re caught in stormy seas. But if you begin with a sturdy boat, a crew of people determined to survive and maybe a few dozen bottles of rum, you’re damn well going to get through just about anything.

It’s the boat AND the knowledge, sturdy and well-built, that determine the outcome. A well-found sailboat, skippered by an old sea fox whose mind brims with knowledge from hundreds of days at sea, will weather any storm.

The ocean hasn’t changed.   In the worst conditions, we let the boat carry us through the crests and the falls. We do it because we are not an enemy of the sea; we are part of it.

I was a skinny 13-year-old the first time I dragged a match across the scratchy edge of a matchbook and touched it to the end of a Marlboro cigarette. The slim length of the smoke captured between my lips, I closed my eyes and breathed in the acrid aroma of tobacco alight, trying not to cough.

The year was 1961, long before the time when surgeon general warnings accompanied discouraging glances from mothers and other hovering figures disapproving of this habit. Everyone smoked. It was a distinguishing characteristic among long-legged, black-haired European women who oozed the kind of sexuality we pubescent American boys dogged after and it was the hallmark of the leather-jacket-wearing hot-car-driving older boys we aspired to be.

Smoking was the after-touch of a sensual movie scene and it was the badge of being cool. I first lit up unaware of the inherent toxicity of the habit; I certainly had no clue that dragging on cigarettes, even for the 13 years that I was addicted to nicotine, would have more farther-reaching effects on my body than almost any other habit.

I quit after I graduated law school in 1973. It was then, entering into my adult life and all the responsibility and adventure that came with it, that I made the conscious decision to engage only in vices that would give me some beautiful pleasure without the high price to my health that cigarettes demanded.

Smoking gave nothing to me except the shakes when I tried to stop. For a month after my last toke, I walked around with Tootsie Roll Pops hanging out of both sides of my mouth just to simulate the habit while I dragged through withdrawal.

I enjoy an occasional gin martini on a sunlit or grey afternoon and there’s nothing better than a Creekstone steak blood red on the inside. Those are indulgences I can afford because I bookend them with so much more healthy intake of veggies and oily fish that the balance is skewed in my favor by a long-shot.

For decades, I’ve sold cigarettes in my stores because that’s what groceries have always done – make available items that the consumer demands and which society has deemed permissible, despite evidence to the contrary. This month, I acted on a hunch I’ve harbored for years – I pulled all remaining inventory from my shelves and announced that Hiller’s Markets will no longer sell cigarettes.

I’m not trying to lecture, believe me. Every person has the supreme right to choose their habits and behaviors. It’s just that no one has the right to kill others — overtly, subtly or otherwise without cause. Simple proximity to a smoker is not good enough reason to risk death.

Discontinuing cigarette sales is going to cost me a quarter of a million dollars a year in income. And it might cost me even more if I lose customers who are angry that I won’t enable their habit.

Change is easy for no one, so the realization that Hiller’s won’t be an outlet for this vice might hit hard at first. But by next month, my stores’ shelves of smokes will be a distant memory as we move on to more important matters.

That’s ok. There are so many statistics about how smoking not only destroys an individual’s lungs and sets him up for cancer and other deadly ailments – but the secondhand smoke, the off-air breathed in by anyone around a smoker, is just as deadly.

Babies of smokers have higher rates of medical problems than the children of non-smokers. And now there’s research indicating that even the unborn babies of someone who was surrounded by secondhand smoke risks the negative effects of this habit.

That’s a long channel of impact.

I’m glad none of my sons smoke. I wasn’t the best example, smoking for 13 years as I did, well before they were born, and then later allowing the sale of this crutch in my seven stores. It wasn’t something we spoke of; I discouraged adamantly the obvious illegal drugs, issuing and maintaining a no-exceptions policy in my house to marijuana use or even experimentation.

The heinous part of all of this is that cigarettes are legal. So is alcohol and God knows I love a good drink. I sell foods that contain trans-fats. Yes, there are vices for sale at Hiller’s that, if abused, could certainly be the downfall of even the kindest customer. But they will only be hurting themselves.

And…. I’ve got to start somewhere.

I won’t sell fish raised in China. I won’t sell meat clinging to filthy pens and stuffed to the point of illness. I won’t sell produce grown in valleys where cattle run-off makes it susceptible to e.coli and worse.

I maintain the highest standards at every point where I know I can make an impact on the community around me. When you’re a leader, however slight and humble, your every move makes a statement.

So I won’t sell cigarettes anymore. You can do whatever you want and you can hate me for having scruples. But as Zechariah Chafee, Jr., wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 1919, “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.”