The
Old Coot misses the whiff of pipe tobacco.
By
Merlin Lessler
It
is an era long gone, and for good reason, yet I miss it. Hadn’t thought about it
for years but the other day I spotted a picture of Sylvester Stallone in an old
news photo lighting a pipe. Oh my, how politically incorrect! A pipe? Not in
this day and age! Not a common sight. It
hit me how much I miss being in a world with pipe smokers, letting that sweet,
mellow aroma tickle my senses. And, hearing the tap, tap, tap as an indulger empties
the ashes and unburned stubs of tobacco to rest the bowl until the next time it’s
called into service.
Just
seeing a pipe smoker with a briar protruding from the side of his mouth, a
contented man, at peace with the world, would make my day. It was a male vice
for the most part, yet women did puff on them as well. Not very many and rarely
in public, though I recall a picture of Katharine Hepburn puffing on a briar
back in the 1950’s.
I
was fifteen when I bought my first pipe. It was on a display at a neighborhood
mom and pop store, attached to two tins of Raleigh Tobacco with a rubber band. A holiday special, for only a dollar! I
thought I’d give it to my father for Christmas; he’d recently given up
cigarette smoking, along with five minutes of coughing every morning. I thought
it would help him stay with the program. My mother said it would only get him
started again so I kept the pipe for myself. And, with a couple of like-minded
knuckle-headed friends, walked around town puffing away, thinking how adult we
must look. A pipe was a nerdy thing to smoke, long before nerdy became a word, so
we switched to cigarettes. Winston’s, the ones with the catchy advertising
jingle, “Winston’s taste good like a cigarette should!”
Not
the worst mistake I ever made, but right up there near the top. I took up the
pipe again in my twenties, to get off the cancer sticks, as we called them, well
before the Surgeon General got around to alerting the public to the dangers of
cigarette smoking. The pipe did the job: I quit cigarettes, at least for a
while, and eventually forever but I still remember how nice it felt to have a
pipe protruding from the side of my mouth and to be enclosed in an aromatic cloud.
I wasn’t alone; a lot of famous people were pipe smokers – Bing Crosby, Clark Gable,
Darwin, Gerald Ford, Walter Cronkite, FDR, Einstein, Stalin, and Mark Twain to
name a few.
Now,
no one smokes them in public, not that I ever see. I miss it. But even more, I
miss the sweet aroma of pipe tobacco. Almost as much as the scent of burning
leaves on a crisp fall afternoon. When I turn eighty, which isn’t that far off,
especially now that years slip past me at the speed of light, I’m going to buy
a pipe and go in my back yard and put a match to it and to a small pile of
leaves. If the authorities come charging in to stop me, they’ll have to pry, both
the leaf rake and the briar pipe from my cold dead hands. Want to join me? Be
at my house on November 15, 2022; we’ll light up the world together. Ha Ha!
Comments?
Complaints? – Send to mlessler7@gmail.com
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