I mostly have weekends to myself. I have a job, which keeps me, shall we say, occupied for 10 hours a day, Monday through Thursday. Ah yes, one of the long sought after 4-10 schedules. For the most part it does work out very well. However, I do find myself at work most Fridays because the overtime available is what my lovely bride of 17 years refers to as "your money", a.k.a. the pipe fund.
Karen, my long suffering wife, also holds down a job at which she gets generally 25-30 hours a week. The only thing wrong with the set up is she works Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. This is to explain how I come to have most weekends to do as I please, as long as the laundry gets done.
While I do occasionally find the time for hunting or fishing expeditions, like the majority of my contemporaries, most weekends are spent working around the house. Sunday evenings we are in church. We go to the evening service because I hate to go alone (I get tired of explaining to those same people every week why Karen is not with me).
Enough children have now left the nest that I officially have a den. This allows me a place, with a roof, other than the garage in which to smoke my pipes. As we all know the hobby is not all about the pipes and tobaccos. After a certain age, little things such as heat get to be important. At first it was difficult to convince Karen that I actually had a need for a room to smoke in. She seems to be hoping that my pipe smoking is some sort of phase I am going through and will someday outgrow. After 30 years, I think not. It was while in the process of moving all that smelly old pipe stuff, as Karen calls it, into the den that I realized how much meaning all this actually has for me.
It occurs to me that of the 40 some odd pipes I have come by over the years, I have actually only purchased about 10 of them. The rest were from my dad, or gifts from friends and/or family. Even the 10 or so that I bought for myself, I got to mark an occasion of one sort or another. Each one is a reminder of someone or something.
I was fortunate enough to get dad's pipes when he passed away. He never was one to splurge on things for himself. He got every bit as much enjoyment out of an old Medico as I do from my one (and only, by the way) Dunhill. I'm reminded of the Webber Canadian dad bought the weekend we spent in a cabin on the Little Deschutes River. He spent one summer building a block retaining wall at the front of the house in Klamath Falls where I grew up. He was hardly ever without a rather large Kaywoodie during that project. I have the Custombuilt straight that he had at hand the last time we went fishing together. Dad had 16 pipes when he passed, and each of these pipes has something of him tied to them, even if only that they were his. All have their places in the collection, and I do smoke them all except one. This pipe has been well smoked, but never by dad, or me. This is an old bent that he picked up in the street in some small town in Holland toward the end of the war. He never could bring himself to smoke this pipe. So I have not either.
As for later acquisitions, there is a Savinelli Autograph I bought after graduating from college some 25 years after high school. It took me that 25 years to figure out dad was right about getting a degree, too. There are pipes that friends have given to me for no reason other than. . . well, we are friends. What better reason is there? A coworker and good friend gave me a Lowe bent a few years back that had belonged to his father. I no longer work with Craig but we are good friends. My wife and I were witnesses at his wedding last year. Another dear friend who managed a local tobacco shop brought me an absolutely gorgeous Bjarne bent home from the RTDA in Vegas this past summer. Thanks Matt!
Even the small gadgets a pipe smoker collects can have some meaning. About three years ago I was at an event at the local tobacco shop. The shop was holding several raffles for everything from tobacco pouches to cigar humidors. I happened to win a cigar cutter. While I do enjoy the occasional cigar, maybe one a week, my preference has always been a pipe. A man approached me toward the end of the evening and introduced himself, telling me he was a cigar smoker, and wanted to know if I would be interested in trading the cutter for a roll up tobacco pouch he had won. The trade was a done deal. John and I ended working together at that same shop, part time for the next two years. I count him among my closest friends. He moved his family half way across the country to take a cigar s ales rep job a few months ago. I call him every Saturday. I am using that pouch he traded me and will remember our first meeting every time I fill a pipe.
While working at that shop, one of the more memorable regulars was Bob. This man was one of the more colorful characters I met. I had an old Peterson that he seemed fond of and was after me for a trade of some sort. I told him what I really wanted was a Corona "Old Boy" lighter. A week or so later he came in with the lighter, one with a briar case no less. The trade was made on the spot. He sort of gave me the horse-laugh and confessed that he got the lighter on E-Bay for $15.00, and then I told him it was ok because I had paid $7.00 for the Pete at a yard sale. We both came away happy. Bob just stopped coming in one day and we never heard anything of him again. Wherever he is I hope he is still smoking that Peterson, because the lighter is sitting right here on the table top as I put this together. One last item must be included, a tamper. Some time ago, Perry Fuller held a writing contest on this web site. My entry won me one of the "Trout Stream Tampers" mentioned on the site. It is a bit on the large side and somewhat unruly to use, but there it sits in a pipe rack next to a gourd calabash. It serves as a reminder to me that each of us has something to say, if we will only take a moment to listen.
Everyone remembers the big events in their life, graduations, weddings, births, and deaths. While these do stand out, we should remember that as important as they are, it is also the small things that connect us to those acquaintances that have made us who we are.
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