GETTING INTO THE HABITS

Every week I would head over to the bookstore to read for hours in the stacks. There was a tobacconist right next door, in front of which I'd park my bicycle. At one point a lovely polished wood item in the window caugt my eye, and for several weeks I'd look at it with ever-increasing appreciation. Then I bought it, because no one else should have it, and I didn't want it to disappear. A few months later, after my fourteenth birthday, I finally purchased some tobacco. Because a smoking tool with nothing to put in it is rather pointless.

Eventually a tamper and cleaners were added to the growing kit of delicious sin. And more tobacco.

My parents found out that I was smoking within half a year. My mother's lecture anent the evils of tobacco was stern and filled with all kinds of frightening medical terminology, including the data that it inevitably led to incontinence, hairy palms, and a slack jaw. She huffed three Kent Filter Kings while delivering the speech. My dad said "son, good pipe tobacco does NOT smell like a Parisian bath house. Please smoke good tobacco", and returned to his paper.

The next week I asked for an increase in my allowance. Because good tobacco costs more.

Within two years of that, my father's hand would snake across the table after dinner to fill his own pipe from my tin of Balkan Sobranie.


I like to think I had a fine upstanding adolescence. At an age when other boys in Valkenswaard (located in North Brabant province) were discovering soccer, sex, beer, and hashish, I was reading Suetonius' De vita Caesarum, Voltaire's Candide, and Isaac Asimov's short scientific articles for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

[Of course I really must confess that the Romans excelled in naughty business, and the copy of Candide had a lovely breast on the cover. And knowledge is profoundly exciting, even erotic. This probably added much to the experience.]

It was a life filled with coffee, tea, smoky Syrian Latakia tobacco, sambal (chilipaste), and mountains of the printed page. Rather splendid.


In so far as discovering the other gender was concerned, they were the classmates and the companions of classmates, or unrealistic amazons on the covers of cheap paperbacks.

One imagined them. But they were peripheral and figmentary.

Although some of them did read, or smoke.

The teenage years shaded into adulthood. More tobacco. Buckets of coffee and tea. Cooking interesting dishes, learning what other people ate. And familiarity with many more bookstores and libraries. When visiting other people I usually scope out their bookshelves to see what they read. It's much more important than admiring their taste in pictures on their walls. Or their vast collections of Pink Floyd, David Bowie, and The Rolling Stones.

Some of them have interesting dislikes in food.

Nowadays, many do not own ashtrays.

Coffee beverages are common.

Sambal is rather rare.

TOBACCO INDEX


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