OH LOOK, BLINKY THINGS!

Like many middle-aged men I find myself hopping up and down and cussing furiously after my physical coordination has come a cropper. Then I get distracted by something I see, and forget all about the stubbed toe or bruised elbow. Oh wow, look at all the boxes!
Empty cigar boxes! Mostly empty. How many of these things do I have?

They're useful. Not that I have actually used many of them. But boxes are nice.

Sunlight reflected off the ceramics adds light to the room.

Perhaps I should rearrange my pipes?

Why does my foot hurt?

Oh, yes.


The great advantage of cigar boxes is that you can stack them neatly, or slide them out of sight into bookshelves. But when you are not paying attention they multiply.
Even when you hardly smoke cigars, being a pipesmoker.
Maybe a couple of cigars a week.
At most.

Collections and stockpiles are probably a sign of neurosis. Tea pots. Books. Cigar boxes. Drafting equipment (mechanical pencils, many of them architects pencils or fine points).
Tins of pipe tobacco for a rainy day, and a pretty good pipe collection.

All of this accumulated gradually. The pipe collection is large enough that I keep the current rotation on a tea tray near my chair in the teevee room, and the rest in boxes in a bookshelf. Every few months I shake things up a bit, putting some of them away and pulling out others for smoking. There are also a bunch that I need to restore, old damaged briars culled from elsewhere specifically because they are good projects. And a few that I acquired because the specific version of the shape or the glow to the wood, speak of a previous era. There is just something about certain shapes and textures that lures the eye. Three Peterson's that say "early sixties, engineer, Southern Califonia", for instance, or "snooty young man at Harvard". George who liked one particular shape because it hung nicely while he was writing a report after surgery. The American Chinese gentleman whose wife hoped that his pipes would find a good home. The retired fellow who liked to browse for hours on end, the lawyer who died years ago, the ebulient chap whose sudden passing startled all of us.

Even a short Chinese woman who had exacting tastes.
As well as strong opinions, well expressed.

Haven't seen Pauline in years.
She moved to Seattle.

Many of my pipes are items that my father would have liked. Some of them are, in fact, his pipes which he gave to me years ago. I only smoke two of them regularly, the others still have faint whisps of the tobacco he prefered. A blend which when I finally tracked it down had changed. But I could probably reproduce it as it once was.



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