THE MAGIC LIBRARY

What if there were a club, of varied gender and racial/ethnic spectrum, that all smoked pipes, swilled tea, and read foreign languages? Let us say in a building no more than ten blocks away, near bakeries and restaurants, but discreet, you know? Not blatant and likely to upset the little kiddie-winkies, or the Karens of which San Francisco is so generously endowed.

Yes, they'd all be variations on me.

Dutch, Colonial Malay of a by-gone era, or Cantonese, might be nearly common languages. The club fridge would, among other things, contains pots of sambal. In case someone decided to have their lunch on the premises.

Obviously some extra ventilation would be required, along with lots of bookshelves, plus reading desks, and comfy rattan chairs, as well as good directional lighting.

As you can tell I have thought this out, and it's probably not ever going to exist, but it would be rather like the reading room attached to a bar on the Market Square in Valkenswaard, as well as the two or three sociëteiten where many of us were more or less members back in the day, but withoout the beer component. A spot of sherry, perhaps.

On a cold day, early in the morning, it would be rather nice to walk into a warm quiet place which smelled of hot beverages for a nice read in a comfy chair, instead of stumbling out into the bleak and almost gothically grim public street where people walk their teacups and jog if they are excercise freaks, sniffing disapprovingly over all of us in a soi disant superior way, why the nerve of us taking up space in their world, polluting the air they breathe with our utterly nasty industrial smells, moist body odours, or foul brimstone reeks!

Who let us out of the work house?

Why isn't there soy milk latte available at the top of the hill?

There are just so many things wrong with the world, they think, and it's our fault!



I'm presently contemplating a pipe from a previous era. An unremarkable grain to the briar, but the glow of fine old wood. It's a Corinthian made for Grant's by Comoy, which a friend recently got rid off, because it's just not his style and he's simplifying. He hardly smoked it, it's nearly new. I think I'll load it up after teatime today. One or two smokes and it won't have even a trace of the vanilla tobacco he puffed in it. It's a Canadian shape (meaning longish oval shank, standard billiard bowl, and a tapered stem). Looks very colliagiate.
Should be interesting. Reflective of a disappeared time and place.


Thank you, Herb. It will live again.



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