THOSE WERE DIFFERENT TIMES

Today giddy peasants all over the world are celebrating three things. Three. Columbus Day, marking the rapine, slaughter, and infection with European sexually transmitted diseases and ideals of native peoples in the new world. My birthday. And frog protests in Portland, Oregon. Which will go down in history as greater than the first mentioned.

Oh yeah, something happened in the Middle East. But there is always something happening there. It's an overly dramatic attention-seeking part of the world, with issues. So whatever.

I'm off work today, which is unconnected to any of those three things.

This evening we'll be going out to dinner at a local restaurant, where, seeing as I get to order (because I've told my apartment mate we will NOT be overdoing things), it will be simple and not too much. I'm thinking steamed pork patty with salt fish (蒸鹹魚肉餅) and something with bitter melon. There will probably also be red stewed eggplant (紅燒茄子) to take home, so that she can have something tasty for lunch tomorrow and the turkey vulture will be happy. If we don't bring back food he will be heartbroken, and wail despondently that he's a little orphan girl in the Andes and no one loves him, hungry, so hungry!

[Steamed pork patty with salt fish (蒸鹹魚肉餅 'jing haam yü yiuk beng') and red stewed eggplant (紅燒茄子 'hung siu ke ji') are not considered high fallutin' fine dining, and rather home cooking type stuff. They are very good.]

The turkey vulture normally lives in my apartment mate's bedroom.
Because he's a noisy fellow, and I need my beauty sleep.
Someone snarkily said that it wasn't working.
Fine. She can deal with the bird.

Slowly, imperceptibly, my face has grown older. I'm not really aware of it -- a damned handsome fellow looks out of the mirror at me, oh my -- but if I look at my passport pictures over the years the change is dramatic. I do not like that, and still think of myself as a fine young thing still bicycling gaily over the moors and dirt paths of Brabant in the Spring sunlight, my pipe jauntily sticking out of my manly jaw.


Only slightly connected to that is the image of a young man in London stepping into the Kapp & Peterson shop on White Lion Street, dressed in a tight wide lapel tweed coat and burgundy pants (Carnaby Street, NOT Saville) and the hippest gayest Beatles tee-shirt, and selecting a new pipe to happily show off when he got back to Texas.

That wasn't me. I did not become a pipe smoker till years later, and I wouldn't have been caught dead in that get-up. But I've seen the pictures.

People dressed strangely in the sixties and seventies. The 74/77 White Lion Street location closed in 1970. Obviously I never got to visit it, and I didn't discover that tweed coats and red velvet bell bottoms (slightly ragged at the edges) were fashionable again till I saw someone wearing that on Polk Street last year. Pipes have gone out of style entirely, because tobacco is grown by big corporate gangsters wipping natives and denying them health care, every one knows that, but tweed, red velvet, and The Beatles are timeless.


I have a few Peterson pipes stamped Dublin & London.
Made before 1970. Fine pieces.
Rather old fashioned.



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