STUBBORN DREAMING

A gentleman who was approximately my age stumbled up the street last night slightly tiddly while I was smoking my pipe. I myself gave up drinking a few years ago after I found out it could react adversely with some of my medications, and have not regretted that. Though there are times I miss the good cheer of drinking holes. Let's chalk it up to virtuous living.
That's the story of my life, really, please do not make any rude comments.

Since cutting liquor out of my life I've turned tea into a near-vice.
Most of the day I'm zipped to the gills on hot beverages.
Not quite insane, but it's close.

Start the day with two cups of coffee, with a smoke in between. Then switch to tea, punctuated with perhaps another pipe. Afternoon milk tea, another pipe.
Last cup of coffee or tea for the day and another smoke.

No problems falling asleep at night.
Thank you for asking.

Let's hear it for deceased gentlemen who stubbornly refuse to give up certain things that make life fun. It's because of people like that that there are some very fine books and pipes in my possession. The pipe above was made sometime before I was born. It had not been smoked when Marty Pulvers sold it to me nearly twenty years ago, for reasons I do not know. Sutliff, the company for whom it was made, became Grant's in the fifties after the proprietors sold the shop to long time manager Ed Grant, who passed away in 2003.

After a late lunch yesterday afternoon I loaded it with some nice Virginia flake tobacco, and enjoyed a quiet half hour on Waverly, occasionally dodging maskless foreigners and their berserk confidence in their own immortality.


I have no idea why whoever owned the Comoy pipe in the painting for so many years before I found it never smoked it. Perhaps like me they kept a few prize briars for the children or girlfriends that they never had. Or their spouse told them he or her was leaving if they continued that horrid habit one more day.



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