Pipe (April)

Cigarettes still make appearances, but pipes? Family photographs came out at Easter, some with my father gripping a Peterson briar with his teeth. This April I re-catalogue Philosophy (Dewey 190s). British Empiricists on old jackets have the grip. Even the Existentialist Sartre has the grip, in a graphic act of mauvais foi. It’s mysterious. Did the smoking ban silence pipes? Tobacco-clumping, bowl-scraping, hemp-enflaming, air-perfuming: it seems a ritual of social history now, gone the way of tape-cassettes and lace ruffs. My father kept his in a pipe rack. Nothing to do now but accept change and take a deep breath.