Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

For most of my adult life I smoked a pipe once or twice a week. Almost all the men in my family smoked pipes. The smell of pipe tobacco still conjures back my father in his leather chair in better times, or my grandfather scowling in a rocker on a screen porch in the Smoky Mountains. When my grandfather passed, he left me his pipes. I managed to chew through the stems before I learned not to hold a pipe with my jaw any more than I had to.

But I loved smoking a pipe. Because it was never a daily activity ("a hobby not a habit") it always retained a feeling of luxury. Few things made me happier than smoking away an evening on a balcony with a glass of milk and a plate of pickles and sandwiches. I had a fondness for a particular type of ship's tobacco (a round of navy flake with a black dot of Cavendish in the center, like a bull's eye), which was getting hard to find even before I quit. Whenever I found some, I ordered a case and put it up in mason jars (which is the only way to really preserve tobacco at home).

A few years back, my daughter was born and I more or less stopped smoking. But I still have the remains of that last case of tobacco I ordered in my "other life." These days, I have a pipe a few times a year as a kind of performed remembrance, not only of my ancestors but of my ancestral self-as-I-was in the years that I smoked. It makes me feel human in the same embodied, ritual way that cooking a meal or folding laundry does; smoking a pipe correctly is a small skill, and my hands and lips have long since learned the rhythms.

We're currently bottled up at home for some weeks to slow the spread of the Coronavirus, and so is everyone else. Some folks are moving around outside (cautiously), but mostly folks are just staying inside with the windows drawn. Cracking open a six-year-old mason jar of tobacco, carefully extracting a few thin flakes, and then smoking it, while looking out over a completely vacant street (dead silent except for the birds) gave me a flash, not of the past, but of an ugly future.

While things are certainly looking bad (someways), the end of civilization is probably not here yet. But you can kind of see it just now if you squint. My pipe was quite fine, though, and the birds and I had a nice time of it anyway.