THE PHILOSOPHER'S PIPE: WHEN A FELLER NEEDS A FRIEND (BRIGGS TOBACCO SLOGAN)

Today, as a parting gift, I’ve just received a pipe. Yes, a pipe, and here is what I know about pipes.  Mark Twain smoked a pipe and lived until he was 75.  Albert Einstein puffed on a pipe and lived to 76.   Sherlock Holmes was a pipe smoker and he is immortal.  Rose, the great grandmother of my colleague, Dawne, smoked a pipe until she was 109.

My very first memory of a pipe was when I was six years old and living with Grandma Ollie and Grandpa Sid on a grain farm north of Shaunavon, Saskatchewan.  I remember our house being BIG, white with green trim, a veranda on the front and two porches at the back, the inside filled with chopped up rooms and endless stairways.  I remember the lambent flickering of coal oil lamps (the kind of which the woven wick would crumble with a finger touch) and the intense heat from our iron-black wood burning stove.  Grandma and Sid hauled water from a hand-pump well situated just ten steps from our front door.  I remember bathing in an aluminum tub, in cold water, outside in the yard, one day a week.

I remember the sweet haunting fragrance of the burgundy-purple lilac bushes, the bright yellow caragana hedges, and the yellow and white honeysuckle bushes, as I ran down a our country lane to the catch the school bus.  And I remember the violet-green pointy swallows swooping at me whilst I did so.

I remember the grey and yellow kingbirds perched on fence posts in back of our BIG house, and I remember the early morning salvo of the yellow meadow larks.

(I was the only elementary student riding the bus.  The rest of the riders were all high school students, grabbing my hat, a greyish tam with one snap on the front, and tossing it back and forth, back and forth to one another, to everyone but me, until we arrived six miles later at the school.)

My uxorial grandmother was chief cook and bottle washer.  She would make lye soap cake in the summer, cutting it into squares and baking them on a concrete slab all day in the sun.  My grandmother would gather dandelion leaves and serve them as a kind of cooked spinach.  After each rain my grandmother would do a morning walkabout, twisting the mushrooms with the dark brown undersides from the newly cracked ground.

My grandmother grew potatoes, and one of her daily rituals was to peel potatoes in the pantry just off the kitchen.  For meat we ate duck or partridge or prairie chicken or goose, all felled from the sky by Sid with his twelve gauge shot-gun.  Or we ate fresh perch, jack, or pickerel, caught by Sid and Grandma at Lac Pelletier, Duncairn Dam, or Antelope Lake.  My grandma and Sid loved to fish!

In our BIG lenitive house there was also Lady, our grey Persian, with us since she was a kitten, scooped from my great Uncle Byron (Sid’s brother), one time while at a visit on his farm a few outside Vanguard, Saskatchewan.  I remember those visits at Uncle Byron and Aunt Millie’s.  After supper Byron would play the fiddle, after which Ollie and Sid, and Byron and Millie would play cards.

Grandma did the cooking and cleaning; Sid did the seeding and combining.  In evening, the unflappable Sid would stretch out in his living room chair and smoke his pipe.  I remember the spark of the match as he struck it on his pant leg and I remember the sharp aroma of the pipe smoke filling the room.  I even remember asking him if I could have his pipe after he died. 

“We’ll see,” he would always reply.

By the time I was thirteen years old we had moved back to Vanguard, Saskatchewan, the place I consider to be my home town, most likely because this is where my developmental years as an adolescent took place.  Anyway, thirteen year old Mohammed Gader, used to carve pipe bowls from corn cobs, from the corn crop grown at his family’s farm.  Mohammed would bring his pipes to town and sell them (to the town kids) for a nickel.  We used to jam the tube of a ball point pen into the side of the corn bowl and voila, a pipe!  Many happy times were spent stuffing our pipes with tobacco and smoking and chatting and smoking and chatting about everything and nothing.

We also smoked cigarettes and cigarillos.  I can remember each of us chipping in to buy smokes from the Chinese Café, 39 cents a package, or those wine-dipped, rum flavored little cigars at two bits for a package of five.  We’d sit around the PFRA dam and smoke between swims.  But of all my adolescent smokings, puffing the corn cobs were the best.

I was an English major when I went to university.  I remember being in Ken Mitchell’s Creative Writing classes with a girl named Jackie Toupin.  Ken Mitchell, Chair of the English department, was just emerging as a famous Canadian writer at that time.  (His short story, The Electrical Revolution, is still my favorite of all his works.)  Jackie was bright and beautiful.  Her hair was black and straight and long; she wore skimpy revealing tops, ankle length skirts, and heavy work boots.  And she smoked a pipe!  Back then, you could smoke anywhere in public, including university classes.  Smoking, in the seventies at the university was fashionable.  I would roll my cigs of Sportsman tobacco and Zig Zag papers and Jackie would stoke her long black pipe.  Practically everyone university classes smoked during the lectures.

Well, fellers, the pipe that was given to me today is a MEDICO CHEMIN DE FER IMPORTED BRIAR.  On the roughly textured chocolate brown bowl is an embossed golden diamond, and the stem is jet black and smooth.  It had belonged to the late lettered and intrepid, derring-do William Martin, a military engineer in the Canadian Army.  

Serving in the live theatre of the Korean War, William had been both stabbed by a bayonet and shot in one particular battle, having a near-death experience as an army paratrooper and geo-trig surveyor scout.  He was one of only two survivors after his platoon had been ambushed.  An enemy soldier had stabbed him with a bayonet, and then shot him in the shoulder.  As William’s enemy was about to thrust again with his bayonet, the final coup de grace, William was reduced to being on his knees in agony and pain, and bleeding. Miraculously, William heard the blast of a shot gun, and was stunned to see his assailant fall dead in front of him. William’s army buddy, the last standing other survivor of the ambushed platoon, had pulled the trigger that saved his life.

“Have you ever killed someone?” asked his nephew after listening to one of William’s stories.

“Yes, many,” replied the stager William.

The feller who gave me the pipe is my close buddy, Ricky, and the feller that gave it to him was his Uncle Billy … aka William Martin.

In my CHAUCERIAN PARADE this week:

Busking with my twelve-string and harmonica, two gentlemen, one tall and one short, approached me. The tall one spoke out.

Can you buy me some beer? he asked.

Why? I responded, You look the legal age.

I’m 33, he said, but they won’t sell to me because they say I’m drunk.

Sorry, man, no.                                                                                              

Why not?

Sorry, man, I’m not going to buy you beer.

I’ll give you twenty dollars if you do. He thumbed a wad of twenty dollar bills.

Sorry, man.

And then the short man started swearing at me.  I pretended to ignore him.  Finally, he relented and walked into Extra Foods, returning with two giant bags of potato chips.

Want some chips? he asked.

No thanks, man.

Are you sure?

I’m sure, but thanks.

And then he tossed some change into my guitar case.

And fellers, I leave you this:

The moment a man takes to a pipe … he becomes a philosopher.

(Sam Slick, the Clockmaker)