"Fathers Day Treat" has two meanings in this post. One, it's a treat for me, a father, to hand my son his first pipe today. Two, father is "treating" his boy to a new experience.
It's a generational thing that at first I thought perverse(Giving my son a smoke?), which I got over and am looking forward to. It was my father who gave me my first pipe. It was a joke on my mother. I had been smoking cigarettes since I was nine. She had a fit one day: "I do NOT want my boy smoking cigarettes in this house!" For my 10th birthday, my dad smirked as I unwrapped my first Grabow. I don't think he thought it would stick. He was not a pipe smoker himself. Pall Malls only. But he'd given me Huckleberry Finn for my ninth birthday. To me, this was a natural step in the right direction. I smoked pipes for the next 17 years, stopping all smoking of any kind when I had babies in my house).
While my son served in Afghanistan he was commended for bravery several times. Once it was for standing off a crowd of Nationals 500-plus strong who pressed to enter at his gate. Before that, he had stood long hours in the sun "guarding" a plane on a tarmac with one or two others, all of them looking a little something, I suppose, like those palace guards at Buckingham. Thankless. Glamour-less. Mindless. I think I read somewhere that security forces had the highest suicide rate of any of the job positions. Day after day. Afghanistan for him was almost a relief. Random rocket attacks that hit nothing or blew up a shed. Stuff like that broke the monotony.
I got over being reluctant to share piping with him because
1) I don't consider that I'm damaging myself all that much. It's a hobby. It's relaxing. It's dignified. It's pleasureful. Why wouldn't I want him to have that?
2) He smokes already. Heavy cigarette smoker. If anything, I'm improving his health.
3) It's another level of bonding. Father and son.
Haven't decided which of my pipes I'm giving him, or if we're going shopping for one. But we will start out with the innocuous, neutral corncob. Picking up some of those shortly.
Not worried about which of the tamer ribbon-cuts we'll start with. Because before this weekend is over, he'll have had a little sample of my slices and flakes, too. I have all my blending tobaccos here, so he'll get to sniff the different contributors to the Crown Achievement, for instance. Get a basic understanding that pipe blends are intriguing.
And.... you should be able to find him here. I'm going to see if he won't subscribe to Pipes Magazine.
Be nice now. Not just because he's my son. But because he left a station he'd been at for nearly two years as the undefeated hand-to-hand combat champion and is a damn fine shot with rifle or sidearm. (Definitely want to give that boy something to keep him calm and mellow.
)
It's a generational thing that at first I thought perverse(Giving my son a smoke?), which I got over and am looking forward to. It was my father who gave me my first pipe. It was a joke on my mother. I had been smoking cigarettes since I was nine. She had a fit one day: "I do NOT want my boy smoking cigarettes in this house!" For my 10th birthday, my dad smirked as I unwrapped my first Grabow. I don't think he thought it would stick. He was not a pipe smoker himself. Pall Malls only. But he'd given me Huckleberry Finn for my ninth birthday. To me, this was a natural step in the right direction. I smoked pipes for the next 17 years, stopping all smoking of any kind when I had babies in my house).
While my son served in Afghanistan he was commended for bravery several times. Once it was for standing off a crowd of Nationals 500-plus strong who pressed to enter at his gate. Before that, he had stood long hours in the sun "guarding" a plane on a tarmac with one or two others, all of them looking a little something, I suppose, like those palace guards at Buckingham. Thankless. Glamour-less. Mindless. I think I read somewhere that security forces had the highest suicide rate of any of the job positions. Day after day. Afghanistan for him was almost a relief. Random rocket attacks that hit nothing or blew up a shed. Stuff like that broke the monotony.
I got over being reluctant to share piping with him because
1) I don't consider that I'm damaging myself all that much. It's a hobby. It's relaxing. It's dignified. It's pleasureful. Why wouldn't I want him to have that?
2) He smokes already. Heavy cigarette smoker. If anything, I'm improving his health.
3) It's another level of bonding. Father and son.
Haven't decided which of my pipes I'm giving him, or if we're going shopping for one. But we will start out with the innocuous, neutral corncob. Picking up some of those shortly.
Not worried about which of the tamer ribbon-cuts we'll start with. Because before this weekend is over, he'll have had a little sample of my slices and flakes, too. I have all my blending tobaccos here, so he'll get to sniff the different contributors to the Crown Achievement, for instance. Get a basic understanding that pipe blends are intriguing.
And.... you should be able to find him here. I'm going to see if he won't subscribe to Pipes Magazine.
Be nice now. Not just because he's my son. But because he left a station he'd been at for nearly two years as the undefeated hand-to-hand combat champion and is a damn fine shot with rifle or sidearm. (Definitely want to give that boy something to keep him calm and mellow.
)
