A Year Without Tobacco – Thank God It’s Over
-
Kevin Godbee - Oct 2, 2018
- 5 min read
A. Miller
Around December of last year, I wrote an article about being 6 months in to a year without tobacco. It was a rough 6 months and honestly the following 6 months weren’t any better. It was a weird combination of getting used to not smoking, and still finding reminders of my love for a pipe everywhere.
Turns out there are a whole host of activities that, in regular life unrestricted by insurance, I only partake of when I’m smoking. One, perhaps obvious, example is I managed to go a whole year without throwing a block of briar on my lathe. There is shockingly little motivation to make a pipe when you know you won’t be able to smoke it for a while. But a lathe sitting idle isn’t a huge deal. Something that suffered much more was the general cleanliness of my garage. Turns out I only walk around the garage cleaning things (including my workbench) when I have some tobacco burning. A couple of times I walked out to the garage knowing it was time to clean, but as I got started, I just got depressed that there was no nicotine urging me on. Eventually things got, well, bad out there.
An end in sight
At around the 11 month mark I called my insurance company and told them the time was coming where I would be eligible for a review and they were more than excited to schedule the one-year check-up. All of my vitals checked out, I hadn’t meaningfully gained weight or anything, and basically nothing changed except my status as a smoker.
I had been planning for months that first smoke…. er… well, I kept meaning to plan for it, but the truth was, I couldn’t really bring myself to dream about it. What combination of blended leaf would I light first and allow the smoke to swirl around my head in glory? What pipe would I hold and turn over in my hands as I stared off in to the distance? The reality of it all was too wonderful to let myself dream about until it really was time.
So then, when I opened my email one day and found my new insurance policy, I legitimately didn’t believe it. The first thing I did was call several friends and tell them the nightmare was over. Then I called the insurance company to ensure the policy had actually been issued and I wasn’t reading it wrong. After that I was a free man without a plan. Just standing there in front of my stacks of tobacco and all my pipes and trying to figure out how to enjoy all of them. Together. At the same time.
I feared complexity. I feared nicotine. I feared being disappointed. What if tobacco was less amazing than my head had made it out to be over a whole year of waiting?
So I chose something dependable. MacBaren HH Old Dark Fired in a vintage (~50 year old) Missouri Meerschaum Cob. I have written record of my first thoughts as sent to a group of friends. Getting word that I can smoke, "IT’S REAL. I’m so not prepared for this. I think I’m going to cry." And then a few minutes later after lighting my first bowl, "Tobacco is SO much better than raspberry leaves and Kinnickinnic." (Yes, I had resorted to that).
Delving back in to tobacco
I had read about it while away from my pipe, but now I was faced with the reality that McClelland passed on from this good earth while I was away. I had a number of open McClelland tins, and I dove in to those pretty quickly. The first smoke of Blackwoods Flake after a year away from the leaf was every bit as delightful as you would imagine, but when coupled with the knowledge that this particular tin was the last tin I’d ever own, it was bittersweet. Don’t even get me started on my jar of 5100… I can’t hardly bear to open it, let alone pack a bowl of it. There will never be 5100 ever again, and that very tobacco is one of the greatest things that ever happened to me, both in blending, or as a solo act.
My first smoke of a C&D blend was with Chenet’s Cake, something that was a daily go-to for me before I took the year off. It did not disappoint, though my tolerance for nicotine had been substantially decreased. Then I noticed my mouth chemistry has definitely changed. Haunted Bookshelf has long been a go-to, and suddenly I’m getting tongue bite from it, something that never happened before. I can’t tell if I’ve just lost the leathery-tongue I so valued, or if everything really has changed. Thankfully Bayou Morning and Kajun Kake are causing no problems at all.
Peter Stokkebye Luxury Navy and Luxury Bullseye Flake are still hitting the spot when aged (and now everything is at least a year older). I smoked through the remains of a Solani Silver Flake tin in about three days. And I used a cigar cutter to cut off bits of Gawith, Hoggarth & Co. Happy Brown Bogie before throwing it in my pipe and it still puts hair on my chest….
At one point a good friend sent me a message about what he was smoking, and it encouraged me to re-humidify a few blends that had grown dry in poorly sealed tins. This encouraged me to bust out some Daughters and Ryan Rimbroche S.J. and to dive in to an old tin of Samuel Gawith Cabbie’s Mixture (which is now high on my list of things to re-order).
I haven’t purchased tobacco in over a year and still have more than a handful of tins that I haven’t cracked–it’s about time. Two weeks ago, I fired up my lathe and made a pipe—my first in over a year. Today I put the finishing touches on it and stained it.
It’s only been a few months and already the year without tobacco is but a distant memory. Did I survive it? Apparently, the answer is yes. But I sure as hell hope I never have to again.
Life is better with the glorious leaf
With tobacco, yard work is better. Pipe making is better. Going for an evening walk is better. Sitting with a book is better. And since I work from home, virtual meetings are way better. I digest my food better. And I’m generally a happier person.
I’m nearly certain I’ll live longer as a result…. which…. if I remember right, had something to do with why I got started with this whole process in the first place.
Written by Kevin Godbee
3 Responses
Recent Posts
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 636. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Barry Kane. Barry started smoking a pipe in 1961 when he was 14-years old. Back then it seemed like everybody smoked, and you could buy pipes and tobacco just about anywhere. Barry is a true old-school pipe smoker, sticking to just one blend. See if you can guess which one before listening. At the top of the show Brian will give his take on Scandinavian Tobacco Group’s purchase of Mac Baren and Sutliff Tobacco and their announcement that they will be shut down.
There’s a pipe in my collection that I cannot bring myself to smoke, though I’ve had it for more years than I care to recall. It’s old, or shall I say, well experienced; that experience, that oldness came to it long before it was in my possession. The pipe is an old Comoy’s Grand Slam from the 1940s. The shape (#93), a slightly canted, stack billiard (sometimes referred to as a Belgian) is right up my alley, and it’s a beautiful example of it. It came to me with some wear and tear; nothing unusual for an old pipe, but more the signs of one that has been well loved, smoked a lot, treated as a favorite tool, cherished, in a sense, by frequent use. It’s the pipe equivalent of a vintage car that’s been driven a lot, enjoyed fully and maintained adequately, rather than one kept in a spotless garage, dusted and detailed weekly, brought out only for leisurely Sunday drives, or to be ogled behind the ropes at the next Concours d’Elegance. When it arrived, those uncounted years ago, it wanted a little restoration. Nothing dramatic needed to be done to it, but the stem was oxidized, the finish a little dingy. The cake was even and fairly thin, and the airway was relatively clean, both signs that its previous owner cared for it, but the bowl’s surface was a little drab and dull. It took little effort to reveal its beauty, to show the lovely contrasted stain and interesting grain beneath the old wax. I often think I should do before and after photos of pipes that I work on, but those thoughts always come after the work’s been done. This one would have been a great illustration of how years of handling that can sometimes make a pipe more beautiful, can other times make it just look grungy. Once I’d cleaned up the externals, it was time to address the inside bits. I approach this a little bassackwards, I realize. It would be more sensible to take care of the inside before addressing the outside, but it’s how I roll. If an old pipe isn’t pretty to look at, it’s unlikely that I’ll care much about it, and cleaning is usually the hardest part, or at least the most boring part of any restoration for me. Alcohol and pipe cleaners. Lots of pipe cleaners. That’s why I leave it for last. Sometimes, I’ll even give a pipe a test smoke before a deep cleaning, just for a point of reference. I gave it a sniff to get an idea of what I was up against, and it stopped me cold. There in that bowl was an aroma that I had not smelled in decades. My head was instantly filled with memories of being in the back room of a fabled Berkeley tobacconist’s shop where I stumbled upon a few jars of long discontinued blends. One of them, a blend called Forty and Eight, had the most engaging and unusual scent of any tobacco I’d stuck my schnoz into. It was sweet, but not in a candy store way. There were none of the usual vanilla, cherry, berry or anise notes of typical aromatics, nothing that could be compared to aftershave or deodorant soap, but something almost musky, a little earthy, something exotic. The shop’s owner couldn’t tell me what was in it, how, or where it had been produced. The old blend had been retired before he’d bought the place. The printed catalogue gave no clues, either, other than being overprinted with the word “DISCONTINUED” in bold, rubber-stamp type. (And, I don’t recall it as being “highly aromatic” as the description indicates.) There was still quite a bit in the jar. Being, at that point, an intrepid explorer of all kinds of tobaccos, whether I thought I’d like them or not, I had to give it a try. It was burly based, but also comprised a good measure of virginia leaf, and maybe some other varieties; I didn’t have enough experience at the time to really pick it apart. But, that aroma was unlike anything I’d experienced before or since. It was something now completely lost to time. Until it wasn’t. Memories are powerful things, and there is no sense more tightly bound to memory than our sense of smell. One whiff was all it took to carry me back in time, conjuring a vivid recollection of something long submerged in the inky depths of a subconscious mind. Look, I know as well as anyone that pipes are meant to be smoked, and that many feel it almost sacrilegious to have a pipe and not set it to its intended task. In this case, I simply can’t. I won’t. Ever. Rationally, I am fairly certain this pipe would probably be a great smoke. It was too well loved by its previous caretaker to be anything less than that. My choice not to smoke it is an emotional one, not something rational. Of the thousands of pipes that have passed through my hands over the years, this is the only one to create such a singular and vivid, almost Proustian recollection of temps perdu, of lost time. It revivified a long dormant memory that is mine, and mine alone, and that’s enough. I keep it in a drawer with other old English pipes. In some ways, it’s nothing special, just a nice old pipe. I don’t lavish it with any particular care that arguably befits the hidden treasure that it holds. It’s not in a special box, or displayed preciously in a glass cabinet. Every once in a while, I take it out, point my nose bowlwards, and every time, those memories return just as powerfully as they did the first time. I have no idea how long it’s been since its last owner smoked it, but in the years I’ve had it, there seems to have been very little degradation of the aroma, and that’s […]
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 635. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with James Ravenwood. James is the boutique tobacco blender of Ravenwood Blends. His blending started out as a fun hobby, and he now has professionally packaged commercially available products with some great tin art. Part of his interest in pipe smoking goes back to fond memories of a retired Navy Veteran that lived on his street while he was growing up that would sit in his driveway smoking a pipe all day. Later, in 2011 he began smoking pipes and soon after started experimenting with mixing different tobaccos. His other hobby, that he has been doing for 30 years, is photography. He takes wonderful photos of outdoor spaces, and still life pictures of pipes and tobacco. You can see them on his Instagram @thebriarfellowship. At the top of the show we’ll have an Ask the Pipemaker segment with renowned pipe artisan Jeff Gracik.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 634! Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Warren Ertle. Warren is an extremely accomplished musician with a PhD in music. He started early as a percussionist in sixth grade. Later his grandmother got him a cheap Casio keyboard which he taught himself to play. He started playing in blues bands in high school, and has been a pianist with jazz big bands for years. Even though he was already a professional musician, he took his first real piano lesson when he enrolled in college with his studies in classical music. He is of course a pipe smoker. At the top of the show we will have an Ask the Tobacco Blender segment with Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy is the Head Blender at Cornell & Diehl, which is one of the most popular boutique pipe tobacco companies in the USA.
Soon now, supposedly, our neighborhoods will shift from grinning pumpkins, skeletons in various assortments, and zombies dashing about to pretty reindeer, angels, and flashing lights illuminating homes with sparkling stars and laughing, scurrying Santas. But, lest we forget, there is the turkey season, fancy pie aromas wafting from kitchens, and a national pardon of a big Tom Turkey. Remember, now, that only one of these holiday personalities is a pipe smoker. And that is the hefty, bearded fellow in a bright red suit sitting in a sleigh with a herd of deer hitched up and ready to streak across the globe, bringing tidings of joy and many presents. Ok, the scene is set for the next couple of months, right? So, before we get too far off the beaten path, let’s just take a deep breath of fresh autumn air, shall we? Ahh. That’s better, isn’t it? What’s got the Pundit in a snit is not all the Halloween spooks who came a-jostling for candy. Or the wild turkeys gobbling in the backwoods or all the fuss and feathers over the big one—Christmas. No, it is that we might need to take note of all the little things that mean so much to us. Like a good sunrise (seriously, Pundit has not gone all Pollyanna.) Mayhaps we need to appreciate more of what we have than what we have not. Or something like that. Like, a good pipe in the morning with coffee as the dawn brings us coolish weather now that we have flipped the calendar to autumn. But it also brings beautiful leaves that have become a spectacle of technicolor in the wind. It is the little things. The rereading of an enjoyable book and finding something you did not see or learn in the first go-round. Or a stunning phrase you commit to memory with the re-read, while smoking that favorite pipe. And you notice a superior puff that just seems to be different. It’s in the air and the seasons of meaningful little things. It’s aromatic! Or perhaps it is that sense of satisfaction knowing and appreciating you made it to another day. With the world in a kind of rinse-and-repeat history, reminiscent of a Shakespearean play, it is perhaps a good moment to remember some of Pipedom’s philosophers whose cogent thoughts brought light to clear a path in the mists of confusion and confounding opinions. Ok. No gloom and doom. Just some down-home thoughts. Think of times in the past when history was running off the rails. It took our pipe-smoking thinkers (the mind workers of the world) to speak of better pathways to more light. Think for a moment, with a pipe in hand, these wizards of the world and word: Albert Einstein, J. R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edwin Hubble, Bertrand Russell, C. S. Lewis, and Jean-Paul Sartre. All learned and enlightened. They offered wisdom instead of storms of meaningless roads to nowhere. All while smoking their pipes! Maybe especially with the help of their pipes in the art of thinking and philosophy. Recall the words of Mr. E=MC2 when he said, “I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.” Amen and amen! Dealing with world-rattling events takes a calm and objective view of things, to the Pundit’s way of summing it up. You just don’t go messing around with quantum physics without a calm and objective approach, methinks. Or as the extraordinary physicist Robert Oppenheimer said after he and a team in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Labs developed a way to split atoms into bombs during World War II. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” said Oppenheimer referring to the development of the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. It must be pointed out that Oppenheimer was more of a cigarette smoker than a pipe smoker. Nonetheless, pipes were part of his personality. Now, if you have read some of the great authors of the past and present, their pipes were always nearby. Reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be a three-pipe problem at times. S. Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre require time with your pipes to reflect on the existential problems and solutions these authors provide in learned novels and other narratives. Or take Edwin Hubble and Bertrand Russell, philosophers of another world. Pipes are required for reading. The quantum lode of ideas Pundit is attempting to sort out is that our pipes are relaxing and stimulate our thoughts and creativity. Especially in these last months of the year. Many times Pundit has had that light bulb flick on while smoking my beloved pipes. And friends in Pipedom, it ain’t easy to turn on the lights in Pundit’s rock pit head. Now it’s time for a quote from a Pipe Smoker of the Past. Shelby Foote was born Nov. 17, 1916, in Greenville, Miss., and died June 27, 2005, in Memphis, Tenn. A fact is not a truth until you love it—Shelby Foote. A parting thought: It is said that famed Southern author William Faulkner carried a packed pipe in a coat pocket wherever he went. That’s one effective way to deal with workday conflicts and confusion. A calm and objective judgment in our everyday human affairs, as the quantum man said.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 633. Our featured guest tonight is Jon David Cole. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and the accompanying online store. We’ll have JD and Brian talking about what’s new at the store and in the business in general. At the top of the show, Brian will discuss tobacco growing, what happens to the leaf, and provide updated information on where tobacco is being gown today. Tobacco production originated in the United States and we were once the #1 producer. It’s quite different now.
Welcome back! I’m glad a year away didn’t spoil it for you.
I did a long hiatus to support my late wife who quit a multi-pack cigarette habit after many years. I did cigars on business trips, with her approval. As a widower, I bought a new pipe from a carver who sells at our state fair, and especially used this to help get through some medical hard times with my second wife, with her in rehab, etc., when a refreshing beverage wouldn’t have helped during those demanding times. Up early, off hours, long commutes at night, etc. I still have my first pipes from decades ago, so there is continuity. At least my experience was entirely voluntary. No one asked me to quit or held anything over my head about it. But it has been a long journey. I keep my pipe smoking extremely moderate. My modest cellar will last me for years. But I share a certain familiarity with this experience. As a footnote, my late wife’s shortened life had nothing to do, so far as medical science knows, with her heavy smoking, but was from an unrelated cause.
mso489 Not sure why I am posting this, but God bless brother! I wish nothing but the best for you and yours!