From: Peter Kukla <??????????????????????>
Subject: Pipe Digest entry - Daniel Pinkwater's NPR essay (long)

Hello again, everyone.

	Well, as promised, here's the Daniel Pinkwater essay which 
aired on NPR recently.  Mr. Pinkwater has my apologies for any 
mistakes I may have made in transcribing the essay.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

	Here is the first joke I ever heard:  Hey, sonnye, you like 
music?"   I would deliver the correct response, stiffling giggles.  
"Yes, I like music."  "Vell, here's a band."  Whereupon I would be 
presented with a paper ring, printed in gold and gaudy colors 
bearing the legend `El Producto' or `Garcia y Vega'.  All my uncles 
and my father knew this joke;  they never got tired of it, and 
neither did I.

	When the menfolk gathered, they would savor cigars in 
candela wrappers and drink whiskey out of tiny glasses with gold 
rims, leaning back in their chairs around the dining room table, 
luxuriating after a family meal.

	They might play a spirited game of pinochle while I lolled 
on the carpet in the living room with the other children admiring 
our cigar bands and listening to fibber McGee and Molly, The 
Shadow, or The First Nighter on teh big floor-model radio.  The 
aunts and my mother would knit, chat, and shout good-natured 
comments back and forth with the card players.

	These men had survived the hardships and privations of the 
immigrant experience, worked hard, and now were able to sit at a 
bought-and-paid-for table in the bosom of their family, survey 
their achievements, enjoy a hand of cards, a good cigar, a glass of 
schnapps, and maybe a (piece of fruit?).  The rewards of 
citizenship in a democracy.  At some point in the evening, 
invariably one uncle or another would stretch and hook his thumbs 
in his waistband and sigh "Ahhh...America!"

	With so many of my happy childhood memories fragrant 
with cigar smoke, and my little personal treasures redolent of 
Havana, for being kept in cigar boxes, it was inevitable that I 
would turn to the leaf when the time came.

	That time came only this year.  I had stunk up my environs 
with pipes for most of my adult life, and some time ago I quit.  I 
thought I was perhaps puffing a bit too much, and anticipating 
possible trouble, I boxed up my beloved Briers, tossed out the last 
of the Balkan Sobranie mixture, and went cold turkey.

	Kicking was no problem for a Schtarker like myself.  After 
buying out the candy counter, and consuming every sort of mint, 
caramel, sour ball, and chewing gum for a week, the nicotine devil 
was out of my body.  Of course, I was unable to work, sleep, or 
think for weeks and weeks, I growled at my wife, was plagued by 
morbid thoughts, and spent hours drumming with my fingers on 
the desktop and staring into space, but I was not going to go back 
to the pipe.  I had sworn off, and a swear is a swear!

	Fortune decreed that a brochure should arrive in the mail.  
It was from a discount cigar company.  There were pictures of the 
various products - remarkably the same.  A cylinder rounded on 
one end.  How do you take a good picture of a cigar?  It's a cigar!    
But the copy!  The copy was hypnotic.  All about Honduran and 
Jamaican and Dominican leaf and creamy brown wrappers of 
Connecticut shade-grown.  Maduro cigars, black as coffee;  Green 
Claros, and all sorts of cigars, just as good as Cuban, or grown 
from seeds smuggled out of Cuba, or made by cigar makers who 
had learned their trade in Havana.  And these things were rare and 
expensive!  I never knew there were cigars that go for eight or nine 
dollars a smoke!!!

	I swore off pipes...I didn't swear anything about cigars.  
Besides, I read somewhere that while pipes were less threatening 
to health than cigarettes, cigars are less dangerous yet!  They're 
practically good for you.

	The cigars arrived, and I've been smoking one or two each 
evening.  I wasn't sure I liked them at first, but now I'm sure.  My 
hand is stead, my eye is clear.  I am able to work again.  I dont 
have desperate thoughts.  So what if when I come into my office in 
the morning, it smells like old jewish men hae been playing cards 
there all night?  So what if I have to gargle mouthwash before I 
can kiss my wife?  So what if, besides looking like my father, I 
now smell like him too?  I am now myself again, and I did not go 
back to that vile pipesmoking habit.

			Daniel Pinkwater, November 1994.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

	The part of this essay which first caught my attention was
his joke about "You like music?"  My own grandfather used to tell me
that joke when he was a cigar-smoker, and it really took me back.  
(As an aside, I might add that it was a sheer joy to tell this joke
myself upon the occasion of smoking my own first cigar.)

	Pinkwater addresses the occasion of his pipe-smoking 
debut in an essay in his book "Fish Whistle".  You might be 
interested in checking it out.

	I also appreciated the fact that Pinkwater treats smoking as 
more than simply some "social disease", which has been 
practically the only way that the media currently refers to it 
anymore.  For Pinkwater, smoking isn't simply some bad habit, but 
a time-honored family tradition.

	Oh, well, just my thoughts.  I suppose I ought to try to 
catch up on the last issue of Pipe Digest, which is languishing on 
my hard drive.  Until later...

Peter Kukla

[ Thanks for the transcription, Peter! Any guesses whose catalog he
got? First clue: the first two initials are the same as
Tolkien's... :-) I vehemently disagree with what Mr. Pinkwater has to
say about pipes, of course... but it sounds like he had a habit, not a
hobby. Of course, I know where he could get rid of that unwanted
leftover Sobranie... :-) -S. ]


~\U ~\U ~\U ~\U ~\U ~\U ~\U ~\U ~\U ~\U ~\U ~\U ~\U ~\U ~\U ~\U ~\U