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I was late for a meeting the other day, so I quickly grabbed a pipe and filled it, ran to the conference room and lit up. Yes, we smoke in meetings here. It's remarkably civilized, and I recommend it for the rest of the world.
I couldn't tell you what the meeting was about, though. Maybe it was important, I don't know. A colleague noted a few weeks ago that I look ponderously deep in thought during meetings, as if calculating the strategies for perpetual world peace. But that is employment camouflage. It's the pipe. A pipe can make even me look intelligent and invested, and I've capitalized on that. When I'm in meetings, the only thing happening in my head is old Roadrunner cartoons on a repeating loop. I may crack a wry smile now and again, which my colleagues attribute to wisdom, but it's due only to the coyote immolating in the blast of an Acme rocket. I never tire of that wacky coyote.
Not this time, though. I was diverted from my routine mental disassociation by my pipe, which was acting strangely. It had never behaved in such an odd manner before and I didn't quite know how to cope.
It was smoking perfectly.
And I mean perfectly. I put it down to pretend to take some notes, and two minutes later when I picked it up, it was still smoking. One draw and it was in business. I tamped only twice in 30 minutes and never relit. I would put the pipe down on the table and watch the wisps of smoke, and just as they were dwindling to invisibility, I'd pick up the pipe and draw, and it would roar into life as if my last puff had been only a few seconds before. The flavor was full and rich and I kept wanting more. It was a miraculous happenstance, and that may have been the only meeting I've ever attended that I wasn't desperate to escape.
I kept glancing around the table to see if others noticed this phenomenon, but no one appeared to understand the cosmic significance of the event. I later discovered that they did notice, and a couple of them even attributed it to my advanced pipe smoking experience. Ha! It was utter chance. I got busy reviewing my steps, exactly how I'd filled the bowl, the consistency of my tobacco, etc., in hopes of reconstructing the circumstance, because bowls of tobacco that perform at that advanced level are usually years apart.
Typically, I am always fiddling with the bowl, tamping a little harder on one side to adjust the burn and compensate for my artless filling method, or gently breathing through the stem to try to keep the tobacco lit. I may poke a hole down through the tobacco to provide a flue if the draw is too tight. I may pry part of the tobacco up and then gently push it back down in a doomed effort to improve the smoke. It seems like I'm always chasing and losing that perfect smoke, so when I finally caught it, I was surprised.
And now I can't repeat it. I've tried the same pipe, filling it quickly and haphazardly, trying to recapture my experience, but it's gone. Now I'm back to relighting 20 or 30 times per bowl, and my coworkers are starting to catch on and realize that I'm not nearly as smart as I appear. Especially when they ask my opinion during a meeting and I wake from my reverie, able to reply only, "Beep-beep! Thththppthth."
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Comments
Yes, they always seem to just come at random. I think when the tobacco you are smoking is at perfect moisture in relation to the way you packed it. You get a good starting light. And, just take your time and enjoy. Sublime moments indeed.
Nice way to put it. I would love to be in those meetings too!
Kudos.
CSM: I agree: moisture level is paramount. And then there are a hundred other factors that affect a smoke in differing ways. So many variables are difficult to observe, but I'm trying. I recently bought a small dry box, used mainly to store camera equipment at low humidity, and I keep a couple of open tins of tobacco in it. Sort of the opposite of a humidor. I'm experimenting now to find the exact humidity level that works best for me for each different tobacco I smoke. Once I get that licked, there will be only 99 or so more variables-per-tobacco to overcome. Fun stuff!
Chuck
LV: You'd like meetings here. Previous to my employment at Smokingpipes.com, I thought meetings had been socially designed specifically to torture me. Wasted time, posturing and boredom on a level with waterboarding seemed standard. But here they are quick, they accomplish goals, and we can smoke. Though maybe I'm just more tolerant of meetings when smoking is standard....
Chuck
Chuck S.,
So true what You say about regular meetings. And to know that it´s possible to enjoy a professional meeting the way SmokingPipes Team makes me dream.
Cheers to Smoking Pipes Team,
LV
Es increible, esos momentos que ocurren como por arte de magia. Muy buen relato
I believe packing your tobacco just right and also proper tobacco's moisture level is the secret to a great smoke. If the tobacco is completely rubbed with no big chunks and then filled in not too tight it should burn all the way to the end of the bowl with minimal tamping.
I'm a couple of years late to the party, but I wanted to comment. Ah......the perfect smoke, it comes upon us like a thief in the night. Then slips away, just out of reach, taunting us. I have been chasing the perfect smoke for forty years now, and I periodically catch it. But how I got it has always been a mystery. Certain pipes catch it more than others, but attempts to repeat it go without success. All I know, is that when it suddenly appears, it's magic. It's in the moment, and always by surprise. I have one pipe that catches the perfect smoke disproportionately more than all of my other hundred odd pipes. It's a very unattractive one hundred years old 'HOUSE OF LORDS' sandblasted Canadian billiard, with a smallish (group 2) bowl. I got it as an unsmoked estate pipe twenty years ago, for $40. I was a regular at Stag Tobacconist, in Phoenix Arizona, and I was chummy with the manager. A group of estate pipes came in, and he approached me as came in the door. He showed me the little chocolate colored Canadian, and offered me first dibs at it. He didn't know much about HOUSE OF LORDS pipes, other than people said they were good smokers. I figured "what the heck", and I bought it. I took it home and added it to my collection, where it sat unsmoked until early 2020. I had moved several times over the past twenty years, and the pipe had been put in a small box along with several other pipes, and misplaced. I came across the small box in March (2020), at the bottom of a box full of odds and ends. I thought "how was it that I hadn't missed these pipes"? I have nearly a hundred pipes, so that kind of explains it. Anyway, I decided that it was time to break the Canadian in. I loaded it up with Dunhill Elizabethan and sat on my front porch. It started out like any other smoke, but then transformed in "Puff the magic dragon" on its maiden voyage. Suddenly I was experiencing Nirvana! During the next few weeks that ugly and unassuming pipe produced the same Nirvana smoke a dozens times. I decided to investigate the origins of HOUSE OF LORDS pipes. LONDON ENGLAND was also stamped on the pipe. I had to dig fairly deep into the interweb to discover that HOUSE OF LORDS pipes were only produced between 1901 and 1919,in London England, by a gentleman named Samuel Gordon, and that the brand later became Sasieni. I was in possession of a century old pipe, and it's got the mojo. Not every smoke is magic in it, but enough that I call it "my magic pipe"!