The year is 1988.  Tom sits in front of his television and smokes his Killarney pipe.   He draws nervously on the pipe as he watches the final countdown for Discovery, the first space shuttle to fly since the Challenger disaster.   As the shuttle lifts off and soars into the sky he gradually feels the tension leave his body.  For some strange reason he is reminded of the days when smoking a pipe had helped him relax before another long night in the jungles of Vietnam, and he thinks of the man with the slight Irish accent who gave him the pipe that night a San Francisco diner.  Could that have been twenty years ago?

The year is 2010.  Tom’s wife has spent the last few days deciding what to do with his personal possessions.  As she boxes up the items he had accumulated in their long years together she comes across the old pipe he smoked for so many years.  She holds the bowl near her nose and breathes in the scent of pipe tobacco.  It reminds her so much of her beloved Tom.   She stands there for long moments, with tears streaming down her face.  She considers keeping the pipe, but then decides that is not what Tom would have wanted.  She can almost hear him say, “A pipe is meant to be smoked, not set on some damned shelf and gazed at.”  She smiles.  Tomorrow she will find someone who can pass the pipe on to a new owner.

The year is 2011.  I carefully load a bowl of Irish Flake into my recently acquired 1948 Peterson Killarney apple.  Of the many pipes that comprise my collection, this pipe has quickly become my favorite.   It really is true that the old Peterson pipes are wonderful smokers.   But that is not the primary reason I love this pipe.   As I sit at my computer and read the news… Bin Laden has been killed by Navy Seals in Pakistan… gas prices top $4.00 a gallon… hundreds are dead as tornados sweep across the southern states… I think about who may have owned the Killarney and what they thought and felt and experienced as they smoked the pipe in the long years since it was made.   I draw deeply on the pipe and think of people and times gone by.  In our throw away world an old pipe is a piece of history that deserves to be smoked and cherished.