"There's a time in every man's life and I've had alot of them".--Casey Stengel

Last night, at dinner with friends, the subject of pipe smoking came up. I thought back to my own pipe-smoking days in the early 1980s and wondered. I know I lost a promising relationship to the aromatic swirls of Tobacco Village Butterscotch blend. I simply wasn't going to be told what to smoke by anyone. I enjoyed the comraderie of the fellows who hung around the pipe store. I smoked and joked with old genius Charlie from the gun lab. I learned about cigar-rolling from well-traveled Don. I bought a hand-made Kabik pipe from sculptor Mike Kabik, himself. Kabik was the custom supplier of pipes to Anwar Sadat and Gerald Ford. Pipe smokers had panache.

Unfortunately, I failed to notice that all of these older men whose favor I sought to enlist for one purpose or another had no wives. I was dense. As I gently bit tooth marks into the stems of my 6 pipe rotation of bowls, I was throwing away a series of possible relationships to the smell and the juicy spit that grossed out the vast majority of my dates. I was oblivious to the swirl of smoke-the cloud-that followed me. It was bad enough I had the stench of cigarettes already with me; I had added cherry blends and dank latakia straight tobacco odors to all of my suits and shirts.

There is an old saw about a pipe giving a wise man time to think and a fool something to stick in his mouth. I think back now and know that I was not a member of the former class. Old genius Charlie used to call the shop "the last bastion of male chauvininity(sic)!" and I bought into that male bonding mantra.

Late in 1981 I began to come to my senses. I started dating a woman who smoked, but couldn't abide a pipe or cigar. This one was able to break my addiction to the cumbersome world of tobacco bags, pipe cleaning fluid, creasote cake development and blend experimentation. Though the cigarette habit followed me for another 20 years, I gave up the lonely world of guys laughing hard with old men in chinos in a smoky tobacco den. I tired of teak-lined pretensions and being able to discern a quality humidor from a cheapie. I began to see the reason why the wooden Indian in the corner bothered some people.

I spent the best part of that decade with the woman who I deemed worthy of the sacrifice. In the end, we too fell apart due to other pretensions and things not abide-able. Now, today the Tobacco shops and their smoky lounges are all but gone, victims of the new sensibilities. I still own the hand-made Kabik. I regard it more as a piece of art or a momento now, rather than a tool. It was a tool of former ignorance and vanity. I probably alienated 10 non-smokers and potential friends for every loud-talking buddy I had in the English Straight Tobacco scene. Now, when I smell an aromatic blend, I cringe a little. Not for the offensiveness of the smell, mind you, but for my own folly of youth.

Ordinarily, this many days of rain during a vacation week would have eaten at me and made me quite unreasonably resentful. In the past, I would have regarded this as an affront by the cosmic powers to MY special time and how DARE they? But, this week and in the past several years, I've just let go of that special irrationality. Oh, I still have plenty cluttering my emotional landscape, but I think I'm getting better.

One thing another rainy morning affords is the chance to ponder. Ponder enough and you realize soon that, while you may make connections and observations and have insights, absolute answers will almost always evade. It makes reading the rants of those convinced of their immutably unassailable correctness a little easier. I can even giggle sometimes. It's not that they are 'wrong', per se. Opinions are opinions. The giggle arises when I recognize my old self in them.

It's funny to think that I once held shouting matches with inanimate things. It's hysterical to recall sulking and pouting so as to make a guilty remorse come upon a series of rain clouds. It's smilingly amusing to think of how I held grudges against soggy turf on a golf course.

I've been reading alot about karma recently. It's got so many things that generate it. At the root of it's creation is intention. Only volitional acts generate karma. I think today, as I have many times this week, I will laugh. Loudly. Often. Hard. When that karma comes back to me it should feel even better, don't you think?

I am so proud of my Orioles. They are holding their own, playing solid, respectable baseball and giving themselves a chance to win each time out. They carry the bearing of major leaguers and Dave Trembley is giving a clinic on modern managing with a young team. I'm happy to see it and hopeful for even better things to come. It's all I've ever wanted; something in my day to give me hope, the joy of anticipation and the chance to feel pride, however reflected.

Oh, and a series sweep over the champs and a grand slam are nice too.

The fragile clay cliffs rise 30 feet or more above us as we scour the narrow beach at high tide. The huge fallen trees we rest on have future mates just above our heads. They hang by exposed roots just above our heads and only luck, chance and percentages keep us from feeling the real fear we should with those killers perched just above us.

Each small breaker of waves lapping the beach brings in more of the washing fossils that have been stolen from the cliffs as they have eroded. They swim in and out with each undulation and the special Miocene relics tease the eye as they swim in and out. The ones that pass the shell hash line , if only for the moment, get snagged and chased by the middle-aged man bent at the waist carrying a film can to collect them in.

Doubtlessly, there are coastal places where the innumerable sharks teeth of the modern beasts abound in thicknesses on beaches south of us. I know that my Floridian friends find them so thick and often that they take them for granted. I do not. The ones I find came from beasts long dead and often show the scratches of having bitten through the bones of primoridal prey.

Never do I have better perspective on the future than when I hold evidence of the deep and distant past.

I think gumbo might just possibly be the perfect meal.