My Grandfather was an avid pipe smoker.  He loved to end his day on the back porch, where he would bury his old Doc Grabow into a pouch of Velvet and begin a ritual that I had witnessed all my life.  When all was ready, he would lite and tamp, and again, and when the cake was encrusted - he would settle back, and one could almost feel the peace which would descend from heaven, and he would commune with  God. Years later I would attend seminary studies, but it was early in my life that I saw that God would wait with loving anticipation, the man who prepared himself to meet with Him.   I was always welcome to set with my grandfather, if I didn't spoil the moment by talking (or fidgeting). I was five, and my grandfather was the first human being I came to know, and know deeply, without the necessity of words.  My grandfather taught me the posture of prayer and meditation.

He came into the world in 1902 and Prince Albert and Captain Black both prospered whenever he would grab his pouch and head for his cave.  He was never at home in the world of noise and drama, and much preferred his own - a place for contemplatives, a place more inside.  He wanted a place where he could be present to nature, even if it were simply a bench in a garden or park. He would spend hours watching squirrels forage to the evensong of birds.

Though separated by decades, he knew Thoreau, and Hawthorne, and Emerson. He loved the lore of the native American Indian, and I think he believed that the historical fiction of Robert Utley were personal letters that were written just to him.  After retiring from a university where he taught many years, he and my grandmother set out to discover for themselves the lands and places romanticized by history, until he was just too old and arthritic to set the leveling jacks under the 18 footer, which he towed behind the Chrysler New Yorker all over the Sierra Nevada's and the deserts that precede  them.   Finally,  he brought Eva home to be closer to our families, and he lived out his days with "pipedreams" of the past, of places he often read, and had seen, and rediscovered.

A Bari has its place in a cradle near my working desk, next to it a Savinelli -  and next to it an empty tin of Prince Albert.   I've just packed the bowl with a plug of W O Larsen Signature, and it is nearing evening. Once again I find myself heading for the deck which hovers over my little garden, where I bribe squirrels to entertain me (with cracked corn).  My eyes are getting weak, and my hearing ( a blessing inherited from my grandfather) is sadly going. But my sense of smell is intact, and so I breathe in the aroma of my past.  Our people buried the old man in 1995.  We laid his body in a family plot near Peoria.

Now, I am old, and the fire in the belly of this Bari warms my own arthritic hands, and I go to a place inside.  I am still able to hear snippets of the opus of birds in choir at eventide.  Their offerings to the heavens help cleanse the soul from the residual clamor of a fallen world.  Somewhere in the house the phone rings, and I ignore it.  I don't want to leave this place of grace.