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PSA #1
SYSTEM DAY 2025 IS ALMOST HERE
T-Minus 72 Hours & Counting!
submit your entry by Tuesday @ 12 noon CDT–
details for submissions @ end of post

PSA #2
NOW BACK IN STOCK AT SMOKINGPIPES.COM!

Photo courtesy Tom Cuffe CPG

The second printing of The Historic 1906 Catalog, in an edition of 150 copies, is now available at Smokingpipes.com. As with all good publishing–in case you didn’t know–a new printing means an opportunity to make corrections.  In this case, Gigi, our resident Perfectionist Book Designer, said “there are few minor annoyances I want to correct before it goes out again.” Gene Umberger CPG, one of the world’s greatest line editors (probably the greatest) also had a swing at it, uncovering things I never saw and you may never see, but he did. Like Mary Poppins, one of my favorite literary characters,  the book is now “practically perfect in every way.” We’ve used the same incredible printer (Book Baby), so once again there will be an art book visual experience, with text and images popping off the page.

This morning I’m pleased to have Michael Sparks and his good friend and fellow Pete Geek Charles Mundungus expound on the theme for this year’s System Day in a conversation from earlier this summer–

TO HAVE WHAT YOU LOVE / TO LOVE WHAT YOU HAVE
(An X Pipe Appendix)
by Michael Sparks

Every spring I spend a week in June with my good friend Charles Mundungus, who has an airy, spacious apartment on Lake Geneva’s south bank in Switzerland. I can do this because Chas, a long-retired concert pianist, sends me airfare. But I also do this because we’re old friends who’ve been on many pipe-hunting campaigns together, more or less across the globe, and we love nothing so much as what Abba Mark Hunt CPG calls “the ‘3Ps’ of pipes, ponderings, and prayers,” the last of these being as much earnest conversations about life as the folded-hands-on-bended-knees variety, although we do go to mass together on Sunday mornings.

Not the same 3Ps, but excellent, nonetheless

After recovering from jet lag and breakfasting on black coffee and kannelbullar, those wonderful Swedish cinnamon rolls at O Martine! Chas and I visited Chris Bühler’s Au Boa Fumant (“At the Sign of the Smoking Snake” I think?).*

He wanted to check on a sack of estate pipes as well as show me the “secret” pipe museum down in the cellar that Chris (now long retired) had left behind.  I wanted to see if there weren’t some of Samuel Gawith’s “Unobtainium” (that’s Cabbie’s Mixture to the uninitiate), which is no longer imported to the US.  Of course, I also wanted to see if there were any Petes I couldn’t live without.  *Cough.*

We lunted back to the apartment, Charles having us take a fairly circuitous route since smoking now forbidden in so many outdoor places in Geneva, and he’s been given three or four tickets since the bans went into place in 2023.  I didn’t mind, as I was carrying a bag with a 500 gram bag of Cabbie’s and a fabulous NOS (New Old Stock) “Rugby-Style” 1309 System “0” (thanks, Tim Lomprey CPG for creating that desire!).

We came to down-at-heels marina where a friend of his was puttering around with an old boat. “We can smoke out here,” he said, leading me aboard. “Hey Conrad! Come up and smoke with us,” he yelled down the companionway. The breeze was chilly, but the water was calm.

In a minute or two the banging ceased and a tall, skinny man with a bit of a pot belly appeared, puffing what looked like a D17 Spigot, which, truth to tell, he strangly resembled.

“Salü, Chas.  Hello, friend, welcome aboard the Aquaholic. I would shake your hand but mine is greasy–tobacco?” Conrad asked, squatting on his heels and passing a leather pouch.

Charles passed me the pouch, I sniffed something awesome and filled.  The breeze coming across the lake was cold and kept blowing out my butane. “My butane is simply no good out here,” I grumbled

“No, not outdoors,” said Conrad.  “Here, this will work,” he said, passing me a brass Zippo with a curious illustration on it, a triangle with a shamrock in it and an eye in the middle of the shamrock. I couldn’t make out the words beneath.

“So your boat is treating you well, Conrad?” Charles asked after we’d all got our Petes going.

“It depends what you mean by ‘well.’ I love her but she’s difficult this morning, which is so typical for her.”

“Then why not get a new boat?” I asked, wishing immediately I hadn’t.

“Hmm,” Conrad pondered.  “I have what I love, I suppose, and I love what I have. No reason to change.”

Charles grinned, tamping his XL307 with his forefinger.  “That’s almost exactly what I heard at an old man’s retreat in Nevada this past spring.”

“Old men or old man?” Conrad laughed.

“Men, men, like us, my somewhat aged friend,” said Chas.  “You had to be at least sixty to register. Some were even–” but his dead dipped down into the into the old Bona Allen US mail bag he always carries with him.
“—here it is—just my paraphrase:  ‘the concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—this is the test of whether there has been a sea change from the first to the second half of life. . . . The rules are all different, with a greater expansiveness in living, often seen in freedom older men have to give things away.’”

“Care to unpack that?” I asked.

“Not a new idea,” Mundungus replied, “although the brother used it in a distinctive way. The first part is about accumulating what you love, whether that’s concrete objects of material culture, or more abstract things like education and travel.”

“How is this accumulating not one of the seven deadly sins?” I baited him.

“Greed?” said Conrad, raising one of his eyebrows.

“As in PAD?” I tendered, “or PPAD—Peterson Pipe Acquisition Disorder?”

“Uh oh,” said Conrad. “This isn’t another of your pipe smoking laws, is it, Chas?” (see PPN #434 and The X Pipe).

“I love you too, Conrad, but you know, as I’ve been thinking about it, there’s more than one way to understand the acronymitialism ‘PPAD.’ In fact, I can think of three.  There’s–

“Charles,” said Conrad, “you don’t spend enough time on Instagram or watching YouTube.”

“Oh, you wound me to the quick. As I am trying to say, the first, commonly-used “PPAD” is value neutral and simply a way of announcing a new purchase, especially if other purchases have been made in the recent past.  It often seems to be a way of asking for the moral approval of others.”

“Yes,” I said, “mostly I just hit the Buy It Now button and hope there’s no repercussions,” I said with what I recognized as a fake laugh.

“We’ve all been there and it’s usually not too serious. However, the second form of PPAD, the PPA Demon, isn’t something you want to ignore. That’s the little tempter, the daemonium, who injects obsessive thoughts.  You know it’s the demon at work when you can’t stop thinking about it.”

“You’re perfectly serious, I suppose,” said Conrad, carefully knocking the ashes out of his D17 on the taffrail.  “What do you suggest I do if this little imp attacks?”

“This type of PPAD calls for immediate action: ‘driving out a nail with another nail’ is what my Buddhist friend Thay always recommended—that is, substituting another thought (often an action), which could be anything from a good work to a prayer to … well, almost anything that pries your heart and mind from the compulsion.”

Somehow Charles always hooks me in to these absurd conversations.  “I have to confess I’ve actually experienced this once or twice,” I said as I tried to pour the moisture from the reservoir of my System over the side of the boat, only to have it blow back onto my hand. “But I never knew that it was a real thing.”

“Of course not,” said Charles. “Demons don’t like people to know they’re hovering about. It’s bad for business, as C. S. Lewis once remarked.”

“It’s not getting any warmer,” I remarked, “and I’m getting seasick rolling around here in the harbor. What about some lunch?”

Charles pulled a pocket watch out of his waistcoat.  “Excellent suggestion.  There’s an English tea shop not far from the national monument down the road where we can get excellent sandwiches. I know a back way we can lunt and avoid the gendarmerie.

Geneva and Helvetica

We walked along in silence for several minutes until, passing the national monument, I gazed up yet again in admiration of the two ladies and found courage (or politeness) to ask, “What’s the third kind of PPAD?”

“The third type of PPAD is PPA Delight: is the simple enjoyment of the beauty and delight we find in acquiring and smoking a Pete that’s new to us,” he said. “There’s a kind of goodness, an essential purity or innocence about it—”

“Like it’s a gift—” Conrad interrupted—

“Exactly!” he said. “It’s received as gratuitous, undeserved. A form of grace, without our ego.  I can give you an example.  When my mother passed ten years ago, I found a small box with hundreds of old stamps torn from envelopes dating from the 1930s and 40s.  She was from a poor family in rural Kansas and would’ve been a young girl when she collected them. It was fascinating to me, because I never knew she collected stamps. She had them organized in such a way that I could see they were very special for her child-self. I couldn’t believe she held on to them her whole life.”

“For my father it was classical music,” Conrad replied.  “The old 10″ shellacs when he was in high school, university, and med school,” then LPs later on.  He converted our cellar into a listening room when I was a kid, with huge speakers and tube-powered amps. The entire room was wrapped in floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with shellacs, LPs, and CDs.”

“Was he a pipe smoker?” Mundungus asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Papi had a smoker’s stands with a double circular rack and humidor in the middle next to his chair, with a book table on the other side and big ashtray full of dirty pipes.”

I stopped walking to relight my pipe with Conrad’s Zippo, trying to make out the inscription. “It seems, then, that every human being is programmed to have what we love.”

“Yes! Pipes, boats, postage stamps, classical records,” said Charles, “—the infinite mercies of the Creator,” and pointing at my shopping bag, “And it’s all so much fun, isn’t it?”

“Of course,” I said, crossing my eyes to look down my nose at the NOS 1309 I was smoking.

“At some point, early or late, comes other side of the equation: to love what you have.  This takes more forethought, and often forbearance. Sometimes it’s driven by poverty, sometimes by a philosophy of life, sometimes by a sense of other responsibilities,” he said, watching a man trying to load two German Shepherds into a tiny Fiat.

“Poverty was certainly my driver through university and graduate school,” I said.  “I loved pipe smoking but couldn’t afford anything but a tin of tobacco, and even then had to save.  I went to pipe shops just to look and enjoy the ambience and tobacco smoke.  If there was give-away ephemera on the counter, I came home a rich man.”

Conrad looked at Charles as we walked along the back alley, trailing pipe smoke behind us. “But Michael was young, and you said ‘to love what you have’ is part of the second half of life.”

“Yes I did.  Or rather, the friar did.  But don’t forget that suffering and love can often precipitate us into that ‘second half.’  Michael, do you remember what our Navajo friend Will Cowboy told us about the vision quest of the young warrior and ‘the Good Red Road’?”

“Um . . . not really?” I replied.

“Of course you do: walking the path of goodness, striving to live in harmony with the Creator and His creation by showing respect to others and dealing compassionately with everything you encounter. That’s ‘second half of life’ stuff, no matter how old you are biologically.

“How it comes back to me!” I laughed.  “But where’s the bridge here from the one to the other? These days I’d say I’ve arrived at the place where I’ve forgotten how to love what I have by accumulating pipes like a spoiled kid who gets a new toy every week and throws the old ones in the corner.”

Conrad’s face betrayed the kind of respect of one who doesn’t quite believe what he’s hearing but isn’t prepared to offend anyone by saying so.

“There aren’t any quick and fast rules here,” said Charles.  “It requires self-awareness, honesty, and more than a little humor to determine if PPAD is any kind of moral or financial, let alone spiritual problem.”

Conrad interjected: “I believe I read somewhere that one must focus his mind in thankfulness for at least fifteen seconds or it won’t imprint. Even if that’s an oversimplification of the neuroscience, I see the point—a scientist in the Antarctic finds only one new species of fungi in an entire year and is grateful. Another scientist on the Amazon discovers a dozen beetles the same year.  They are equally grateful.  It isn’t numbers that we’re talking about—that’s an obsession Americans seem to have—no offense.”

“None taken!” said Charles. “At the end of the day, pipe smoking is so very good for us because when we face into its multiple complexities ethically, spiritually, morally, economically, we face into ourselves.”

“Then all this has just been an appendix to the fifth law of pipe smoking?” I said, incredulous, but they weren’t listening.**

“Just don’t start talking about Eckhart Tolle and his famous maxim about die before you die,” said Conrad as we spotted Ye Olde English Tea Shoppe up ahead. Not every sophisticated European—among whom I count myself–wants to talk philosophy over lunch.”

“Never in life!” said Charles, taking Conrad by the arm, “although it occurs to me we might talk some theology, which you Europeans seem so reluctant to do–no offense–perhaps something about take up your Cross and follow me?”

“None taken,” said Conrad with a smile, tucking his D17 into his jacket pocket and turning to the hostess inside Ye Olde English Tea Shoppe.  “Einen Tisch für drei Personen, bitte.”

* This footnote for the Nebraska Pete Geek, taken from the website of the famous tobacco shop: “‘Au bois fumant’?! . . . Non, ‘au boa fumant’—‘With smoking wood?!’ . . . No, ‘with a smoking boa.’ The Boa is above all a vibrant allusion to the all-consuming passion of its founder, Christian Bühler, herpetologist and master reptile charmer. Sometimes, when customers asked him about the name of the store, he enthusiastically recounted his adventures around the world studying boas in their natural habitat. The smoking boa also evokes the practice of smoking wood: that of dried clematis stems from hedgerows, which country children enjoyed using to smoke like grown-ups. The brand’s philosophy playfully echoes this custom; each wisp of smoke tells an anecdote, and the love of snakes blends with the craft of pipe making.”

** “Your pipes are an unfolding story.”

RUA P-LIP SPIGOT.  These dropped last Friday, August 29^th, at both SPEu and SPC. I didn’t know the actual drop time, shapes, numbers, et al, nor did I know they had P-Lips! Nevertheless, how cool.  They’re also part of the on-going “CP”-stamped Charles Peterson Collection.  By the time I returned from the hospital there were pretty slim pickings, so I hope everyone who was alert, aware, and on board snagged the one they were looking for.

DISPLAY CASSETTE.  Hats off to my good friend Clint Stacey across the pond, who spotted this magnificent display cassette box. There’s a strut-card ad with a pipe clip to hold a pipe in the big Peterson book and, I believe, in Clint’s collection.  He didn’t get it, as it vanished under his very eyes, but it’s great nevertheless to see it.

GUIDE FOR SUBMISSIONS
Theme: “To have what you love / to love what you have.” 

Pick One:

• Have what you like (in a nutshell, what do you collect?)
• Like what you have (in a nutshell, what do you companion?)

Write the Obligatory Explanation, of not more than 250 words.

Send the Obligatory Photo,  which can include a smokin’ selfie or not, as desired.

Caveat: Only Peterson System and Sub-Systems are eligible for inclusion in this post.

• A “System,” by definition, is any Peterson pipe that includes a reservoir and graduated-bore stem with a P-Lip.
• A “Sub-System,” by definition, is any Peterson pipe that includes a P-Lip, graduated bore stem. Thus, the X61 P-Lip Celebration is a Sub-System, as are most of the Sherlock Holmes releases. Many older Peterson P-Lips are Sub-Systems, and will sometimes encounter a “Peterson Product” bent pipes with a F/T that has a reservoir. This, too, qualifies as a Sub-System.

To be included in the System Day 2025 post, entries must be submitted no later than Tuesday, September 2nd, at 12 noon CDT.

PSA#3
Pete Geek Meet at the Vegas Pipe Show!
Sunday Morning, 10am.

PSA #4
CORPS wants YOU!
More info:
2025 Pipe Expo Flyer 2

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