I remember enjoying making it. In the winter, I would set a bowl on the table, fill it with water, and stick the pipe in it. As the water cooled, I would add more. The bowl would hold a pretty good-sized pipe. The great thing about piping tobacco is the variety. I found every type of tobacco that I had tried and loved. My favorite pipe was a pretty, old, broken one that my grandparents got when they bought their first house. The beautiful wood and the ornate look were so out of place in that era and yet it was so interesting. I can picture myself walking around with it in my hand and the pipe smoke wafting around me as I was in my "trout puddle in the morning sun." I can also picture the day when my aunt took me over to the lake for the first time. She saw me coming out of the boathouse with my grandfather's pipe. "Wonder what that young man is doing out there?" she said to herself. Turns out I was filling a pipe. I was only about eleven years old, so it must have been something that was pretty common at the time. I didn't know how common or what I was doing until years later when I found out about all the stuff I was inhaling. When I started inhaling, I would use the old pipe. I felt that it was important to make the pipe myself, which included stuffing it with paper, then wrapping the tobacco and making my own pipe holder out of clay or wood. There were many times when the pipe would simply be shoved into my pocket and I would put the tobacco in another pocket and go about my business. I just didn't know any better. My favorite smoking ritual was to take a bunch of pipe tobacco and light it all up, sit down, and then pull out a book and start reading. I got a lot of joy out of smoking my pipe. I would take it everywhere with me. I probably tried to keep a clean pipe in the car all the time to avoid having to go in and out and start over again, but once, on a very long drive, my clean pipe got dirty, which actually helped, because I kept getting more and more paranoid about keeping my pipe clean. If I had known what I know now, I could have just taken it out and used a dirty piece of pipe for another bowl. I really didn't start inhaling for a very long time. My first time was an accident. At the time, I wasn't really even inhaling yet. There was this one night when I was sitting in my den, after dinner, when I just grabbed my new pipe out of the pocket of my jeans and started puffing away. The first couple of times didn't really taste good, but then I just kept puffing away. I never once thought about the fact that it would catch fire. I was pretty much oblivious to all of the dangers of inhaling. The pipe was sitting in a bowl of water. It was an old pipe, so I was trying to keep the water in it clean. Once I noticed the water was starting to drip in, I just took it out of the bowl. The bowl would have held a lot more water if I had left it, but I was totally unaware of the gravity of what I had just done. I remember that when I started smoking again I would always carry around a small amount of pipe tobacco in my shirt pocket, just in case I needed to light up somewhere along the way. Some people carry around lighters, but I just didn't. Maybe I wasn't ready to have one that I could lose. I can't remember smoking anywhere but the house and my den. I never smoked when the kids were around. I didn't get any particular kind of pipe when I started smoking. I never knew what was out there, so I just tried to get the best one I could get. One day I was driving down the road and saw a pipe store. I had not yet experienced my first seizure, but on the way back to my house I blacked out and drove off the road, onto a field. I had the feeling that I was going to die. As the feeling began to leave me, I remembered how I'd always seen people who were epileptic smoking from pipes. I thought that maybe that was the safest way to go. So I went back to get the pipe, which wasn't there. I continued my smoking by taking cigarettes out of my dad's pack. In my mind, cigarettes and pipes were somehow alike. I didn't have much to do with other people, so when I quit inhaling, I quit smoking cigarettes. All that was left was cigars and pipes, and now that was out. ### THE WALK HOME When I was going through the whole first year, the second day that I didn't inhale, I had to walk from the middle of town to my house. I had to use a walking stick and keep my arms in my coat sleeves and hold my cigarettes. The first day, there were people along the way, but once people realized I was only smoking cigars, they left me alone. They knew I was not inhaling. But it was still hard for me. My right arm was stronger than my left arm, and the left arm was more damaged because it had broken so often. My sister had left for college when I was first smoking, so it was just me and my mom to help. I had all these problems that I couldn't solve, like a paper route and school and the car repairs. My mom was trying to stay on top of everything and I was having a hard time just keeping up with the normal things. I was tired and weak and it would wear me out to walk up a long driveway. I had to sit on a crate with my left arm and my walking stick. It was uncomfortable to sit because my left arm always hurt. I started thinking about how all of this had to be done to help me, and then I thought about all of the people that I had passed while walking. I would see someone standing in their door in a dark suit looking down at me as I passed by. When I got about halfway to my house, the rain started coming down. A young woman who knew me was driving by. She stopped and I got in the car. She said she had never seen anything like me before and that I looked so different and so old. "I wish I could fix you up," she said. "I wish you were young again." There is no question that people were much kinder to me when I was young. There is also no question that I wish I was young again. What can we do to give all of these young people back their lives? ### THE PIPE AS A CIGAR To be honest, one of the reasons that I started inhaling again was because of the way that I could inhale. In the past, I smoked my cigars by putting the cigar in a bowl of water and putting the bowl on a table. Then I would sit in a chair and suck the smoke into my mouth. This was an incredibly bad habit. The smoke is very hot. All you have to do is go outside and take a puff of a cigar and you can feel the hot breath come up your nose. But back then, I didn't think about it. When I started inhaling again, I was having more seizures, and sometimes they would last for weeks at a time. For a while, I could not remember much about them. I really did not want to talk to my family about the seizures. I was embarrassed. I could not stand my mom seeing me fall or anything like that. I was really embarrassed about what I was going through. My dad made a rule: He said that when I fell, nobody but him and Mom were to know that I fell. "I just want you to know that it happened," he would say. "But I don't want any special treatment." I wanted to talk to the doctor or someone who had some sort of medical knowledge, but I was so embarrassed that I just didn't. I started to have seizures at school when I was in the ninth grade. We had a football game coming up. I wanted to play, so I needed my medication. I ended up throwing it away. That's where my addiction started. The pipe is something that I can hold in my hand and it lets me take in some tobacco. I thought about the pipe and the tobacco more often than I thought about what was happening to my brain. As the addiction started to grow, I started to inhale more and more. I found myself just sitting down and smoking and smoking. I couldn't stop it. I just couldn't stop it. I could not say no to myself. It just kept growing. I never considered that I was having seizures. The thought of that didn't cross my mind. I got to be about sixteen years old, and I was about to quit school. At that time, it was pretty hard to quit school, so I went out to the basement in my grandmother's house to talk to her about my situation. I could see her face as she was coming up the stairs into the basement. She came into the room. She asked me what was wrong and I told her about my seizures. She told me that she knew of a program for boys who were epileptic. They gave them a place to go and get treatment, then sent them home to their families and said,