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Show pile. They smelled of my father, tobacco and match, and fit so neatly into the various circles. I loved the gentle click they made against my teeth, how the bowls bobbed up and down in my mouth, the weight of each pipe in my hand. They were the colors of the woods in autumn, bowls in burnt orange, deep brown, and cornstalks right before the snow. One pipe, a gag gift I suppose, was actually a glass baby bottle, probably from when my brother Scott was born in 1972. Because of its size, it wouldn't fit with the others in the rack but had to be laid across the top, disrupting the orderliness, and making it so the pipes never slept level. The baby bottle made me uncomfortable. I knew it wasn't the right kind of pipe, my father never actually smoked it, and I never knew where in my organizing scheme to place it. It felt improper to me, like my father shouldn't have it, and I wished deeply that he would throw it away. But it remained, with the others, until the day my father stopped smoking completely. And then all the pipes disappeared. I pair the memory of organizing the pipes with the one of sitting exposed on top of a bomb shelter. They are two of the very few memories I have of our first tour of duty and seem to rest in balance. The confusion Iexperienced in public and my private desire for order. Every time I fit the pipes back into the holder some kind of order was restored, the boys returned to their houses, the shelter not an indication of war, the ships I saw plowing the harbor full of people on vacation, guns veiled in sheets. One more autumnal pipe settling with its gentle click into the wooden holder, one less need for a t-shirt covering my naked chest. Hospital Point was a cemetery. On December 7, 1941 the hospital burst with wounded 44 |