Pipes un-smoked for 60 years reek with history. The one sporting a white dot still rank from my father’s favorite Dunhill leaf curling over sermon outlines. Mine, pungent residue from archetypal pursuits from apeing Carl Jung, my psycho-spiritual guru.
“But do you really know how to smoke?” Jack, a dapper colleague once asked, shoving forward a 6-inch cheroot. “Danneman Lonja—World’s best smoke! Take a mouthful. Don’t inhale. Very slowly let smoke trickle out your nostrils.” And—voila—a hazy love rolled in with the first pecan-scented bite. Cheroot out-smoked pipe! Tobacco fumes abet and haunt many sherlocks of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud, his cancer-riddled larynx removed, insisted on smoking his cigar in the recovery room. Jung and followers puffed pipes in and out of sessions.
.

Adrian, most depressed
of all my patients, refused
to accept new friends or
opportunities. Nor heed
her lung doctor’s warning:
“Stop smoking or you’ll
stop breathing.” Hospitalized,
after sneaking a smoke,
nurses found she’d fallen
out of bed, detached her life-
line—stroked out. Luckily,
she woke bedridden, free
at last from her daily mantra:
“my life from day one adds up
to nothing. Zilch. Zero.”
Misusing tobacco to kick
depression lifted.
Like smoke.