Reborn Pipes
Sunday, June 24, 2012 at 9:40AM | Neill Archer Roan | Permalink tagged Comoy Blue Riband, Reborn PIpes, Smokers Forum, Steve Laug | in People, Pipe Culture, Pipes, Restoration 
As of my last researching the number, there are over 150 million blogs out there on the internet. By the time I finish typing this sentence there will probably be 160 million. It’s amazing how many people blog these days.
Steve Laug at breakfast at the Chicago Pipe ShowThere is one new pipe blog out there that deserves your attention: Reborn Pipes, written by the Vancouver, BC pipe man Steve Laug. It is better than good. It is wonderful. Truly wonderful.
I became acquainted with Steve Laug through the popular Smokers Forums, an online pipes and tobacco forum. Steve serves as a moderator on that forum. Subsequent to my online introduction, I met Steve in real time at the Chicago Pipe Show quite a few years ago. I had already intuited Steve’s kindness and generosity; these things can be experienced in an online environment, but they are amplified in real time.
In real life, Steve is a member of the clergy. He is the sort of man whose flock I would immediately join if he lived within driving distance of my home. Thoughtful, quiet, and warm, Steve is, to my mind, an old-fashioned ministerial type in that his ministry emerges from serving others. I once learned of him bringing a homeless stranger back to his home and table for Thanksgiving dinner, an event inside his life that is probably so routine as to seem unremarkable. I’m sure he will be embarrassed to read these words, assuming he ever does. In other words, he actually lives the example of Jesus Christ as opposed to preaching the example.
I bring this up because that spirit of service comes across authentically in his writing.
In his pipe life, Steve brings homeless pipes to his workbench – pipes that have seen better days. In most cases, these are unremarkable pipes in brand or collectible terms. The one thing they seem to share is that they were once loved by someone. Most of them have had the tarnation smoked out them. As we would say of this kind of horse in Wyoming where I grew up, they were “rode hard and put away wet.”
