This Pipe was not your pipe

This was not my Dad’s pipe but an image showing a pipe that echoes one from my early memories of my father, but it isn’t the one he owned. It’s a symbolic gesture, reminiscent of René Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images,” (“La Trahison des images” 1929), where a painting of a pipe is not the pipe itself. My father, once a heavy smoker during his tenure at Atlas Steels, could smoke up to three packs a day. My parents kept Cartons of Vantage or Du Maurier cigarettes in our kitchen in the lazy susan. I remember finding a pipe once in the house. I asked him once if he had ever smoked a pipe. He told this tale about this very type of pipe: an unfortunate shove on a bus led to the pipe injuring his throat, prompting him to give up pipe smoking forever. I’m unsure if this is true, but I know this photograph isn’t of his actual pipe; it’s a tribute, a representation capturing the essence of his story and the object’s role in it.