When Grandpa was Young

My grandpa smoked a pipe.  It smelled good, and it was my grandpa, so I have always had an association between pipe smoking and solid old fashioned worth.

But lately I and the Lovely One have been watching a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie of a weekend.  Frothy and fun.  They are obviously meant to be young, fashionable concoctions, with the dressmaker for Rogers getting top billing in the credits and the two of them embodying hip young style.

Which includes a pipe.  In almost every movie, there’s a scene where Astaire mosies around with a pipe artfully casually dangling from his lips, obviously just full of being young and cool.

Those movies came out when my grandfather was a young man.

It is disorienting to find that all my life my old grandfather was still that young dashing man from the 30s on the inside.  He grew old and gruff and gray and crotchety but somewhere in his soul it was still 1938 and the stars were out and here was this stylish young man, full of beans, making his way under the night stars towards the sound of of the big band orchestra.