An odd Twin Cities trend

I thought nothing of it the first time a few months back when I glanced over at a stoplight on my commute home and noticed a guy with his head bobbing to the beat of what I can only assume was music. It wasn't odd that he was very in touch with his musical choice for his ride home. No, it was odd that he was smoking a pipe.

It's nothing new. Hell, I've seen plenty of people indulge in the suaveness that is smoking a pipe but the folks indulging were usuall of a certain age (cough - senior citizens). This guy, though, might have been younger than I am. To top that, he wasn't smoking a straight (I don't know my pipe terms) pipe but one more like this humdinger. Yep, sort of a crook-neck affair was what this guy was rockin'.

I thought little of it until a couple of weeks later when, at that very same stoplight, I noticed a person again smoking a pipe as I peered into my rear view mirror. The biggest difference this time was that it was a woman, again near my age, sitting in her red Dodge Shadow non-chalantly smoking a pipe.

Theories abound in my weird, wonderful world but I can assume at least two things from these observations. Pipe smoking seems to be a strictly after work activity and pipe smoking now crosses all age boundaries and spans a wide demographic.

Am I alone, though? Have others witnessed an increase in use of tobacco pipes? Is this a new trend I missed out on or is it just a Minnesota oddity?