Taking A Deep Breath

I read somewhere that we hold thousands of smells in our olfactory vault. I wonder if I can trace my way back from today’s burnt bagel to yesterday’s gasoline fumes at the pump….and back ninety-three years to my first diaper change. I think it was on a Thursday but I really don't want to talk about it.

Donald has provided us with the malodorous stench of arrogance, degeneracy and malice. I need to clear my lungs. The flower section of Trader Joe's has many spring blossoms and some have no odor at all. Both the orchids and tulips have traded vivid colors for scent. Even those hot-house roses come to us deodorized. I feel cheated. My nose leads me to the stargazers to take a deep whiff.

Peggy first wrote her poems in a notebook with a number two pencil. I’m the guy who sharpened them. I admit getting a temporary high from the shavings. Not high enough to write my own poem but often achieving a height sufficient to write a blog.

I’m seldom hungry………until I see and smell the plate. That wakes my salivary glands and I get in trouble trying to subdue the flow. As I write this I’m thinking of the rhubarb crumble I recently devoured. Speaking of food I’m the only one I know, outside of my daughters, who doesn’t like feta cheese. In fact I can’t stand it. My brain registers it as vomit. Blame it on a blemish in my double helix.

Among other vapors I could live without are newly laid black top, coconut, rancid acacia and asafetida. I don’t expect anyone to connect with the last two. They transport me back to those years in pharmacy. In my days at my father’s drugstore, there were no glued labels. The pharmacist made his own out of acacia powder dissolved in water turned upside-down with gauze covering the opening of a wide-mouth jar. After a week or two it stunk and that rancidity has never left me. Asafetida is a gummy substance used to ward off evil spirits which emits a pungent odor one wants to run from out of the room along with the spirits.

Childhood fills my nostrils. There were faint vapors of chalk mixed with bubble-gum from baseball cards. (I was so dumb I saved the gum and chewed on the cards.) Airplane glue got me for a short time. Neatsfoot oil soaking into a leather mitt. Citronella to repel mosquitoes. Licorice or wild cherry syrup in cough medicine made respiratory infections not all that bad. The eucalyptus and compound tincture of benzoin in the vaporizer took away our suffering. My father’s store breathed a curious mixture of aromatics which he carried on his body … a smidge of Evening in Paris perfume comingled with tuna fish from the sandwich board along with malt from the fountain and all this triturated by the overhead fan with crude drugs leaking from the apothecary jars, sometimes sulfurous, mostly warming, ancient, botanical, and slightly intoxicating.

Subways smelled of sweat especially with raised arms holding onto dangling straps. The straw seats retained traces of everyone who sat there. We inhaled each other and exhaled our communal air. Maybe we even got to like what we smelled recognizing a whiff of ourselves in the mix.

Then there was Mrs. Spizzeri’s parmesan cheese cooking on the second floor from which I dashed holding my breath on the way to the sanctuary of my apartment 3 FB in our four-story walk-up. Today I love eggplant parmesan which tells me how far one comes away from those first foreign aversions before our noses accommodate and finally embrace them.

Our inspirational leader has mastered the art of deceit. But I'd like to believe that Truth always passes the sniff test. I cannot define it but I know it when I smell it.