I've been kicking this idea around for a few days now, and here it is, Thursday, and nothing else has sprung to mind. (I don't know what it is with me this week. Depression? Fatigue? Residua of the stomach bug I caught last Friday?) Here it is: life is episodic, and each phase has its characteristic smell. Here are mine. Please forgive my semiliterate style.
1. How far back can my nose remember? Blueberry Buckle, my favorite baby food. I remember the precise shade of off-blue, the tart-but-not-too-tart taste, and, faintly, the smell. Runner-up: Vicks Vapo-Rub, which my mother knew had miraculous restorative powers when smeared liberally on a toddler's chest.
2. My grandparents' house smelled like dog and cabbage and rye bread. It smelled like the shmatas my grandmother used to cover the furniture and never cleaned. 3. I loved fingerpainting in first grade. When I walked into the room, I would know from the smell that it was painting day. Runner-up: wheat paste and rubber cement. Ever make rubber cement boogers? They bounce! 4. Later childhood: the low-tide mussels-and-oil slick smell of the Redondo Beach Pier. Runner-up: the smell of salt on the ocean air. My mother would claim she craved it, which I thought was typical nonsense, consider the source, yatata yatata (Yiddish for yatta yatta). But when we lived in Texas, I understood.
5. The smell of my girlfriend's arm. Or hair. Or her Dr. Pepper lip gloss.
6. Summer before senior year, I worked at USC School of Pharmacology as a dog-walker/rabbit-phlebotomist. Those dogs walked me. The USC vivarium smelled of dog shit and antiseptic, but mostly of dog shit. Nothing smells quite like a vivarium.
7. College chemistry brought me the smell of baths of MEK (methyl ethyl ketone, which we used to clean glassware). Lift the lid and it hit you, two fat gassy fingers shoved up your nostrils into your brain. Glacial acetic acid, nitric acid, and hydrochloric acid each have their characteristic smell-memories. Runner-up: marijuana smoke at my friend Sam's co-op.
8. Graduate school: My Life as a Scientist. Molecular biologist, to be exact. And what do I remember, more than any other smell? TEMED, a catalyst which makes acrylamide polymerize. TEMED gives acrid new meaning. (We also used beta mercapto-ethanol, but rotten eggs? Boring. Get over it.) Runner up: phenol, which we used to extract protein during the purification of DNA.
9. Med school: where to begin? Perhaps with decubitus ulcers, like a wet dog gone horribly wrong. But my pick would have be the fecal smell of any medicine ward. You can always tell when you're on a medical, rather than a surgical ward, by the penetrating aroma of the bed pans.
10. Internship and first year of residency: alcohol-and-blood breath. As low man on the totem pole, when I was on call, I would suture the torn lips, mouths, and tongues of every drunk sonofabitch who got belted, fell on his face, crashed his car, you name it. We had a secret weapon against alcohol-and-blood breath (which, trust me, is far worse than dog breath): cepacol and hydrogen peroxide. Gargle, spit, repeat.
11. Jacob was born during my year as faculty at USC -- forever after known as the Douglas Hoffman Remedial Year. I wish I was kidding. I'm thinking about Jake's first week at home, and how Karen and I fought (jokingly, of course) over the right to change his diapers. Parental love hit us like a policeman's sap. Neither one of us expected it. Jake's diapers -- well, maybe you parents will understand. We were in heaven.
12. I'm asking myself, "What did Texas smell like?" and all I can remember is our last summer, when fires raged across the Rio Grande, and for weeks the sky remained a sickly umber.
13. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we're never more than ten minutes away from the redwoods. After growing up in smoggy Los Angeles, you can't imagine how sweet that is.
D.
Leave a comment, and I'll link to your Thirteen list here.
1. JMC writes about food -- Yippee!
2. Norma belts 'em out.
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I can’t think of thirteen smells that I associate with memories. Must work on that. What I do remember: the spicy smell of steamed crabs when the lid is lifted off the pot, spice and vinegar and seafood-y; gloat cake coming out of the oven at my grandma’s; the smell of the ocean when I lived in Jacksonville, Florida, and went to the beach every weekend, even in the winter; Cool Water cologne mixed with pine and snowy, winter smells.
Did the 13. I’m feeling really fixated on food at the moment.
Live Journal is acting up at the moment (or else it’s my computer) so I couldn’t leave a comment. I enjoyed your 13, jmc. Cassoulet — mmmmm. I’ve done it up proper, first making duck confit, then using the confit for my cassoulet. Soooo unbearably rich. (But the heartburn afterwards was bad enough, I’ve only made it twice.)
This is one of the most interesting TTs I’ve read. I thought I had a pretty good memory for odors, but libraries never smelled like labs. I may try this one some day just to see what I can come up with.
My TT is up.
This is really a great idea
http://niceillusions.blogspot.com