Scents rise from Childhood

There was a grove of tall green pines and magnolias that lined the streets of Savannah, the waft inside the sightseeing bus made me experience a form of time travel; the trees smelled like those I inhaled on the way to school that I attended from ages six to nine, and for a moment I was transported to Montebello, California sitting in a yellow school bus riding south on Concourse Avenue and then north onto Maple Street.


The trees brought back a lot of things I'd forgotten, among them the particular kind of musty warmth that radiated in spring in between the canopy of trees when the sun was shining and I was daydreaming. I thought about odors and the deep sensory links with certain smells going down to the core of memory; encountering them again can set off reverberations.


I closed my eyes and like a priestess in a trance images floated before my third eye. The most enduring and evocative smell from those years was the smell of the tempera paint that was used during Art. At Washington Elementary, in the first grade, egg tempera was the first paint I ever used, as an earth-smelling scent it generated a concentrated essence of sulfur. Along with its odor I recall school shoes, wooden desks, polished floors, and institutional gravity. The hallway outside my classroom had a powerful smell- and that smell was even stronger in other parts of the building, especially the auditorium.


During those years I brown-bagged my lunch and given the choice between eating inside or out on the benches, I favored the outdoors. The warm vapors from either my tuna-fish, bologna or peanut butter sandwich emitted something that made me convulse coming close to nausea. So in the trash it went! I survived on an apple and milk. To this day I prefer a hot lunch and dislike mayonnaise and sandwiches. When my mother discovered what I was doing, no doubt instigated by my brother's tongue, and in part by my ravenous appetite when I got home, I would start buying my lunch. Standing in the cafeteria line I could sniff fresh baked bread mixed with various cooking odors and happily ate my institutional lunch in its entirety.


In those days, almost everyone's house smelled like cigarettes, since everyone's parents smoked. Mine did not, but during parties at our house, a cloud like an inversion layer would fill the living room and the next morning when Alfred and I would pour ourselves bowls of cereal and wait for cartoons to come on, there would be overflowing ashtrays everywhere. Once while Alfred and I, in pajamas lurking in the hallway at one of our parents parties looked across our smoked filled living room and watched how adults changed once inebriated. Mixed drinks emanated a unique bitter sort of smell.


My best friend Susie, lived down the street on the corner. When we played at her house, either Dollhouses or Candyland, her mother would bake us snickerdoodles, the rich sugar-cinnamon cookies baking in the oven, smelled like heaven on earth.


When I was a youngster, kids walked, rode their bikes, rollerskated or skateboarded and went places on their own. I loved the independence. One favorite place to go was the Garmar, the local movie theater for a Saturday matinee. My brother and I would head out on bikes for the afternoon. The minute we rammed through the doors of the pastel lobby the scent of fresh popcorn permeated the air. Possessing a sweet tooth, I was so overcome by the buttery, salty scent, that I'd forgo milk duds or a fifty-fifty bar in lieu of a small popcorn coupled with a soda.


The summers meant a trip to the plunge, the public pool that offered a great aquatics program and when I was seven years old, my mother enrolled me in swim lessons. On the first day she stayed behind at home and instructed my brother to lead me. Inside a locker full of girls I didn't know, I changed into my swimsuit and remember the gray cement stools we sat on. At the poolside, I stared at expansiveness of the pool and the cinder-block wall in the distance. The morning sky was blue. The boys came out of their locker room and I couldn't fathom how one teacher, would be able to teach so many of us. As a warm-up we stepped into the pool and performed calisthenics, when I got out the dominant scent of chlorine lingered in my nostrils. Then it was time to jump, one at a time. Being one off the tallest, I was second. I panicked and called for my brother who was swimming on the other side of the divider, “I'm going straight to the bottom” I yelled out. “No you won't! You'll float, I'll catch you,” he protectively called back. Being eleven months older than I, and not much larger, his scrawny frame did not evoke much confidence. I ran straight to the locker room, gathered my things, and in my wet suit, jumped on my bike and pedaled as fast as I could. My maternal Grandmother who was visiting us at the time, took pity on me when she saw me burrow my misery into my pillow. Each time I came up I whiffed the chlorine all over again. My mother who was angry at my cowardice and her financial loss after awhile dropped the issue. It was twenty years before I learned how to swim.


A few years ago, around the Holidays I saw a bottle of Old Spice in a drugstore. I've always loved drugstores and the things you stumble on, they remind me of the wonderful five-and-ten cent stores of the past. The Ivory container had changed, and the sailboats were gone but it imparted a hum of remembrance of my Father. I opened it and sniffed- it was him all over again; the smell of him driving me to school, of him bending over to pick me up, of kissing me goodnight, and of him sitting in the den, in his easy chair hands outstretched as I handed him his after dinner coffee. If one had known that these scents would cease to be used, or exist, and with the accelerating passage of time, one could have stopped to have savored a little more, and contemplate these moments that make up a life. Or maybe such smells never die and conceivably someday, somewhere, they will come back as a passing breeze of childhood.