Smells and Old Memories

I have mentioned before about how certain odors can cause an instant
journey back into earlier times. The smell of an old book instantly
brings back fond memories of my grandfather, who passed on his
love of books to me.

Well, tonight I had another experience from a totally different and
unexpected source. My fifteen-year-old daughter is very talented (like
her mother) and for some reason decided she wanted a big box of
crayons.

"Not those cheap imitations, Dad. I want Crayolas or nothing."

I happened to be in the "school supplies" isle tonight, looking for a
couple of my favorite writing pens and saw the new "50th anniversary of
the 64 Crayon Box" set - at a very reasonable cost. I bought two of
them - one for my daughter and another for my wife. Since there were
supposed to be no duplicate colors, I opened the box right there in the
aisle and the SMELL wafted over me.

I was suddenly a young boy again, sitting in the living room floor with
my baby brother, coloring away in our "colorin' books" and listening to
the old Philco radio. It was a moving and delightful experience, and
once again I realized how very strong our sense of smell is connected
to our childhood.

I have smelled the new off-brands, and they don't do the job... either
for coloring or for memory recall. So like my daughter said, "I want
Crayolas or nothing."

In fact, I don't think there was anything else over 50 years ago...

I remember that smell as well, Brew, and also of that white paste we used in school. It came in a jar, and I can still smell it. Like Crayolas, no other paste or glue is the same.

Bologna sandwiches also does it for me. I haven't had bologna in years, but I used to make fried bologna sandwiches for lunch with plenty of mayonnaise. If we had tomatoes, I'd pile thick slices of those on too. Then, if my parents weren't home, I'd take my sandwich to the living room and watch The Lone Ranger or Superman. Oh, what glorious days when we had honest-to-goodness heros.

Of course that was back in the stone age when we stood each morning, faced the flag, and said The Pledge of Allegiance. Funny thing, doing so didn't warp my young mind at all.

I remember one cool, misty autumn afternoon sitting on the front porch with my dad while he carved our Jack-O-Latern for Halloween. Earlier that day he had raked the leaves.

I think I was around six. And there was something special about that day. The whole feel of the day was just right.

I love the smell of freshly cut pumpkin. I love cool misty autumn days. I love the smell and sound of autumn leaves.

Brenda and JoElle - who just simul-posted so I had to come back and acknowlege!

Ahhh, the fried baloney sandwich! (note the different spelling)

I wrote a blog once on that particular delicacy - how it had to be
fried in an iron skillet, how the edges had to be cut just right to
keep it from curling, and that aroma. I can't help but think of my mom
every time I smell it - that and fried Spam. Those rectangular slices
had to be designed just for sliced bread - two slices exactly fit.

The white paste does it for me too! The stuff didn't taste too bad either (Dick would probably prefer it to broccoli).

Other smells that bring strong feelings to me:

Hot asphalt after a rain
Burning leaves in Fall
A turkey roasting in the oven
Freshly peeled oranges or tangerines
Cookies baking
Pencil shavings inside the sharpener
Greyhound bus exhaust (different somehow from any other diesel exhaust)
Freshly cut grass
Vick's Salve
A new Sears and Roebuck catalog - the one that was 3 inches thick
Cedar boughs at Christmastime
And one that I can't put an old memory to, but yet very nostalgic for me - apple cidar vinegar.

ADDED IN EDIT: Man am I on "free association" tonight! I just had to come back and add one more (complete with visuals)

The smell of a hot iron on damp clothes...

... brings back my mother on a Saturday morning, Listening to Coffee with Bill
on the radio, and me playing in the floor watching her and smelling
that wonderful smell. The funny part of this is that the visual is
mostly of her feet and legs beneath the "arnin' board".

She had a habit of what we called "standing like a stork" - with one foot planted on her opposite knee - and barefooted.

Then I see a pop bottle with an aluminum sprinkler head that she used
to keep the cloth damp - bought separately just for that purpose.

Hey, this is fun!

I'd forgotten about cutting the edge of the bologna slices, Brew, but we had to do it. If we didn't, the curled piece wouldn't fit the bread. I always called it boloney too. It was a shock to discover it wasn't spelled like we pronounced it, sorta like when I realized wash doesn't have an 'r' and y'all wasn't a proper word.

Since you're a Southern boy, Brew, I have to ask: do you like sweet cornbread?

Ours never had sugar in it and everyone in S CA thinks cornbread is supposed to be sweet. If I wanted sweet, I'd order cake. Cornbread is wonderful when it's hot and steaming out of the oven, the edges crunchy and moist inside. We'd slather chunks with butter and hurry and eat it before the melted butter dripped all over our clothes. Oh, what heaven. Sometimes we'd drizzle honey over the pieces. Pancakes never tasted as good as fresh cornbread.

And JoElle, I totally agree with you about cool misty autumn days and the smell and sound of autumn leaves.

Dang, simul-posted again, Brenda! I added a little at the bottom of my last post.

Sweet cornbread? That would be considered a contradiction of terms. If it's sweet, it ain't cornbread.

You described it so well - and once again, the smell of it fresh out of the oven.

Oh, and it has to be made with buttermilk.

On a less positive note, something that grows in June, some plant or grass, triggers a memory of Normandy and I feel beads of perspiration form on my upper lip and my palms get sweaty. It only happens in June and that's all the effect it has, but it has been going on for well over 60 years.

With all of the nostalgia floating around here today, it sounds as if you guys need a good dose of the Rinky Dinks stories. Smells and memories, fried baloney and yesteryear, Superman and heroes, back when we were all kids, the world was somewhere on the other side of town, the sky was much bluer, and the kids on the street were real friends. This is right down my alley, as they used to say.

www.southtownrinkydinks.com

Phil Whitley wrote:

I have smelled the new off-brands, and they don't do the job... either
for coloring or for memory recall. So like my daughter said, "I want
Crayolas or nothing."

In fact, I don't think there was anything else over 50 years ago...

Phil, I can readily identify with the scent of crayons. Quite possibly the very same brand of the ones you describe was what I used in infant school, back in the 1970s after I first came over to the UK.

There are also other 'schooly' things that instantly take me back whenever I visit one of my former schools even today. One of them is the smell of floor polish: what they used all those many years ago, are still the same ones their using today. So now on setting first foot inside a school hall I'm taken right back to childhood again. Very sweet feeling it is too!

What a great thread, Brew! Your list of "smells that bring strong feelings" took me through each and every one with my own remembrances. Thanks for the ride down memory lane!

Don, You've got a great collection of old photos! Nice website.

Thanks Helen. I've had a great response from the Rinky Dink book, and it's already sold a few hundred copies, which beats the sales of my first two books by a lot.

As for smells jogging our memory, here's a few.

A tobacco barn in the fall when the first fires have been lit. Nothing like it.

Honelysuckle at dusk takes me back to sweet love on the creek bank and never fails to stir whatever urges I have left.

The smell when you walk into a funeral home invokes sadness and almost always causes my eyes to tear up.

The pink lipstick that girls used to wear had a distinct smell to it, and it lingered long after the kiss was over. Made me lick my lips and want to go back for more.

There is a perfume that some women wear that never fails to make me close my eyes and recall other women and other times. Don't know what it is, but I still smell it now and then, and it always takes me back to 19, and summer days at the softball park, where several of the girls wore the same fragrance.

Must be a story or two hidden somewhere in these things the memory of these smells has given me this morning.

You're such a fantastic writer, Don, that I'm so happy to hear about your book. I bet it's a great read.

I wonder if that lipstick is Tangee Natural. It's no longer on the market, and it only came in one shade, sort of orangey-colored, but it adapted to the wearer's own skin color. And, it had this wonderful fragrance and taste that I loved. I miss it.

I'm really enjoying all the great responses here. Thanks, y'all - for
letting me know that I'm not alone in my weirdness! Smells have always
been a major memory stimulant for me, and I share many of the ones you
have listed.

I agree, Dick, that many bring negative emotions. The combined aroma one
experiences in hospitals and doctors' offices is a major one for me.
Something to do with alcohol and ether (haven't smelled that in a
while!).

On the positive side... my grandmother kept a lavender sachet in her
dresser drawer and that is one "perfume" that works for me.

Do any of you know of a bush called Sweetshrub? Its blooms are purple,
waxy and shaped like little jingle bells. There was one in the yard of
the house I grew up in and the aroma is like nothing else I have ever
smelled.

Smells. What a trip down memory lane.
Some smells bring back fond memories, as with Don, and some bring back not so fond memories, as with Dick.
There was a perfume or "toilet water" as it was called, that a girl wore on our first and only date. She must have bathed in it and it was nauseating. Every time I got a whiff of that smell it reminds me of her and what might have been....
A good memory is the housecoat that my mother wore. When she died I took it as a keepsake and to this day it retains that special smell she had.
Not so pleasant was the strong smell of urine that was in my cell during my short captivity in Lebanon. When I enter a poorly maintained toilet, it triggers that remembrance.

On the lighter side but not the subject of this thread, are songs that take me back into the past. Great nostalgia.

What a horrible experience your captivity must have been, Abe, and that's certainly not an adequate word to describe it. Have you ever written about it? Your first book was about your business ventures, wasn't it, or am I mistaken?

My male lead, a police sergeant in Ten Times Guilty, has a reaction to the hospital smell when he returns to work after a leave of absence. This may be shameless self-promotion, but it fits the topic:

Ten Times Guilty

Even though he hadn’t exercised in over a year, he sprinted the fifty feet to the hospital entrance. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the break he’d been looking for. Maybe this time he would get what he needed to hunt the bastard down and haul his ass to jail.

If the sonofabitch lived that long.

The glass doors slid open. Puffing, Reese nodded to the ER clerk and turned left into Trauma One. The double-doors slid apart with a whoosh and he stepped over the electronic threshold. The nurse’s station stood in the center of the room, surrounded by twenty-one curtained cubicles. Alicia Ramirez, her flowered pink smock crisp and spotless, looked up from a chart, saw him and raised an eyebrow.

“Why hello, stranger. Heard you were back.”

Reese started to reply when the acrid odor of alcohol, antiseptic, and something else, a sour, bloody smell hit him. His guts constricted to a hard knot and he broke out in a cold sweat. Christ, not again. Afraid he’d puke in front of everyone, he made a dash for the men’s room.

Inside, he threw the bolt, dropped to his knees in front of the bowl and lost his last two meals. When nothing but dry heaves came up, he tore off some paper and wiped his mouth. He rose and stepped over to the porcelain sink, hanging on with both hands until he was sure his trembling legs would support him.

He thought he had it conquered. He thought he could return to work, do his job, even come back to this hospital.

But he had forgotten the smell.

Images he’d tried to drown flared in his brain. He saw again the small, pale figure lying on the gurney, saw all that blood that coated her arms and matted her dark hair. It soaked the bandages wrapped around both wrists. How could anyone live with all that spilled blood?

But her eyes were worse, staring at him, silently accusing, even when he gripped her hand, trying to force her to live. In the end, all he could do was watch helplessly as she died.

He stared at his reflection in the mirror, hating his weakness, hating himself for the way he had allowed that tragedy to happen.

Speaking of heroes, I just turned on the TV, scrolled through the channels, and found a wonderful surprise! The Lone Ranger was on a new channel, WHT - World Harvest Television, channel 367, Direct TV. I have no idea if it's a daily thing or what, but there he was, just as I remembered.

Daniel Boone follows.

That excerpt from Ten TImes Guilty really pegged the topic theme, Brenda! Great descriptions and scene-building!

I had my tonsils removed when I was eight, and that was when they still
used ether. God-awful stuff. I was sick from it for days. Now, although
it hasn't been used as an anesthetic for years, it is still found in
some chemicals, like quick-start aerosols for vehicles. I sprayed some
into the carburetor and when I smelled it, I had a full-blown panic
attack!

Good heavens, Brew. I think we were twins separated at birth. I, too, had my tonsils removed and had a horrible reaction to the ether. Every time I breathed, I smelled the ether and got sick again. That lasted two or three weeks and left a horrible memory. And on the few occasions when I've smelled it in some aerosols, my stomach rolls, and I'm right back to that horrible time in my childhood.

Glad you liked the excerpt.

My dad used to own an auto repair shop.

I love the smell of auto repair shops. I think it is mostly the smell of dirty oil and stuff.

Really, when I walk into a nice dirty repair shop I get a good feeling with the smell.


On the other hand. I don't like cut flowers. In Mexico at the markets I had to avoid the sections with the tons of cut flowers. I don't know why but the overwhelming perfume would *always* give me a headache. I don't like flower shops. My hubby knows to NOT bring me flowers. I LOVE gardens. I do like flowers, just not when they are cut.

When they put that mask over my face... oh God! I felt like I was suffocating and I couldn't get them to understand.
What if they don't know I can't breathe?
I went under during that horrific panic and had what I truly
believe was an out-of-body experience! I was one of the first to see
the Earth from space... A large nurse and I were on what appeared to be
one of Saturn's rings and it was moving further and further away from
Earth. There was a bass drum playing very loud, "thump THUMP, thump
THUMP" (probably my own heartbeat) and I was screaming, "Help!" over
and over. When I awoke in the recovery room I was still fighting.

The new anesthetic agents put you OUT - like death, with no dreams or awareness of time passing. With ether, you dream...

JoElle, I like the smell of repair shops too, but they don't trigger any special memories.

Wonder what it is about the cut flowers? Could it possibly be a reminder of a funeral you attended at an early age?

I too had my tonsils removed when I was 8. Did it upstairs at the doctor's office, as he had a couple of operating rooms there. I went in in the morning, he removed my tonsils, and I went home that afternoon, with a stop at the local drug store for a dish of vanilla ice cream.

I also had ether, but it leave me with any impressions or with any associations with the smell. It did, however, allow me to experience what was the beginning of a lifetime of very odd dreams. This one had me laying on my back on a huge playing card, a King, I think, and the rest of the deck was stretched out like you see on a poker table. I was floating down a huge river on the deck of cards, singing a song about a bluebird, which seemed to be following me. The river was deep and very green, and was moving rapidly. I remember thinking that I had to get off the cards and out of the river before it reached the rapids, and so I leaped to a rock that in turn rolled away into a meadow. I somehow found my way back to the doctor's office in time to wake up and ask if I could have ice cream on the way home.

Ether, huh? Who'd a thunk it would lead to a life time of such dreams?

Seems like everyone I have told of this experience - that had also had
ether - had similar dreams of falling, or *moving away* or being out of
control. One old friend told of being on a bicycle with no brakes and
going down a spiral staircase.

Yeah, they promised me ice cream too (Bill Cosby style) but I was so
nauseated, not to mention that I couldn't, or didn't want to swallow.

Am I the only one who still has her tonsils???

I remember the story of Curious George going to the hospital and passing out on the ether.

Brenda Hill wrote:

Speaking of heroes, I just turned on the TV, scrolled through the channels, and found a wonderful surprise! The Lone Ranger was on a new channel, WHT - World Harvest Television, channel 367, Direct TV. I have no idea if it's a daily thing or what, but there he was, just as I remembered.

Daniel Boone follows.

My hero was "the professor" on Gilligan's Island. He was so brilliant!