Remembering

"The peonies should be out by Memorial Day."

"Whites, starting Memorial Day, ending Labor Day."

Parade.

Barbecue.  Which I want to spell "barbeque."  Or Bar-b-que.

Three day weekend.

~~~

I grew up through a particular commodification of culture, I think.  I'm pretty sure I remember at least an equal emphasis on parades and honorings, though outdoor cooking and the unofficial start to summer were part of the equation.

But it was almost as if you had to be solemn first.  It made sense, like a blessing before a meal.  Let us take a moment to remember those who, whether by volunteering or by conscription, whether known to you or merely an idea, gave their life in service to their country.

And I would see all of us gathered at the parade, and off to the cemetery, all of those grown ups who would later probably vociferously argue about what justifies war and whether there should be a volunteer army and military industrial complexes and greater good and all sorts of ideas that started off as syllabic swirls and eventually became part of the swarm my own mouth formed...

...I would see all of us gathered in one location.  Out of respect.  Remembering perhaps with different sortings, but remembering.  Quietly.

~~~

Currently, a blow out isn't even a rout at a sporting event.  It's a mattress sale.  

~~~

I'd like to say I'm not passing judgement.  But I probably am. 

I try to remember instead of whinge.

~~~

Nobody warned me about the salute.  And I was just young enough to have it not occur to me, and just enough at the front edge of my adulthood to have it slay me.

When you make it through the funeral of a dearly loved one, when you are pacing your reserves like you do in the pool and are trying to swim as far underwater as possible before coming up for air, when you are doing the best you can to balance giving supportive looks and sneaking shared glances of agony without completely losing it, this calculation is very delicate.  The calculation becomes even more important when you feel like if you do lose it, you don't know how you will come back.

So you sit in your seat, and stare fiercely ahead when you realize the talking is half a sentence from being over.  It's nearly over.  You figure you can make it to the end after all, you will follow the cues, you know will never look upon that person living or dead again, but you will somehow either precede or follow them out of this room with the rest of these people sitting so stiffly in unusually formal clothes.  You get distracted for a moment at realizing just how many of them you have never seen in these kind of clothes.  You realize that these people who are usually familiar but currently in unusual clothes are still sitting, there is no cue to move.  Then there is a rustle in the rear, and an honor guard (you remember that term from parades in years past) enters, and you think, "oh, they will lead him/us out.  How nice."

But they don't move right away.  You need a cue.  You desperately need a cue.  You sit forward again, the air starting to swish in your ears, but figuring you'll just roll with whatever movement comes next, you can make it, you can make it, so  long as you don't make any eye contact now, you can make it.

And then there is an explosion, and you leap out of your chair.  Your cousin looks at you, giving you the same evaluating look as when you started to come out of the roller coaster seat heading down the big hill that year long ago and you both knew that you were on the precipice of Trouble.  At that moment of eye contact, the rifles, for now you realize they are rifles, fire again, and they pierce your veneer, and you start sobbing.  It is too much, this fright and this ceremony and this ending and knowing that people are already trying to remember.  The third and final shot is just loudness in a swirl.

And then Taps begins, and you realize you *thought* you lost it before, and you go back years before, when you saw your first eagle and found a tin cup hanging by a stream as if by magic and turned and saw a certain smile and it all goes into some odd expansion compression as you realize that your past was well into his future at the point that earned this Taps and it makes sense that the bugler is out of tune.

You remember that you can never fully know another's life.  But you deem it important to remember what you do know.

And in the case of Memorial/Decoration Day, you vow to remember what you don't know.

A NYT article exploring the backstory to Memorial Day in the United States.  David W. Blight, "Forgetting Why We Remember."

Thanks to Buglers Across America, because digital taps just doesn't play.

Bitters

Never succumb to the taste of bitterness.  (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Yesterday, I had a brief Twitter exchange with the person who tweeted this Salon.com article.  It is a "follow me" kind of piece, in which the intrepid journalist plays with a bitter blocker.  A bitter blocker is just what it says: a kind of immunity granting substance which, when employed, alters your tongue/brain communication so that you will not perceive most of the 50 or so types of bitter.  Burnt toast becomes just toast.  Beer shifts to umami.  Stuff like that.  (Apparently, orange bitters...not the kind in a bottle on the bar, but the kind inside an orange peel...are not covered in this particular chemical insurance plan.)  When I philosophically Tweeted "but do we WANT to mask that which is bitter," I got a very literal response about a particular application of bitter blocking: the salt on the rim of a Greyhound cocktail, and the high volume of salt in commercially prepared broth.  Fair and true.

Still, I pondered.

Embedded in that article is a link to another article, one about scent memories and attachments.  It includes that phenomenon we have discussed before, the fact that we need to familiarize ourselves with foreign tastes, exposing ourselves to them a number of times before we can even begin to formalize our impressions of them, let alone sort them into an "opinion."  (Which would then seem to raise the spectre of the "first I liked/did not like you" chart, but further sorting is not part of their discussion.)

The fluctuation of memory.

Reading backwards.

The influence of the food we eat as children upon our preferences as adults.

Whether we should mask that which is bitter.

On a holiday the United States sets aside in honor of the memory and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., it seems to me there's lots of food for thought right there.

Vernors

A tale of ginger lost.

Growing up in Detroit meant that if you felt queasy, someone ran off to the store to get Vernors.  7-Up was a pale substitute, in every way including color.  Vernors was NOT ginger ale, thank you very much; everyone knew that ginger ale was Canada Dry.  Vernors was like a Gran Marnier; sure, technically speaking, it belonged to a certain family of beverages (ginger sodas for Vernors, orange liqueur for Gran Marnier), but what made it outstanding was not that it was the epitome of that family.

It was a creature related, and yet entirely unto itself.

Since it was so fabulous, so weird, so dense with flavors that weren't your basic ginger ale, let alone soda pop (simply "pop" in Detroit, but I'll put in the soda for the east coasters, and to demonstrate my inclusivity and tolerance in rhetoric)...since it was so novel, so tasty odd, the flavor alone had healing powers.  In retrospect, it was probably the ginger that made even carbonated sugar banning parents like my mother relax the rules in cases of illness.  The fact that it was concocted by a pharmacist wouldn't have persuaded her as to its efficacy; she was sharp, and would have immediately cracked something about "snake oil" and "what USED to be in Coke" (forget it, I'm not going to be rhetorically correct and say "Coca-Cola"), and she would have pointed out that she wasn't serving Kool-Aid just because I was sick, because that was just sugar and water and what good was THAT going to do?

But she softened for Vernors.  Everybody did.

(Not everybody softened for the remedy we learned from Wilma Jean, our neighbor across the way at House #1.  "Coke syrup, honey," I heard her drawl as I rested against my mom on a concrete stoop outside on a hot summer night.  "She needs Coke syrup."  What in the world was that?  I could tell my mom didn't even know...Wilma Jean walked back home to get some of her own supply, and my mother didn't know the answer to my questions.  "Does she mean the pop?  Is it cough syrup that tastes like Coke?  How would cough syrup help a queasy tummy?"  She didn't know.  Wilma Jean returned with a small bottle, a cross between a bitters bottle and a medicine bottle.  To my amazement, my mother let me try some -- after reading the label.  It was...Coke syrup.  Had I had some seltzer, or a soda fountain, I could have made soda pop.

It didn't help, even though it scored on the exotic quotient.  But I digress...)

I have learned that some people drank Vernors hot, sometimes only and specifically in cases of illness.  Otherwise, they consumed it like the rest of us:  cold.  Though, truth be told, I sometimes drank mine tepid, when extreme temperatures in either direction could spell a rumbly turned into a rumble.

other graphics on 6-packs encouraged you to bake your ham with a Vernor's glaze

All of this association with illness is endemic to those who grew up with Vernors.  And yet it is a shame.  Because Vernors was one heck of a concoction.  It was..."deliciously different," just as the tagline declared.

In the same way you will hear perfume folk bemoan modern versions of old formulas, anyone who knows their Vernors will talk about the Real Vernors.  The Late, Lamented Vernors.  Old Vernors, the way they used to make it.  They may tell the tale of the near death of the brand, it being purchased by a bigger company, leading to its final death.  The graphics and the mascot remained, but...it was never, ever the same.

The new owner fiddled while the gnome wept.

**
Detroit's an interesting place.  There are two foodstuffs invented in Detroit, the Boston Cooler, and the Coney Island, which are unique--and which have nothing to do with their geographical namesakes.  The Boston Cooler is basically an ice cream soda, using vanilla ice cream and...did you guess?...Vernors.  The Coney Island is a hot dog with chili sauce over top.  Chili *sauce,* not chili...while it has almost discernible ground meat in it, it is more liquified than what you would typically conjure when thinking "chili."  With our without onions, your coney.

You can imagine the looks of curiosity, disbelief, befuddlement, near anger, derision, then humor that passed across my Brooklyn-born beau's face when I introduced him to a Coney Island.  A situation that kind of piled on when I asked him if I wanted to go to American or Lafayette to try one.  "Which one is closer?" he asked.

Ahem.

But I digress.

*

Today I tasted Goose Island spicy ginger soda.  In spite of what it doesn't have, I wilted.  It is, in perfume parlance, a flanker, the eau legere of Vernors.

To translate for the not-perfume-smitten, its like a less intense Vernors, but with the spirit of the original.  A lighter version of the original juice.  Unlike the New Vernors, which you might as well ditch for Canada Dry.

We talk scent and memory plenty of times.  We've talked about Francis Kurkdjian and his bubbles.  Today, I mashed 'em up.  What if those bubbles, like some perfumes, immediately whisked you through a life-flashing-before-your-eyes series of vignettes, of memories you could smell and taste?

I would pay online auction mania prices for the chance to taste Real Vernors again.

No longer do I whimper for Vernors when I am sick.  But in over a decade of raising kids, it has never ceased to be my first instinct to reach for some Vernors when they were ailing.

The old Vernors was aged for four years in oak barrels.  In a little bit of auld lang syne, I'm going to raise my glass tonight.  With something aged for 12 years, I think.  A substitute cup of kindness, as it were.

Unless I choose to pilfer my kid's eau legere Goose Island.


∞Vernors sign from the Dewey from Detroit blog
∞Vernor's six-pack from the Vernor's Club on Flickr
∞"The Vernor's Story" poster from Beverage Underground
∞Photo of Lafayette and American Coney Island from Fancy Mag (and a good narrative of the scene, too, though it doesn't mention how each joint would have a guy in an apron out front waving you in, battling with the other guy for your business)
∞Wilma Jean not the real name, though not far off the mark in a family full of double names, up from Kentucky to work in the auto factory, a case of Detroit taking on other geographies for real

Arrivals and Departures

I took Son the Elder to the airport yesterday.

When faced with the fork in the road, yesterday's journey took the car under the "departures" sign.

This picture (not mine) shows that point as you approach the airport circle.  When you know you will have to select "arrival" or "departure," and are ideally already positioning yourself appropriately, but if not, know that now is the time.

See, there in the distance. Arriving, or departing?


Smacked me pretty hard, looking up.  There was no choice.  Just a direction.

These days, you can't go to the gate with passengers. One must simply perform a most unceremonious curbside drop and run, under the piercing stare of traffic attendants who are intent upon making sure that there is not ONE BREACH of homeland security on their watch.  So you are forced to put on your most winning smile, whilst strapped in to your automobile, and say a hurried goodbye to the departing one(s).

There is no friendly last call from the conductor.  No "All abooaaard! All aboard who's getting aboard!" A door shuts, you move back onto the circle.  And try to remember to shoot yourself out of it at the entrance/exit.


***
"Lady, move it."

So I left the airport, and as I headed through the out door that is the airport highway spur, an incoming plane dared descend directly toward me.  Arriving.  I leave, one of many.  It arrives, one of many.  Life has these habits of putting my singular self into perspective.  I start banking on the interchange to get onto the tollway, and BANG! a billboard with Marc Jacobs entertaining himself appears immediately in front of me.  Fortunately, the angle of the turn is fairly acute, and I don't have do think about Marc's exploding metal for long.  I head home.

The music on the radio is at that level Son the Younger calls "Mom is Not Listening."  I'm not.  I'm paying more attention to the hum of the tires, the drone of the bass, the awareness that part of my brain is doing its thinking-thinking-observing-thinking thing, but there is another part, very silent.

I realize my scarf is getting wet.  It's cold around here.  Scarves are required, even in cars, especially when you've got all settings to functional levels but nothing to overwhelm.  I wipe my jawline and drive on.  I'm not sad.  Not in the thinking-thinking part of my brain.

**
The visit was great.  Lots of laughter.  Plenty of old routines, mind you--family scripts are hard to rewrite--but the old routines aren't all bad.  Just funny to note that people have slipped into their roles.  And yet, are now shaking them up.  One of the monkeys fell out of bed.  We're all rolling over.

*
So this all brings me back to vintage perfume.  I've talked about it before.  I refuse to turn my head away.  I am a knowledge omnivore.  I'm also a bit of a mashochist, apparently...gadZOOKS! some of those things make me yank my head away from my skin as if I were a cobra doing a reverse strike.  Stinky.  Stanky.  Insta-headache.  But when they're good...and especially good in a way I would never have met otherwise...totally worth it.

I don't cry over "I'll never have any more!"  (Okay, not much.)  But, really; if you're not madly huffing all that you can get your hands on, if you're taking your time moving down the path into the forest, because you fell down the rabbit hole and that was all so fastfastfast and you've already gone through the phase of grabbing as much as you can as you fall because it's all so beautiful or interesting or might be and it's going by so quickly and you don't know if you've heard of it before and might it be like that green one you just tried and oh my somebody said this one was fabulous hurry up and try it here's one that is promising hurry hurry hurryhurry, if you've already gone through that, well, then, the blur is over.

And you are in one of those moments when you realize you'll never grab it all.  Mistakes will be made.   But, by gum, if you breathe...if you allow yourself to breathe, and take something in, and let others pass you on the left...well...you'll enjoy *that* moment.  And you'll have it.  Always.  Later, you'll be able to turn the radio on to a nearly discernible volume, and let the hum of the tires add to the music, and remember what it smelled like.

Maybe you'll even have the memory of it on your scarf.

photo not author's own (I was driving, silly); find it at Virtual Tourist
an article on the effect of smelling women's tears: ScienceMag

Made by God and Man

Godowsky and Mannes, that is.  A couple of musicians.  Who also happened to invent Kodachrome.

Which renders its last impossible color today in Kansas, at the last plant to develop those crazy saturated colors.

Sometimes I think it was the impossibility of the colors that both underscored and made palatable the shock that my grandparents' youth actually transpired in color.

I know that it was Kodachrome that made the Pepto-Bismol pink jello stuff featured in the Junket advertisement (full color!) in my mother's copy of Dr. Spock look so otherworldly good.  I could spend an hour imagining myself eating it...and did so, often.  What flavor COULD that pink be, after all?  Early musings, I suppose.

Not just the colors, but the blacks and the browns, which are of course a color, but...again, hyperreality.  So clearly not sepia tones.  A blackness that wasn't an absence, but something that could swallow you up.

I just found this out this morning.  Polaroid, I knew in advance.  I didn't care so much...Polaroid was my uncle's camera, for gadgeters.  With a most memorable smell when you wiped the squeegee across the prints that came out the first generation of those cameras/that film.  Polaroid was a good film to highlight the fleetingness of memory, always needing protection, always doomed to fade no matter what.

Kodachrome, though...Kodachrome made memory more than it could be.  Or so it seemed.  Now that I am older, I sometimes wonder if what Kodachrome did was capture a detail so full, I had trouble accepting how real it was.

Not realizing that even that intense amount of detail was not capable of rendering the full truth.

Life is beautiful.  Reproductions try.

They took my Kodachrome away.

It was a heckuva thing to find out on New Year's Eve eve.  But I do have some prints.  And my memories.

The Irish Times
The New York Times
a Kodachrome documentary is in the works, says the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle 
other food on Kodachrome at CHOW, "The Last Kodachrome Christmas"

Storage, or, A Trip Down Memory Lane

Am scrapping other posts in the hopper, as I was visiting the Perfume Posse this morning, where March summarized her approach to storage.

The wise thing would have been for me to read and move on.  But, as often happens, I feel compelled to open my mouth.  And, as often happens, I attempted to find the balance between responding and oversharing.

Guess which direction I failed toward?

And guess what I am going to subject you to today?  Further meandering on the topic.  I'll start with my comment:

Erm…more than one storage system. Should I really tell?

Because…there’s the first “discovery sets” I picked up from Perfumed Court. Which I keep, still in their category grouping (“roses” “101″ etc) stuck into sea salt which is in odds and ends vintage stemware. Then there are the miniatures and precious morsels, a.k.a. put in the bottle by the maker items, which stay in the velvet lined drawer in my dresser. Then there are the Precious Decants and Smalls, Influenced by the Early Years which reside in a place of honor in my, erm, lingerie drawer. (LOL…lingerie in my mind conjures images of pegnoirs and camisoles and other dainties…suffice to say they are well cushioned, but not so much by silk and lace.) A few full bottles in the front of the other two drawers.

Decants in boxes, loosely grouped by house, unless they are workhorses grouped by season, in which case they are likely to be in a bigger bottle anyway. Back up bottles (yes, I have as many as five of those) with odd vintage things (Intoxication, Hay, etc) up on the high shelf in the clothes closet.

Sigh. I almost feel like this is a confessional. I can almost hear the perfume years zing past…I remember when I first fell, I had a bottle of Norell (picked up at an estate sale as a curiosity in memory of my grandmother), a few samples plus the discovery sets, and then a full bottle of Magie Noire, my first “real” perfume since I had KL in college and Carolina Herrera from my wedding day. (I didn’t wear perfume then, but felt like I should have something for a wedding.) Husband purchased that for me the summer I fell down the rabbit hole.

Smile. As long as I’m confessing…there’s one more box. Not full. But overflowing with memories. I keep the perfume I purchased in Paris in that one, along with a vintage bottle of Apres L’Ondee that I split with friends who came to me via perfume but have become very dear to me.

Which would probably summarize the storage system overall. There is logic and method to it, but all considerations are subject to and generally molded by sentiment and history.

I didn't even bother to mention the whimsy of how certain splits end up out and on display.  They are there to remind me to play with them.  Unless, of course, they are carefully packed away, a game of hide and seek I play with myself when I squirrel away treasures to be re-found at another time.  The display:

Antique lipstick holder, a recurring item.  

Broken pottery, repurposed. 

 One of the stemwares mentioned in my comment.

Vintage manufacturers samples, about to be gifted for the new year.  Samples somehow mixed with other ephemera in an eggcup.  Samples from long ago, still in the (intact) cup where I first put them.  Because when/how they came into my life is sometimes a better way to retrieve from storage than "A-Z" or "Manufacturer" or "author."

Mind you, I admire Bonkers' perfume refrigerator.

Hmm, this one must be a misfit.  

These photos are mostly pictures from a favorite spot to write. The perfumes are not those that I generally wear, or that are "in storage."  They are..."in process."  

Kind of like me, when I am here.

I tried to speak about storage before, in this post ("Door #1: Ways of Storing").  Go there for more pictures, if you like.  There will be madness.

What I did not try to address before is what I recognized in my comment to The Posse.  Which is...I treasure memories.  And this exploration into perfume is mapped by memories as much as it is by scent families or style or even type of bottle.  Memories of where I was in the journey, to a great extent.  Memories of how a certain perfume anchors outward, certainly -- usually broader questions like does it connect to a geography/vacation/season? does it remind me of a certain friend, because they introduced me to it/helped me learn to love that scent family? does it evoke a certain period in my life?  But sometimes simpler ones, like "did I panic houseclean when this one was out and it ended up in my son's closet?"

And, it turns out I not only treasure memories, I have allowed myself to allow them to trump any Dewey Decimal style of organization that I might try.  A fair number of what I have are entered onto a spreadsheet, separated into sections labelled "Sample" "Decant/Partial Bottle" and "Full Bottle."  But not all.  A number of my "regulars" are sorted into boxes by season (warm v cold, basically), but not all.  

A number of my treasures are cloistered in the dresser.  But not all.  

treasures, yes, but whimsically collected here, largely because size allows

It occurs to me that if I end up fully charting, with this combination of words and pictures, in serial post form, I might actually accumulate a functional mind map.  A portrait of How Things Work in there, as it were.

(That laughter you here might be yours, but it most certainly the author's own.)

Anyway, I offer you sincere happy wishes for warmth and good cheer as the holidays wind up and the year winds down.  I'd like to give you a hint of what else is coming this week.

But I know enough now to know that what I would offer is the muscle of plans hung upon the skeleton of intent.  All of which would be subject to that little box of whimsy.


all photos author's own

Veteran's Day

Today the local newspaper featured a story on local veterans, including some who had served with the Merchant Marine.

Immediately, I remembered old movies and toss off lines in conversation about being sent to serve in the Merchant Marines.  And realized I knew precious little about these mariners, other than some mangled impression that being sent to serve was akin to being in the Foreign Legion, but with water, rather than sand, under your feet.

Here are a few corrections to my imperceptions:
*Rather than foreigners choosing to serve in another country's armed forces (the Foreign Legion), the Merchant Marine is composed of citizens of their country.
*The Foreign Legion has an elite reputation, and is not Abbot and Costello bumbling through the desert
*The Merchant Marine is not composed of U.S. Marines on punitive duty, but seafaring folk who come to the aid of their country...without the artillery of a fighting ship.

Every year, when Veteran's Day comes around...the day formerly known as Armistice Day, in honor of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, when there was a "cessation in hostilities"...every year on this day, I dig around, and every year on this day, I learn something new about this history of those who have served.

Of course, just about every day of every year, I find myself reminded of that which I don't know.

Today I take that reminder in more somber form.  Because something I will never know, no matter how much I recognize what I don't know, is what it is like to give your life in service of country.  Or spend your days serving, knowing that you might cross the bar before the day is done.

photo from the Gjenvick-Gjønvik Archives, an online source of things marine from 1800s-1954, including information and documents from the two World Wars, the WPA...and groups working the inland seas.


manuscript copy of Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" from the University of South Carolina rare books and special collections section of their Libraries site.

Common Smells

Had to turn on the heat last week.  It dropped below 40 degrees at night multiple days.  Couldn't postpone the inevitable.

There is nothing more melancholic for me than the first whiff of gas forced heat.

Why?  I'm not sure.  I love all the seasons.  I love to wear sweaters.  I welcome the opportunity to sip warm drinks from a mug.  I love being able to have a fire in the house (in the fireplace, as opposed to outside, in the fire pit, which I also love).  I enjoy indoor activities...more games, more drawing, more movies.

Every year that heat kicks in, though...

Layers of dust.  Layers of history.  It's like I run through a survey of all the eras of new heat.  Every house, every state of my being.  I even remember how in some of my many houses the smell could be more metallic, or have a hint of damp, or suggest old wood, or carry up the smell of the basement.  But always vaguely dusty, and vaguely...old.  Like there was air that had been waiting all year, doing nothing, and now was being released.

The house was exhaling. Into itself.

I guess that's why I insist on cracking some windows within 24 hours of the first heat up.  Need to take a full breath.  And, as anyone who plays a wind instrument, or has taken yoga, knows, the quality of the exhale is just as important as the quality of the inhale.

Mustn't forget that moment between breaths.  Be aware.

Then let it out.  And start again.

photo from Flickr, by Moiht

Rainy Ruminations

I'm relatively new to my neighborhood.  Moved here almost four years ago, but still haven't had the opportunity to connect with many neighbors.  Funny, that--"many"--the ones I know by name I could count and sort of need both hands.  A few more I know by sight, but I'm pretty sure only one of them realizes I am a neighbor and not a passing through crazy when I smile and wave.

In my last neighborhood, which was urban and rather dense, I could walk around the block and tell you the names of the residents of every house and multi-flat.  So you see, the current experience is...different.

All of which is a prelude to what I witnessed today.  A moving truck.  Again. The third in the past year--the horrible downturn in the real estate market is starting to correct itself, I guess.  The house across the street from us actually sat empty for a year.  The one next to that on the left was half-occupied, but grown adult children who spent most of their time somewhere else.  The house to the right has been lived in, but I never knew by whom.

Until today, and a moving truck that pulled in nice and early.

Just the sight of a truck hauling out has the potential me a little verklempt...lots of moves in my childhood, plus an overactive metaphorical mind.  But with moving trucks every few months, and an ambulance that makes regular thrice weekly visits to a house down the street for some sort of transport run--yeah, I get all cycle of life.  A bit lonely, and feeling badly for those who will move in, because there no longer is a Welcome Wagon person that comes and greets you like they did when I was a kid.

All of that is prelude.  The story is in a single vision.  In what happened later.

It's rainy and grey and autumn is descending today with a relenting drumbeat that we should prepare, prepare, prepare for winter.  The moving guys start collapsing the loading ramp, clearly preparing the truck for departure.  Out walks a woman, of certain age, probably, but rather indeterminate just where in the range.  Dark coat and scarf about her head, both clearly protecting her against the elements, and making her visage anything but clear.  You can only draw conclusions by her gait.  And her gait seems almost sprightly at first, from the rear...she walks up to the truck, gestures to the guys...turns toward the house...and suddenly I see a curve in the spine, a catch in the step.  She turns slowly back to the truck, engages in conversation again.  I watch in amazement as she shape-shifts from a capable physical appearance to a more frail one.  And it continues.  Then, in an unpredictable cap to it all, she waves good bye to the car that I know belongs (belonged?) to the house, and gets in the truck cab with the guys.  All pull away.

She gets in, and leaves with her belongings, headed to wherever.  End of chapter here, however long it was.  Methinks much longer than four years, but I'll never know.

I am left yet again with my brain wrapping itself around that image.  Wondering how I will be her, when I am her.

***

When it comes to perfume, my brain wraps and wanders and finds itself in the land of vintage perfumes and reformulations.  And how while on the one hand, I still feel like the new kid on the block when it comes to being a Perfume Person, I realize I have already been the welcome wagon, as it were, to others who are earlier on the trail than I.  I'm not as young nor as inexperienced as I think I am, it seems.  That woman getting on the truck?  For a moment, she became the current Grand Dame Perfumes, about to move on, no longer accessible. Should I be glad I never really got to know some of those old perfumes?  Or more current ones who will obviously need to change to continue to stay in the neighborhood?

I can't really change anything.  I'm glad that I got some backstory, glad I always stayed friendly, even if I couldn't spend any meaningful time with them.  I did get to know a couple, and whether or not I liked them, they will always inform how I understand the future.

***

That woman stayed in the cold grey drizzle, and made sure everything was okay.  Then, rather than turning her back, she stepped up into that big cab and helped drive it away.

She was both old and young.

She was someone.

***

If you've ever seen Bruce Conner's short film "The White Rose," all moody and b&w and Miles as the soundtrack and a moving truck and an artist's major work being cleared out and an empty space left behind--that's how I'm feeling.  I am not yet sure how to scent it.  Others would, I think, say Mitsouko, or Apres L'Ondee, but to me Mitsouko is reconciliation, and Apres L'Ondee is smiling while you let go.

Oh.  Maybe those are good scents.  But they didn't feel right until I gave them words.  I'm still going to think on that.

Potter's Potions

Just saw “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” Comments: An uber-hip teenage critic in the family thought it was too heavy on frivolity, but changed his mind after a second viewing. Me, I thought it was plenty dark, showed some nice cinematic touches and weaving of themes between the visual and the spoken, and was worth a trip to the cinema. Though I *did* wish there were more layering within sections.

Whyfor Potter? With perfume?

Because early on, in potions class, the students are introduced to the recipe for and effects of a love potion. Hermione, of course, provides the deets: “It’s effect is different on each individual who experiences it. On me, for example, I smell...newly mown grass...fresh parchment...[sigh] spearmint gum....” Have we perfume appreciators not read plenty, discussed plenty, ruminated plenty on those scents which have visceral effects upon us? The wizards’ love potion is all about that. Scents are composed according to the perfumer’s experience, according to a committee brief, a mentor’s directive, a customer survey. But they always come down to a single rendition...a particular something, a unique but the same in every bottle delivery...

...the closest we come to the individual experience delivered by a Hogwarts love potion is the (still contested) experience that different people will experience the VERY SAME potion differently, or differently depending on whose skin they smell it, or differently depending on time of year or context. Come to think of it, maybe there is a sort of magic going on there...yes, I know science will explain it eventually. Receptors and all. But, it’s still magical, isn’t it?

Further on in the Potter film, the pensieve reappears, and there is Dumbledore’s fabulous glass cabinet, full of vials containing various memories. Because my brain had already been primed by the love potion scene, I saw that cabinet and immediately thought of a perfumer’s organ. Yes, physically it resembled some of those cabinets like in the perfume museum in Barcelona, and that crossed my mind, too. But the perfumer, sitting down with so many single notes, ready to compose an accord, or blend a full piece...those memories waiting to be explored individually, or collected in an overall experience...and then Harry, submerging himself in the water, letting the memory/experience consume his conscious.

Mown grass, indeed.

****

Incidentally, there is a scene in the movie where a professor explains why an academic always travels with ampules, a trait which of course is both "intellectual" and opportunistic. On the way home, I entertained my family by having son-the-film-critic reach into my bag and pull out what would appear to be a typical hardshell eyeglasses case. What does his mother, a one-time college teacher have inside?

Ampules, of course. 1ml and 1.5ml glass vials, at the ready to collect specimens.

L'air du Desert Morocain

Okay, on this one I have to skip the traditional approaches, either in my own or more traditional perfume writing.

I smell L'Air du Desert Morocain and I smell my grandfather's hands. I remember the look, smell, and atmosphere of the corner of their family room by the fireplace which had the door to the garage/basement stairs, and I smell his woodshop. I am in a whirl of memories, and yet laser focused all at once. This perfume doesn't smell like my grandfather, or remind me of him; this smell puts me back there, in that house, smelling those hands which smelled like the freshly cut wood from his band saw, like something from his basement was left inside the cedar chest he made me, like I am inside that house that he built and I've been left alone and I am having another one of those "I'll never forget this particular moment" experiences.

I know Andy Tauer imagined himself in a Moroccan desert. I'm in a house in the woods nearly on top of the 45th parallel; there was a fire in the fireplace last night, fresh wood on the hearth ready to burn, the knotty pine panelling on the walls is 1/2" thick, my grandfather's "coveralls" are hanging on a hook in the hallway waiting for spring and the garden, and I'm waiting for the grown-ups to call me to dinner.

It's not the trip Andy intended, but I'm incredibly grateful to be given it.