Madeleines in the oven

Of course Proust has a more refined set of memories, and indeed a more refined sensory palette, than I have.  He tasted and the world came into being.  I can only breathe.  But still, scents matter.

My son had a very good day out here in the wilds of exurban northeast Georgia, on the shores of Lake Lanier.  He did a very fine job dispatching six or seven pages worth of home schooling work – summarizing a story in his awkward seven year old penmanship, destroying dozens of three-digit addition and subtraction problems, answering with ease a set of questions about lizards and their habitat.  He ran down to the lake, finding sticks and branches and deeming them “BB Guns” or “swords” or whatever, and battling first the dog, confused by it all, and then trees, stalwart and patient against his efforts.  The air was perfect and fine – just 20 degrees, feeling more like autumn than spring – and the breeze stirred the lake into a quiet simmer.  We had leftovers for dinner – we’re trying our best to economize in these uncertain times – and then afterwards played a board game with Droopy, my stuffed dog from when I was an infant; Baloo, my stuffed bear from when I was his age; and Teddy, his very own bear that his grandparents gave him when he was three.  He played on a team with Baloo and Teddy and beat both Droopy, playing solo, and myself quite handily.

We piled downstairs and he brushed his teeth and I put him to bed.  He hugged me and I tucked him in, a couple of books by his side – Wimpy Kid and a large scale book about the history of aviation which he eagerly grabbed for – and I went back upstairs and found Teddy and Baloo.  Realizing they may want to be with my son – after all, they had been the winning team – I brought them down.  He thanked me and promptly said “I think there is a little puppy dog who wants to sleep with me tonight”, and the actual, real live puppy dog, looked at me and indicated it wasn’t her.  So I trooped upstairs and grabbed Droopy to complete the tag team in my son’s bed.

As I walked back, Droopy in hand, I smelled his scruff.  This may seem odd to you, the reader, but you have to realize that being alive as a human being, we are given – we are gifted five senses.  But we rarely use more than two or three of them.  We always see – reading, avoiding obstacles on the ground, staring at ceilings, etc. – and we usually hear, and sometimes we feel or touch.  But I try my best to also smell a lot – especially recently, now that we know that if you can’t smell things it might be a sign of novel coronavirus infection – but even before that, it was a sort of intentional effort on my part.  Maybe it’s living with a dog, which with only a brief year long interlude after Gordy’s death has been an essential part of my life for now almost 15 years.  Dogs smell essentially; they can’t not do it.  So I try to as well.

The stuffed dog, scruffy from too much love four decades ago and now just as much new love, smelled of….

… a trip to Montreal with my family in 1984.  I know it was 1984 because the smell of the dog brought up a specific view on I-91 in northern Vermont just before the customs station, just before you crest the hill at the bottom of which is the customs station, and crackling radio is playing Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton “Islands in the Stream”, which was the prior summer’s hit for adult contemporary listeners such as my parents (who obviously controlled the radio) but it was February vacation and we were going to the Bonaventure Hotel, which had the outdoor pool even though it was Montreal in February and it was below zero Farenheit.  But the stuffed dog was with me – our real dog was in the kennel in Westbrook, out a mile or so past the weird mechanical handyman sign, where I hated leaving her but she didn’t seem to mind and my dad clearly was comfortable with the whole drop off the dog in a bare caged area thing – the stuffed dog smelled like only one thing, like nothing else could smell.

And smelling the dog as I walked across the first floor of the odd, gigantic mansion we are trapped in for “the whole coronavirus thing” (as my son calls it, like a kind of mantra), the memories of the front seat of the Oldsmobile station wagon, the burgundy plush seating, the brilliant northern New England sky, the approaching Canadian border, the trite and even to my nine year old ears awful Rogers/Parton duet, the smell of Droopy, the feeling of both safely and yet the tingling feeling of what, danger? challenge? the NEW? of crossing into Canada, all of it came back like a flood.

I visited Viktoria and Walter several times while I was living in my home in Maine, but only twice have I crossed the border there in northern Vermont.  The first time it was one of those high cloudy days, a melancholy day, and it was exactly like that time when I was nine.  I checked the radio and tried to find a station that was playing something early 80s New Wave – Tears for Fears “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” or the like – but just found Francophone pop, Vermont mid 70s classic rock, and CBC1.  I obviously went for the last.  But that first stretch when you cross the border, it’s not motorway, it’s four lane divided regular roadway, 80 kilometers per hour, and you have to crawl your way along.  I remembered how that felt when I was nine, how much it felt like crossing the border meant slowing down.  The border guard back then was a strikingly beautiful slim tall Quebecois woman who made it clear to my young mind that we were entering a more beautiful, more elegant place – but the road let me know that we couldn’t go fast here.  And the sky told me to be wary, to be alert for heartbreak.  As did Tears for Fears, probably.  And all of it came back to me, even though I was now forty-five, with Gordy in the back, just stopping over in Montreal to have great food and earn Fairmont points with my friend from Alberta on my way to Demorestville.

The next time I went to visit Viktoria it was snowing, and when I crossed the border I had been driving behind a snowplow in a blizzard.  At the border the air cleared up a bit, and the four lanes that eventually lead to the autoroute were actually much easier to navigate than anything Vermont had served up to me.  But still, the sounds of the early 80s came back to me, and my Audi leather drivers seat suddenly felt much more like the soft contours of a GM front bench seat – my mom always let me sit up front for big road trips, so I could be “navigator” for my father – and the sides of the road didn’t feel any different, as we approached the first town the sights felt identical, as I switched the radio to CBC1 in English for Montreal it all felt the same.  The scent, well, maybe that was different – it wasn’t my mom and sister in the back, it wasn’t my father next to me, it was a dog curled up in the foot well of the passenger seat and it was only me, only me, no one else, likely no one else ever.  That scent was different.

But the dog – the stuffed dog, Droopy, not the dog now sacked out next to me on the couch, not the dead dog who I still miss from trips to Europe and western Canada and everywhere else, not the dog from my childhood who would have stayed back in the kennel and looked longingly at us as we left to go to Montreal – no the stuffed dog brought all of these memories flooding back.  There was no dam that burst: it was a bright quasar exploding back in time and finally, with just the right sensory tuning, returning to the center of my awareness.

We are, mostly, all trapped now, in some way shape or form.  I’m choosing to sniff a bit.

Pine needles underfoot

The cold clear moist scent of a lake on a cold morning

My son’s feet, surprisingly pleasant, lingering in his socks after he takes them off before his bath

The dog after a long run after deer in the forest

Clean sheets out of the dryer

My own funk after hiking in the woods

I’m also imagining scents, both from memory but also from speculation.  The scent of a woman whom you love; the scent of your parents’ house when you return from a journey and they have been expecting you; the scent of the beach, empty in the off-season after a storm.  Proust’s quasar exploded from a taste; I’m trying to light up my universe with an odor, or at least the remembrance, or at even greater remove the imagination of a scent.

Breathe deeply with me.