Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

I recall reading somewhere that the sense of smell is the most strongly "emotional" of the five senses. Maybe that's the wrong way of putting it, but it certainly seems that smell can bring up the most vivid memories and associations, at least sometimes. I'm sure we've all had the experience of smelling something, in our adult lives, that transports us back to some specific time and place from childhood - - not a hazy remembrance, but a memory that is sharp and real. It can be Mom's cooking, for example, and the changes in our palates between childhood and adulthood probably account for that feeling that we can never quite make it as good as she did, though if we're good, we can come pretty darn close.

It can be other things as well. There used to be a "New Age" bookstore in Buffalo, called "East and West Books", that I liked to frequent when I was home from college, because I was a philosophy major and this particular bookstore had a pretty good selection of philosophy and science texts beyond the Eastern mysticism that one might expect from such a venue. This store always burned a certain type of incense, in one aroma only, and they burned so much of it that books that had sat on their shelves for a long enough time eventually took on that same scent. I can still detect hints of that smell on books that I bought at that store today, even years after the store has gone. That smell, though, always brings back the vivid memories I have of that place, and I can even remember the almost-exact floorplan and location of the various categories within the stacks.

Intimately connected with memory is ritual, and scent can play a large role in ritual. This is why many religious services involve the burning of incense. But it's not just actual ceremonial ritual that can be enhanced through scent. Our lives consist largely of rituals that are unremarked and unrecognized; sometimes those rituals disappear by virtue of necessity. But the proper alignment of scent can bring them back with startling clarity. This happened to me the other night.

My wife and I used to both work in the restaurant business, which among other things meant putting in long hours on Saturdays. Mostly, we worked the day shifts at our respective businesses, but when we finally got off work, it was typically quite late in the day for dinnertime - - sometimes it was after 8:00 in the evening - - and neither of us had any desire at all to cook something. Thus, our Saturday night meal, for almost four years, was Chinese takeout. Often I would go to pick it up, listening to Thistle and Shamrock on NPR in the car as I did so (that's NPR's Celtic music show). It was about a fifteen-minute drive from our favorite Chinese place back home, and thus the car would fill with the smell of Chinese food while I drove home to the strains of some Celtic reel or ballad. The final part of the ritual would be our sitting on the floor, in front of the TV with Chinese containers spread out on the carpet, eating our fill while watching The Pretender on NBC.

This period of our lives spanned the time of our engagement and the earliest handful of years of our marriage. It ended when certain changes occurred: I left the restaurant business, my wife took on a work schedule that often involved working a closing shift on Saturdays, NBC canceled The Pretender to make room on its schedule for the XFL (to this day the single act of network television that has angered me the most). We didn't decide to stop having Chinese every Saturday night; various things in our lives simply steered us in other directions, and we didn't even miss it, much. We still have Chinese every so often (not as much as we'd like, but money's tight right now), and when we do, we still sit on the floor to eat it. But the emotional fabric of those Saturday dinners, when we flopped down exhausted to watch a favorite weekly show, has been missing, and we didn't even realize it. Or I didn't…until we decided to have Chinese just this past Saturday night, and once again I drove home with the scents filling the car while my car speakers pulsated with the sounds of Uillean pipes and bodhran drums and whistles and voices raised in Gaelic lyrics.

Those smells sent me back in time. It was one of the spookiest sensations I've ever had - - nostalgia for something that, until that moment, I'd never realized I really missed.