54: Smell
In the season of mown grass, banana-oil sunblock, and smoky bonfires, and with the funk of my adolescence still fading, I sold tinny-smelling kitchen knives from a catalog that, to me, had the whiff of a just-cut check. But my prospective customers could smell my desperation, or at least the sweat I couldn’t mask with Old Spice. They waved me away like a stench, but I huffed my own farts.
I did sell a knife to my always perfumed mom (a tasteful floral scent from Sears) for my dad to whittle the grassy balsa wood of his model airplanes. It showed up in our mildewed mailbox and sat in the car (new-car smell long replaced by *eau de* french fries and soccer shorts) as my mom drove me to the airport (home to a fragrant Cinnabon and Starbucks) for a church missions trip (where the boys’ dorm in the host church smelled like chips and dirty socks).
In the passenger seat, where the sun excited a stale odor from a weeks-old Coke spill, I broke open the package, dug through the off-gassing styrofoam peanuts, pulled out the olfactorily sterile knife and opened it. I tried to close it and smelled blood—famously coppery—pooling in my palm.
Next summer I was cooped up in the donut shop, where the air conditioning recirculated the unassuming smell of cheap but always-fresh coffee and the heavy aroma of sugar, chocolate, and dough.