Note to anyone who runs a camp: this is how you contact parents.
“Hello, lucky parent of a wonderful child, who’s having a great happy time being in perfect health, this is the camp calling to tell you she’s not only enjoying her stay, but looking forward to seeing you without any broken bones or concussions. As long as I have you on the phone, we have a question about which bus you wish her to take when she returns.”
This is preferable to the usual greeting, which is “I am calling from Camp Grenada, and I am contacting you because you are listed as the parent or guardian.” Because then you think your child is dead. Okay? Okay. I didn’t even get the call – my wife did, at work, which is odd because I’m the primary contact, with two numbers. But I’m thinking that maaaaybe the organization figured Dad would be at the office doing Seriously Important Dad Stuff, and might possibly be in a meeting, and Mom was the one who’d be close to the home phone. Not an assumption I’d make.
In fact earlier today I’d had to confront the wonderful world of modern assumptions. The appraiser was coming by judge how much this pile is worth, and since he was due at the exact same time I was supposed to start a podcast, I left a note on the door saying “come around to the side door, it’s open.” But what salutation to you? Mr. Appraiser? What if it was a female-type appraiser, and she bristled at the assumption, and was thus inclined to lowball the house? On the other hand, “Appraiser” seemed abrupt. “Dear Appraiser” seemed archaic and epistolary. I just went with Appraiser.
It was a she.
I don’t have trouble with sex-based terms like waitress and waiter – I prefer them to the horrible “waitron,” which was the vogue in my waiter days. It implied a gender-neutral automaton would be bringing you your flapjacks and sausages. This was actually the case for a few of the staff, but in general if half your staff wears vests, and the other half wears dresses, yeah, you can go with waiter and waitress. It seems impossible that they wore dresses, but they did – and nylons, too. The dresses were brown with white lines down the front, made of a type of synthetic fabric that had been designed specifically for its ability to repel all stains. I think it was later marketed as “Kevlar.”
Actor, actress – these still seem to have currency, despite the efforts of some. Wonder why we never invented “Writer” and “Writress.” The one I mourn the most: Aviatrix. For that matter, wouldn’t you have waiters and waitrixes? Actors and Actrixes?
Appraitrix?
Anyway. “So Natalie is fine,” my wife said on the phone as I drove home from the office – turns out Important Dad was at the office doing Important Office Dad Stuff – “but the camp called to see which bus she should take.”
My wife knows how to preface these things. And I still had a little bump-up in the heart rate, just imagining what they could have called about.
Good day – hot as hell again. Did the first video from Studio B, aka the Basement. I dismantled the garage greenscreen set-up and started working on the basement version, because in the winter it’s freezing in the garage, and the noise is annoying. Yesterday I started to do a video, and the rain started. Damn. Had to wait; then the planes came. DAMN. Now I’m in the area I once called the Battle Bridge, and it’s like a concession that summer will end eventually. Foresight always has its downsides, if you’re inclined to read the implications.
I did enjoy not having to get my daughter from someplace at 3. Everything that has to do with kids always seems to end at 3. After a few days I retrain myself, and 3 means nothing – it seems a wonderful release, a reminder of days long long past when the parental tumblers didn’t start to click into place around 2:36. So I wrote, I napped, I wrote a Joe Ohio, worked out, relaxed, revised yesterday’s estimation of summer’s eventual end – greedy for more, I am. Today obliged: rain, sun, warmth, clement night loud with chanting crickets and a big-arse June bug banging around the gazebo, the illusion of Summer Eternal. I even found in my fathomless iTunes library an album from 1987 I’d ripped and forgotten, some quasi-jazz from the Yellowjackets I’d listened to while writing the first novel. Music can be a time capsule – you don’t bury it, you just forget it, but one day you stub your toe on it, dig it up, and a time and place is brought to life. We live the daily life through our eyes and the top-level brain functions, but in the end it’s sound and smell that yank us back.
This annoys me. As a Civilized Person this annoys me. I’d like to think things are contained in my head in neat indexed folders I can access by keywords, not some elemental stink that trips the switches in the lizard-brain segment. What’s even more irritating is that the scent-memories seem triggered only in reverse – you don’t note the moment the bond is forged between a place and a smell, you only recollect the place when the aroma occurs again in a disparate locale.
Questions, then: why do I associate chlorine with freedom?
What’s the scent that pitches you back?
Column night; back to work. Beat as hell. Happy. Cooking up many things for you to enjoy tomorrow. It’s the Curse of Thursday! See you in the usual places.
Pass it along, if you wish
92 Responses to Muddah, Faddah
Host with the Most
Diesel. Even after all these years, the smell of diesel reminds me of childhood trips to Disneyland. It was the trams in the parking lot–the first sense that the trip was *real* and soon I would be experiencing Disney goodness.
I’m not nearly as much of a Disneyland fan these days (I know, blasphemy, sacrilege and all that) but even now that smell always has happy associations for me.
As has been pointed out–chlorine == pool.
For me? The smell of freshly cut grass. Best smell in the world. It means Spring; which leads, inexorably, to Summer.
QED.
“Cheap cigars remind me of my late uncle in a good way.”
My grandfather smoked three cigars a day (one after each meal). Muriels, White Owls, and Dutch Masters were his stogies of choice.
I still love the smell of cigar smoke.
And Grandpa lived to be 94.
Having been raised on a dairy farm and not living anywhere near one now, the sweet sweet smells of fresh cut grass for hay bales and of cow manure are powerful. Not only do they transport me to my youth, but they immediately conjure my dad. I can’t breathe enough of it in. I imagine my dad laughs knowing I think of him when I’m near bovine poop.
And there are authors and authoresses. Cruel for those with a speech impediment.
I personally can’t understand the (recent?) convention where anyone who acts in front of a camera is an “actor”. Was it demeaning or sexist to be an “actress”? For someone to demand to be called an “actor” because it seems more important than the lesser “actress” basically affirms that “actress” is the lesser. Which it isn’t.
I never once snickered when hearing “actress”, as though we all just KNEW she wasn’t good enough to be an actor…
My rule?
If the preponderance of people involved in an occupation are male (or female) then the simple common male (or female) term is fine. That is, unless you actually SEE the individual and can (reasonably) discern their sex.
Therefore, until I see a woman coming out of it, it is a “manhole”, not a “personhole”. And when the of-course-equally-capable female electrical worker comes out of the hole into daylight, I will, with no trace of sexism, point out to whomever I’m with that “That there, for the moment at least, is a womanhole”
Very simple.
Another cuppla examples… “Did the mailman come yet?” “Yes she did.”
“How do you like the night nurse? Is she pleasant enough?” “Yes, he was. ”
When the mail is delivered by a roughly 50/50 male-to-femal mix, maybe I’ll ask “Did the mail come?”, but to worry and agonize over whether the term “mailman” is correct or disrespectful is disproportionate to the potential offense.
I recently re-discovered a smell that instantly kicked in the happy endorphines: Eau du Boat. Theres a certain smell that ski /runabouts get. Part gas, part lake, part fiberglass, part wet carpet, wet towels, hot vinyl…all happy. It’s been 10 years since we sold the last one, and in shopping for a new(er) one lately I keep getting these rushes of happy memories every time I get in a prospective purchase, and it’s all based on the smell.
I guess I wasn’t outdoorsy enough: for me the Proust smell is old, slightly decaying books. The smell of a used bookstore. Add the odor of a gas-fired space heater and I’m thirteen again, haunting the Maple Street bookstore in New Orleans on a wet winter afternoon.
A cigar. Everytime I smell one I’m in the bleachers at Sportsman’s Park with my dad. Gets me every time!
“But I’m thinking that maaaaybe the organization figured Dad would be at the office doing Seriously Important Dad Stuff, and might possibly be in a meeting, and Mom was the one who’d be close to the home phone.”
That’s one possibility. Another is that, since you are the male half you were assumed to be an incompetent dunderhead who couldn’t handle a simple decision regarding your daughter and a bus ride.
Smells…there are a lot that trigger memories for me but one that comes to mind is a Jessica McClintock perfume that an ex-girlfriend used. Occasionally I will get a whiff somewhere in public and my mind gets pulled right back to 1991.
Ditto diesel = Disneyland.
I wonder if the “vague licorice smell” of something growing along the river is akin to the summer-day smell of the redwood-choked foothills I commute through to get to Silicon Valley.
As a little guy I had been intrigued by that smell on our many day trips up to the woods, but it was only after my first encounters with, er, liquid puberty, that it has triggered a different sort of memory.
One hot afternoon when my son was 11 or 12, I rolled the window down and made a roundabout comment about the smell as we were driving over the hill. He got wide-eyed and blushed, and he quickly changed the subject. It was kind of good to know it wasn’t just me!
Enjoy your meal! Sorry.
What scent? Headshops or headshoppes, whichever. Something is gone now that we have lost the smell from my teen days of sandlewood, patchouli, sweat and a vague uncurrent of something…hempy in those shops. Takes me back to trolling thru’ album stacks and “Zap comix” at Dirt Cheap.
@the wolf: that sounds like the thinking process of a typical dunderheaded man.
smells: acetone takes me to 1962 and the film editing bench. there is a dusty waxy hot smell peculiar to old tube electronics that takes me back to master control. pork roast with a layer of onions on it, finishing up on the stove or in the over, takes me back to the living room floor, in front of the heat register, around 1960.
pine and spruce aplenty, not the chemical air-freshener substitute, take me to a slightly damp morning at a campsite in the wilderness. just waiting for a loon to sing.
@strychnine- “There are no small parts, only small actors”- Stanislavski
http://urlmin.com/images/mini_me.gif
“vague licorice smell along the river in the summer” – probably wild fennel. It grows almost everywhere, and has a nice licorice-y smell.
@hpoulter: could be anise, too. grows in low areas, deer like it. commercial licorice is actually flavored with anise root.
I don’t get to smell it anymore, but every summer whilst growing up we would go to Omaha for family visits, and you knew you were close to the end of the trip when the stockyard smell wafted through your nostrils. It got stronger right at the end as gramma lived close to the meat packing plant (late 1960′s). You got used to it, after a while
.
Otherwise, it’s happened twice where I have smelled some girly perfume that was close to what my girlfriend wore back in college. I find myself having to remember to breathe and restart my heartbeat. Talk about the lizard brain coming out!
I don’t know if they use it anymore, but the smell of the cedar stuff janitors would use to cover up and clean kid’s barf at school is quite distinctive. Don’t know if it would make me want to hurl if I smelled it now …
Is chlorine the smell of freedom because pools are disinfected with it, and the one thing uppermost in your mind as a youngster, as summer approached, was a run and splash in the newly opened pool, one that opened after school closed?
For me, a few scent-and-song specific memories:
Castor oil: hot summer days, model airplanes buzzing and snarling in the air, silk and balsa wood in my hands, the feel of my latest creation as I do weight-and-balance before flight.
Over-ripe bananas: I’m down in the cool twilight of the basement, painting airplanes.
Peppermint: Instantly back in the kitchen, baking. In the winter I kept a small cast iron pan on a back burner filled with water with a few drops of peppermint oil in it, to sweeten the air in the closed-up house.
“Summer in the City”: I’m back working on Gemini and other space stuff. I can see the dull gray lab walls and hear the soft chuff of the bell-jar vacuum pumps.
“The Letter” by the Boxtops: instantly I’m in engineering school. The song expressed my loneliness: I was happier when I was working.
Dictionary.com informs that “-trix” is a feminine suffix that comes into English from Latin “agent” nouns (indicating someone who does something) that end in “-tor.” The examples given in an early post all follow this form: administrator,
orator,
benefactor,
inheritor,
aviator,
actor.
So nouns ending in “-er” don’t qualify, e.g., waiter.
Of course, English never felt is necessary to use the suffix as a hard and fast grammatical rule as Latin did, so only a handful made it into common usage. The suffix was already waning when gender-neutral speech codes arose in the last generation, an off-brance of the overall silly political correctness ideology. I’m 50, and I’ve only bumped into a very few of these in common use, and mostly from watching re-runs of old B&W shows from the 50s like Perry Mason and such. Their use in the legal world is disappearing at a slower rate, due to the effect of the Latin tradition and the fact that legal language is less affected by trends.
As for the word “sex” falling on, um, hard times (sorry): “sex” indicates biology: “male” or “female;” “gender” describes attributes; whether something is “masculine” or “feminine.” Gender is plastic: sex is fixed. That’s why “sex” has been usurped by “gender:” the rise of social pressure to reject the idea that if you are biologically male (your sex), then masculinity is naturally expected. Now we just have gender, which skips right over biology to arrive at attributes.
Sex = male or female (fixed in biology)
Gender = masculine or feminine (attributes)
_____
My father operated earth-moving machinery for 37 years, so my childhood nostalgic smells are: diesel fuel, dirt, the tang of ozone from welding; and Brylcreem & Skin Bracer. I’m still using the Skin Bracer.
Oh: by eliminating the “-trix” suffix, I think we are losing something that never really hurt anyone. And my mailman is a charming woman who is very good at her job.
Chlorine + coconut oil = summers at the swimming pool, every day. I never smell pool chemicals and suntan lotion without thinking of those uncomplicated days of childhood,even though I sometimes go years between visits to swimming pools. I must amend that. Do I need to buy a new swimsuit if the knees and elbows in my old one are still good?
Dirt, and road tar; verily, the smell of Terra Firma. When I smell them together, I am a young boy again.
“The Oscars (TM), (C), (R), (K), (etc)” still use Actor and Actress, and you’d think they’d be the most PC bunch in the world. But Hollywood is sometimes a little bit hypocri– I mean inconsistent, isn’t it.
Smells: when the coffeemaker is just about to boil dry, it smells like mmm, BACON.
@ xrayguy
Headshops are alive and well. I walk by one downtown in my city at least once a week, and I know of two others in my area.
I don’t smoke and I’m not a hippy, so I’ve only been in the one downtown once, but they still have the hippy oils, candles, and hundreds of pieces of smoking paraphrenalia (along with many huge signs saying they are for tobacco use only and any indication you will use them for other purposes will get you ejected from the store).
They replaced the magazines and comics with sex toys, though.
2 smells for me, both probably rather rare:
The first is actually a combination taste/smell, and I encounter it extremely rarely, but it reminds me of coming out of the anesthetic after each of my knee surgeries.
The second is much more evocative (and wonderful): the smell of burnt castor oil takes me back to the races at Ascot Park in the 1960s, to which our father took us fairly often. It was quite a thrill, decades later, to meet Skip van Leeuwen in person, who was so dominant at Ascot in the 60s.
> Wonder why we never invented “Writer” and “Writress.”
Actually, we did. “Author” and “authoress” used to be common terms. “Authoress” went out of fashion before the 20th century, though.
“They replaced the magazines and comics with sex toys, though.”
So that’s why people are reading less nowadays.
The smell of salami makes me think of “My Son the Folk Singer.”
lunch time walking into what they call a middle school now (junior high back in the day).
The smell of Tator Tots. or the combined smell of everything they have cooked again and again and again. In every school in the district I work (not a teacher) they all smell the same and they all smell EXACTLY like my junior high did back in like 1972.
@Terry Fitz,
That railroad smell is probably the creosote on the ties. So you hitched freight train rides on the southwest side of Chicago? Must have been around the Santa Fe Nerska yards just a few blocks from Marie Sklodowska Curie High School. Am I close? By the way, the Santa Fe is now known as the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF). At one point in my working life my job as a special agent for the railroad was to prevent such life threatening antics (and hence not pay out claims to survivors who slipped under the wheels).
@Joe, the first commenter – you may be remembering the scent of tea olive (Osmanthus fragrans). My family lived on a US Army base in Japan from 1969-1972, during my middle school years, and it wasn’t until 1990 that I smelled a tea olive blooming here in Florida and it triggered a memory that I didn’t even know existed. Apparently it grew in the area we lived but I never acknowledged it until it appeared again. Now it’s one of my favorite landscape shrubs and always have it growing wherever I live.
Funny thing, my oldest brother was visiting my home a few years ago and smelled the tea olives while walking through the yard. He immediately got a faraway look in his eyes and asked what it was; it reminded him of Camp Zama.
@Wagner von: actually, when the coffeepot is boiled dry, it smells like metal pickling. that’s when they rough and clean it up in a hydrocloric acid solution before dumping it into plating tanks.
man, that’s rough smellin’ stuff. somebody’s making chrome near work again. almost makes me wish they’d take that new 20 foot topper off the stack at the plastic plant. the waste styrene isn’t bad in light concentrations.
Smells…
Growing up as an Air Force brat, the smell of fresh house paint has always taken me back to the many moves of my childhood, inspiring a mix of possibilities (new base to explore, what’s the PX like) and terror (new school, new bullies…).
Having served in the Navy, every once in a while I need to make a pilgrimage to a warship museum for a fix of “ship smell”…diesel, paint, cigarettes, coffee and fried food….for the full effect, I need to find a submarine museum, as there’s an additional ammoniac smell from the air scrubbers…
@Spud
Here in Boulder County we call that Eau de Greeley whenever the winds shift and come in from a westerly direction.
Brisko: “They replaced the magazines and comics with sex toys, though.”
Well, at least print died for a good cause.
…..Camp Lake Hubert?
Mark E. Hurling –
You are pretty close, but the yard I’m remembering was between 75th & 79th between Oakley & Western Av. We’d typically hop on behind Dawes Park (80th & Damen) by running alongside with our right hands on the ladders until we were sure we were at speed with the train, then hoisting ourselves up and catching the bottom rung with our feet. The best (scariest) ride took my pal and I all the way to 87th St. By that time we thought if we didn’t get off NOW we would be on those ladders for a long, long time. Sounds like you had a similar experience?
I was close but not quite correct. That particular yard (and I’m reaching waaay back down the memory hole here with Mr. Peabody and Sherman) was probably a Burlington Northern railyard. That one is a few miles further East of the Polish neighborhood around the Nerska yard. Also close to Five Holy Martyrs Church. Boy, did that neighborhood go up for grabs when John Paul II visited it in the late 70′s. There were probably more Poles around that parish than there were in Warsaw that day.
Forgot about the train smell… That one brings me back too. Growing up just blocks from a busy train track in southeast Minneapolis, and just a few more blocks from a very large train yard (I can’t think of its name, but I seem to remember hearing that it’s one of the largest train yards in the country…), I spent a lot of time playing around on the train tracks. We would craw up underneath the bridges over the neighborhood streets, and flatten coins on the rails when trains go by, and just generally enjoy the industrialness of it all. I don’t smell that smell much anymore because I don’t find myself near train tracks much anymore, but when I do catch a whiff of that smell, it brings me back…
Legal language — and especially, perhaps oddly, probate & estates law — has a lot of “[something]trix” words. My second favorite is “Executrix,” meaning she who’s been nominated and appointed to execute the terms of a will, sounds to my ears much like the decidedly non-judicial word “Dominatrix.” But my favorite, for reasons I will leave you to infer, refers to a woman who’s executed a last will and testament: the “Testatrix.” Mmmm.
No hesitation: mixed gas.
Opening a fresh can of coffee takes me back to eight years old and hot summer city nights catching lightening bugs. We poked holes in the plastic lids and stored our bugs in old coffee cans. Not sure why in retrospect, as we couldn’t enjoy their lights in a can (no jars?? why??), but the smell of coffee will forever remind me of catching lightening bugs as a kid.
Gin smells like Christmas.
…
That sounds like it’s going to end bad, but it doesn’t. Gin smells like juniper, and I grew up in the California/Nevada highlands, where juniper is a weed-tree and thus very easy to get for Christmas.
(looks nice, and doesn’t shed needles, too)
I didn’t realize that gin smelled like Christmas until my ship was in the Philippines, homesick, and gin and tonic was the only drink I could think of.