Can You Hear Me Now

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Did you know that us humans possess between five and six million olfaction (smell) sensors. Because those sensors combine their data to determine odors, we can differentiate an average of one trillion different smells? Comparatively, we have between 2000 and 8000 taste buds and the number of different tastes we can discern from those buds is significantly less. Since flavor perception is a combination of taste and smell, our olfaction sensors play an oversized role in letting us know if that carton of milk has passed its prime or not. This is why having a cold or losing your sense of smell from a Covid infection makes everything tastes bland.

On a more personal level, my incredible sense of smell has led me to a long and torrid love affair with food. I am drawn to powerful spices and interesting flavor combinations. This is why cooking and eating play such important parts in my life. Thankfully, I am also big on physical activity and so far have been able to find a balance between calorie consumption and calorie burning that works well enough to keep me near enough to my target weight range. Yin and yang.

Red lentil dahl on fragrant basmati rice
cool, thin slices of dioptase-green cucumber
resting on a bed of red leaf lettuce

The smell of pungent garlic
the scent of piquant cumin
aromas that tease the senses and sharpen the tongue
like the taste of a lover on a cold winter night

On the other hand, Linda has a poor sense of smell and is more than happy with what I consider to be boring food. She comes by this honestly, though. Her father was the same way and he always treated eating as a chore. It’s my guess is that if there was a pill that allowed him to never eat again he would have swallowed it. That would be the last thing I would ever want to put into my mouth.

Sweet Memories Are Made of This

Given my robust sense of smell, it’s not surprising that my nose plays a big part in my memories. There are odors that immediately spirit me away from the here and now and carry me back to a particular place and sometimes a particular time.

Around the age of 13 or 14, I would make a few dollars a week cleaning up the Knights of Columbus hall in Old Scottsdale. Since the Knights were basically a bunch of middle-aged Catholic men looking for an excuse to get away from their wives and families, a typical meeting was often little more than a few business items followed by a late night poker game. The hall had a bar in the back and the smell of old, stale beer permeated the walls. Despite the unsavory, disgusting aspect of that odor, smelling it now immediately whisks me back to those happy, carefree teenage years and far away from the stresses of adult life. It’s literally so bad that it’s good.

Similar smell connections can be said about certain foods. There are, of course, the foods of holidays and special family gatherings. Turkey and dressing at Thanksgiving. Tamales on the New Year. Kolachi rolls at Christmas. In fact, simply typing the word kolachi takes me back to a taste I haven’t experienced in nearly 50 years. And unlike that stale Knights of Columbus beer walls, this smell memory is good on all fronts.

Fun fact. Scratch-and-sniff cards were accidentally invented in the late 1960s by a 3M chemist. Their popularity heyday was the early 1970s until the middle 1980s, but I’ve been able to find significant usage as late as 2024. My favorite application was for the John Waters’ movie, Polyester. The movie claimed to have been filmed in Odorama. Odorama (a close cousin to smell-o-vision) was a gimmick that consisted of scratch-and-sniff cards theater patrons used to experience various odors throughout the film. The scents ranged from Roses to pizza to my favorite, flatulence. Sadly, Odorama never caught on in a big way, but a small handful of other films used scratch-and-sniff along with rub-and-sniff to spice things up.

Olfactory recall also applies to far more ordinary foods at less special times. The whiff of a Fritos corn chip never ceases to take me back to Mom’s famous Frito Bake. This applies to some of the other bizarre foods of my 1960s childhood.

And who hasn’t experienced the flashback joy of drinking water straight from a garden hose?

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. Helen Keller

Sensory ghosts can be found outside of eating. Anytime I smell pine needles I am instantly transported back to Mormon Lake and Saint Joseph’s Youth Camp. The same can be said for orange blossoms. The slightest hint of citric sweetness sends my brain soaring back to the orange tree in the backyard of my childhood home. It was a scrawny tree, but it produced the sweetness oranges.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Growing up in the Phoenix Valley, Dad would regularly escape the summer heat by driving us older kids up to the Rim Country for camping and fishing. Mom refused to sleep in a tent and stayed home with the little ones. On our way to our favorite spots (Wood’s Canyon Lake and Tonto Creek), we would drive through the little town of Payson, Arizona. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, you were immediately greeted with the smell of wood smoke from Payson’s beehive sawdust burner. As an adult, I am fully aware of the carcinogenic aspects of having to live with constant smoke, but as a kid I loved the smell. It was the odor of summer vacation and to this day I cannot be around a campfire and not recall our northern adventures.

Once solid and substantial
like a sea wall
battered and worn, yet still standing
holding its own against the raging tide
bending, but never giving in

Now a shadow
an ethereal ghost that comes in and out of focus
or a radio
that wavers from station to station
until it fades into shadow

The Nose Knows

Has my sensitive nose made me such an overly nostalgic guy? Is Linda’s limited sense of smell the reason she is far less sentimental than I am? I expect that there is correlation.

How does your sense of taste or smell inhabit and ultimately drive your memories? What odors or foods can stop you in your tracks and send you back to some distant place and time? What ghosts continue to haunt your senses?

Thank you for reading.

The sweet taste of dried apricot
the fiery bite of habanero and cayenne
we are two lovers lost in the cacophony of denial and desire
groping in the darkness
wanting, yet never knowing what we seek

Like fire, like ice
a pendulum that will not stop swinging
we are the tide that swells between escape and submission