Karl Klockars

Smell is a powerful thing. It creates a connection to things that can be decades old, but brought back up with a whiff of anything-even when we don’t want them to. We can choose not to listen to certain songs with a bad association with them, we can opt not to go into bars where we met someone who broke our hearts, but if you have a bad experience associated with bratwurst, it would be my suggestion to you to not move to Lincoln Square.

This weekend added an entire chapter to my smell-memory subsection in my mind. They’re hardwired in there now, for better or for worse. Let’s quickly search for “smell and memory.” Oh, look: a quote from Marcel Proust. This should make me look smarter.

“When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered· the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls· bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory.” I’m probably not going to come up with anything so poetic, but keep reading – maybe we’ll both be surprised.

For example, for some reason my folks gave me and my brothers sticker books when my sister came home from the hospital after being born. This is back in the mid-eighties, so being kids we dragged those books into the bathtub and the smell of wet stickers always brings back new siblings, and for some reason, the Nintendo game Spy Hunter. Oh yeah–we got that, too, so we wouldn’t kill the new kid. Thanks, Nintendo.

In ’98, I went looking for an apartment in the suburbs of Chicago with a friend of mine. I remember the process of working most of the day, running home for a quick shower and then we went and looked at a number of apartment complexes. For this reason, the smell of Suave Strawberry Shampoo reminds me of driving around with Chris, in a white Dodge Intrepid, looking at dingy two-bedroom apartments we quickly realized we couldn’t afford. Chris is dead now, so instead of photographs, I have cheap shampoo. No one said any of this made sense.

Onto the new additions: This weekend, the weekend of my marriage, I added three new memories quick-tabbed by stink, scent, and stubborn smell. None of them have anything to do with each other, all are completely independent of the marriage process–I’m not going to list wedding cake, or the sweet smell of tears of joy. Nope, we start…with pee.

I took the train from Chicago to Central Michigan the Tuesday before we got hitched. It’s about a 6 hour trip from here to there, and that doesn’t include the eventual stand-stills you run into being blocked by freight traffic on a siding somewhere outside Kalamazoo. But lucky for me, I had a laptop, four Friday the 13th movies, and a noisy kid bumping into the back of my seat. I angled the screen of the laptop in the hopes he’d see Jason Voorhies and he’d either freak out, or he’d be warped for life. Take that, kiddo.

This kid reeked of pee. He was wearing full facepaint makeup to supposedly make him look like a skeleton or something, but it was so smeared by general kid-handedness and jelly stains, he just looked like a damn mess, and what kind of costume is that for a 7 year old. But man, did he stink of piss. And I thank him for connecting the long trip to see my betrothed with the smell of old excrement. It was either him, or the drunk grandma sitting across the aisle from me he’d run back and forth to. It’s probably better if we blame the kid.

Happier moments are wrapped into the smell of lotion and sweat. The Girl walked down the aisle and was handed off to me by her father, and when I took her hands they almost squeezed right out of mine – partially because I was clamping down on them for moral support and in hopes of not crying like a baby – but also because she had put so much hand lotion on, that it mixed with moist palms (mine and hers) to create an almost industrial lubricant.

I rubbed that lotion all over my hands, trying to hang onto her, trying to transfer some of that lotion onto me and to just grab onto her while we stared at each other, tried to listen to the preacherlady but mostly just concentrated on not passing out or bawling too much. And that lotion will always remind me of looking into her eyes, saying vows, and being in that short thirty minute span that never seemed to stop but already seems so very far away.

We carried some of the last scent home with us, actually. The smell of bonfire is still rubbed into my jeans and my jacket, and if it ends up supplanting all the boy-scout campfires and bad cooking around them, will always be associated with the wedding afterglow, a circle of friends and family, and wholesome entertainment like marshmallows and hot dogs being roasted all around.

Rather than have a reception at night where everyone gets wasted on someone else’s dime, we had the lunch at about noon-ish, where everyone got half-wasted on wine, and then had a headache during the get-together in the evening gathering at The Girl’s grandfolks place. And the fire was burning all afternoon, all night, and if you sat down on one of the haybales surrounding the blaze, give it about five minutes tops and you’ll get a nice dose of smoke all around you. If you’re lucky, you get some ash in your eye as well but I doubt I’ll associate that with anything aside from annoyance.

Throw all those things together and you’ve got quite a mental cocktail. I don’t know what makes all these things work the way I do, but somehow it does and let the neurologists destroy that mystery for us later. All I know is that rather than give a rundown of the entire week’s events, I figured it’d be better to continue to hardwire these things into my psyche.

I could never properly express the feelings of family and friends, but everyone knows what lotion and burnt wood smell like. You can’t explain the mack-truck of emotion that nails you when you see your bride for the first time in the vestibule, nor figure out how that quaver got into your voice when you’re saying your vows. But it was there, and damn if I guess I’m not a big softy. Oh well, cover is blown.

Maybe I should start working on a way to turn a profit. Imagine how much money I could make if I started making stripper-perfume remind men of fidelity. Or how the smell of whiskey would make people involuntarily throw their keys into the sewer. It’s a master scheme, but needs some work. I’ll just go start a fire in the back stairwell and reminisce, if you don’t mind.