Oh, Janet, thank you so much, both for your comment and for ordering my book. I’ve taken to wearing my hearing aids to watch TV, because if I turn the volume up as high as I need it, it blasts my husband right out of the room.🤣
Apr 24, 2023Liked by Sari Botton, Deborah K. Shepherd
This was such an interesting piece, as I didn't realize anosmia could sneak up on you like that. I'm glad your sense of smell gradually returned, as it did for a friend who had anosmia due to COVID. She used a "smell retraining" kit that included known scents to retrain her receptors and brain. It worked!
Apr 24, 2023Liked by Sari Botton, Deborah K. Shepherd
Dear Deborah: Great weriting!
This flash thing is from a forthcoming book of same. Anosmia was something I'd never heard of either until this, in pre-COVID days:
Anosmia
Before I retired from college teaching, I prompted a student to tell me a story during one office hour, because the story she’d written for class contained a word that the narrative never defined. It said the heroine had anosmia. Then it simply went on, and pretty conventionally, about NASCAR races, and how the girl –who came from a NASCAR family herself– had once fallen for a certain driver.
I had no interest in race cars, and, even if I had, the love plot would still have been way too familiar: exactly the kind of thing, I’m afraid, you’ll read by too many young people. One knows that the story-line represents real urgency on their parts, but it just can’t hold an older reader for long. That sort of jadedness, in fact, was among several factors that moved me to retirement. I didn’t want to feel contempt for young people merely because they were young.
Anosmia, though– well, I’m a sucker for out-of-the-way words, and I wanted to own this one, which as I say kicked off her more gripping story.
Her dad was an EMT, and as a child she’d peeked inside his vinyl bag one evening when he came home from work. Pointing to them, she asked about the smelling salts. Her father explained their use, and she begged him for a whiff. He didn’t want to give in, but he did, in part because it happened to be the girl’s ninth birthday.
She took a sniff, and that marked the last time in her life when she could smell. Anosmia is the term for the loss of that sense.
Yes, that did make a better tale than what she’d written. I was instantly intrigued, thinking that in my own case and perhaps most people’s, the capacity to experience odors is essential to feelings of nostalgia or joy or revulsion– but the list goes on and on, of course. It is, also of course, closely linked with the sense of taste, so I asked my student about that. Did she enjoy food at all?
She said that all she had cared for since that incident was highly spiced cuisine: Thai or Mexican, for example, and certain Indian dishes.
At that point, my mind strayed, because I figured I was not all that much older than her father. I thought hard about his cursed luck. The man, despite his doubts, must have meant to do his child a favor for her birthday. What followed must have been devastating to him.
Driving home after class, I looked out my window at a late-March moon, and beside it, Aldebaran, the brightest star in Taurus. Now if unlike me you have any faith in this sort of thing, you believe that people born under the sign of the bull are suckers for sensuous gratification: wet kisses, good wine, rich food, and so on.
How can it possibly feel, I wondered, to have made so small a mistake and deprived your child of all that, anosmia abiding in the life of a daughter you love? You must go on and on replaying that moment, wishing it could be undone, knowing it can’t. Not ever.
And then, because an adult mind –or perhaps any mind—rarely follows some orderly plot or sequence, for some reason I thought of a woodsman I’d known in my own salad days. His name was Donald August. He was married twice, his first wife having died in giving birth to what would have been their sixth child, who died in childbirth too. He had two more children with his second wife, who outlived him by almost twenty years.
Don’s manner was terse, but he had a nose for truth. I got thinking of something he said, and not about children only: You need to look out, because there’s always some damned trap set.
I got out of my car at home and again looked up at that moon. It looked as sharp as one of Don’s axes.
Oh, thanks for your sweet (and useful) comment, dear Lauren. I especially love the “note to self.”
Thanks, Lauren. Don’t think I’d want to return to my salad days.🤣
Bette, unfortunately so true. Thanks so much for your comment.
Thanks for commenting, Bernie. Yup, I keep a cane in my car, just in case...
Thank you, David! Yes, all of your trying to figure out what people are saying definitely resonates with me. I will check out your Substack.
Yup, that totally resonated with me. Thanks for your comment, Julie.
Thank you so much, Bette. I read about the smell retraining kit and was ready to go that way if my sense of smell hadn’t returned.
Oh, Janet, thank you so much, both for your comment and for ordering my book. I’ve taken to wearing my hearing aids to watch TV, because if I turn the volume up as high as I need it, it blasts my husband right out of the room.🤣
Sydney, just wow! Love this. Thanks for your comment and for sharing your essay.
Oh, yes, Barbara. It’s amazing, isn’t it? And not in a good way...
Oh, yes, Asha, resonates with me, too!🤣 Thanks for commenting.
Oh, Jodi, I feel you. I joke, too, but oh boy, not easy, is it.? Thanks for responding.
Yes, it’s amazing isn’t it? And not in a good way...Thanks for your comment.
If my children change my adult diaper and I don’t know them. Bye bye.
This was such an interesting piece, as I didn't realize anosmia could sneak up on you like that. I'm glad your sense of smell gradually returned, as it did for a friend who had anosmia due to COVID. She used a "smell retraining" kit that included known scents to retrain her receptors and brain. It worked!
Dear Deborah: Great weriting!
This flash thing is from a forthcoming book of same. Anosmia was something I'd never heard of either until this, in pre-COVID days:
Anosmia
Before I retired from college teaching, I prompted a student to tell me a story during one office hour, because the story she’d written for class contained a word that the narrative never defined. It said the heroine had anosmia. Then it simply went on, and pretty conventionally, about NASCAR races, and how the girl –who came from a NASCAR family herself– had once fallen for a certain driver.
I had no interest in race cars, and, even if I had, the love plot would still have been way too familiar: exactly the kind of thing, I’m afraid, you’ll read by too many young people. One knows that the story-line represents real urgency on their parts, but it just can’t hold an older reader for long. That sort of jadedness, in fact, was among several factors that moved me to retirement. I didn’t want to feel contempt for young people merely because they were young.
Anosmia, though– well, I’m a sucker for out-of-the-way words, and I wanted to own this one, which as I say kicked off her more gripping story.
Her dad was an EMT, and as a child she’d peeked inside his vinyl bag one evening when he came home from work. Pointing to them, she asked about the smelling salts. Her father explained their use, and she begged him for a whiff. He didn’t want to give in, but he did, in part because it happened to be the girl’s ninth birthday.
She took a sniff, and that marked the last time in her life when she could smell. Anosmia is the term for the loss of that sense.
Yes, that did make a better tale than what she’d written. I was instantly intrigued, thinking that in my own case and perhaps most people’s, the capacity to experience odors is essential to feelings of nostalgia or joy or revulsion– but the list goes on and on, of course. It is, also of course, closely linked with the sense of taste, so I asked my student about that. Did she enjoy food at all?
She said that all she had cared for since that incident was highly spiced cuisine: Thai or Mexican, for example, and certain Indian dishes.
At that point, my mind strayed, because I figured I was not all that much older than her father. I thought hard about his cursed luck. The man, despite his doubts, must have meant to do his child a favor for her birthday. What followed must have been devastating to him.
Driving home after class, I looked out my window at a late-March moon, and beside it, Aldebaran, the brightest star in Taurus. Now if unlike me you have any faith in this sort of thing, you believe that people born under the sign of the bull are suckers for sensuous gratification: wet kisses, good wine, rich food, and so on.
How can it possibly feel, I wondered, to have made so small a mistake and deprived your child of all that, anosmia abiding in the life of a daughter you love? You must go on and on replaying that moment, wishing it could be undone, knowing it can’t. Not ever.
And then, because an adult mind –or perhaps any mind—rarely follows some orderly plot or sequence, for some reason I thought of a woodsman I’d known in my own salad days. His name was Donald August. He was married twice, his first wife having died in giving birth to what would have been their sixth child, who died in childbirth too. He had two more children with his second wife, who outlived him by almost twenty years.
Don’s manner was terse, but he had a nose for truth. I got thinking of something he said, and not about children only: You need to look out, because there’s always some damned trap set.
I got out of my car at home and again looked up at that moon. It looked as sharp as one of Don’s axes.