SCENT,SENT FROM THE PAST

                                              

This isn’t meant to be sad, so don’t reach for the tissues. It’s just a little human-interest story that I would like to share with those who have lost someone special.

After my wife passed away, for a long time I didn’t change much about the house. By choice I had never played much of a part in the decorating or furnishings, so she pretty much had her signature on everything and she did a good job at it. I had some fears that as time went on everything in the house was just going to remind me of her at every turn and make me sad all of the time. But those fears were largely unfounded. I too had lived there the entire time and really the things I’m talking about weren’t hers or mine, they were ours. In the ensuing years I have changed a few things-- but not to get rid of her ideas, only to keep up with the times.

So the only things I gave away were the things that had no value to me such as her clothes and jewelry. In fact I emptied her dresser in the bedroom except for one thing. A small jar of perfume she had always used very sparingly. It was the only scent I had ever remembered her using. She had used it most of the time when we went out socially or at the times when she just wanted to make an evening special for me. I’ll leave that right there. Her dresser has remained empty except for that jar of perfume because I had my own dresser and really being a pretty simple man who lives in blue jeans and tee shirts I didn’t need the space. Then the other day I opened the drawer for some reason and saw that bottle again. I picked it up and looked at it and then opening the cap, I took a shallow breath. I had to sit down on the bed because my knees got weak. I didn’t break down crying or bury my head in the pillow. I just enjoyed the memories of a very special lady who had more to do with making me the man I am today, then I care to admit and all of this brought on that day simply by the scent of her perfume.

Our senses play such a big part in jogging our memories. When I was a kid there was a bakery in my hometown that made the best Bismarck’s or jelly doughnuts. I had a morning paper route so when my route was done, and before I went to school; I went to the bakery and maybe for nickel or a dime you could get one in those days, still warm and filled with raspberry jelly with white frosting on top. Even today going in a Bakery and smelling those aromas I still think of those winter mornings in that bakery.

Its not always smells either-- sometimes it’s a sound. Back to my hometown and an old house a block from the railroad tracks. At night you would hear that long mournful whistle on the steam engine coming into town from the west, and then, through our open bedroom window, you would hear the clickity clack of the steel wheels on the tracks and the boxcars cars lurching back and forth. It was a railroad town so this happened many times a night. Later in life while living in the cities I could hear the trains again, farther away across the river but always it brought me back to those nights in of my youth.

THEY CALL IT PROGRESS

                                               

In Man’s zeal to find bigger and better ways to accomplish things, there’re always casualties. Driven by the love of the almighty dollar and corporate profits, our way of life evolves each and every day in this capitalistic society. That’s not meant to be a criticism; it’s a fact of life here in America. It’s lead, follow or get out of the way.

At some point progress bumps heads with nostalgia and people who don’t want to change, get hurt in the process. There are thousands of coal miners in West Virginia who want nothing more then to pick up their dinner pails and go to the mine each day but no one wants their coal anymore. There are people in towns all across this nation who live just down the street from a shuttered factory and remember when they had two lives’ that they lived. One for their family and one for the company. Now a robot does their job in half the time. Abandoned farmhouses dot the prairies of the Midwest, sad reminders of a time when a family toiled to grow crops and tend their animals. Now huge pieces of machinery chew up in one bite, more soil then a legion of family farmers could turn over in a day, with their antiquated machinery.

Yes its sad. It’s sad because we were so happy living like that. Maybe we grew up on a family farm, four generations old, smelling sweet clover and fresh cut alfalfa fields not muddy feedlots spilling over with manure and cattle caked with it. We wore that farmers tan and those calluses’ in the summer like a badge of courage and in the evening one would sit on the porch with that good kind of tired, and hear nothing but the mourning doves, perched on the power line, cooing above us and the frogs croaking in the swamp. Or maybe some of us worked eight hours a day, punched the clock, then went home to our families in a quiet neighborhood, confident each week that paycheck would be there on Friday, always grateful for the job.

It was a time when merchants in small towns closed up their shops at five thirty p.m. on weekdays, except Friday nights, when they stayed open until nine for the farmers and then they went home to their families too. Sundays, they did like the good book asked us to do. It was a day of rest and you went and visited friends and relatives or watched the city team play baseball at Pine Grove Park and had a picnic in the park. No one complained that the liquor stores were closed. No one knew what Wall Mart was and when you went to the local hardware store, Phil would take the time to not only cut some screen for you but also show you how to fix it.

If I could go back for just one day it would be a summer day in June of 1957 and I would be sixteen, standing along the railroad tracks west of Staples. I would be pumping my arm in the air as a huge steam engine roared by me on that ribbon of steel pulling over a hundred boxcars and the engineer seeing me would blow the whistle, while leaning out the window and give me the highball. Grains in the fields would nod their heads from the rush of the wind from the train blowing by. The pockets on my tattered jeans would have only a pocketknife, no cell phone and no I-pod. My bicycle lying in the ditch would have my old baseball glove slipped over the handlebars and an old steel fishing rod tied to the bars. I would be on my way to Dower Lake. It’s hard to imagine living like that now but take my word for it. It beats what we have today.

THE DREADED COLONOSCOPY

                                                

I call this “The Dreaded Colonoscopy II,” because I wrote a column a few years back on this same subject. A few months back my Doctor here in Crosslake, who shall remain nameless although we all love her, informed me that it was time for this procedure again. You know something distasteful is coming up when they almost apologize as they tell you about it. It’s as if you drew the short straw as to who was going to clean up the road-killed skunk out by the mailbox. It was April at the time she told me, so what the heck I thought, I’ll worry about that when the time comes in October. Well news flash, the time came.

This procedure has as its nemesis some thing called prep. I am not sure if anyone has succumbed to this prep procedure but I’m betting there have been some who really didn’t care if they did or didn’t. The combination of drugs and liquid mixes that make up this prep remind me of an old Eagles song called “Take it to the limit.” Not sure if I was just more sensitive then others to this brew but my bedroom is literally ten feet from the commode and when the urge hits, you have about a second less then it takes this old man to run that ten feet. I’ll spare you the details on that. The last time my derriere was this sore is when my father gave me a friendly spanking with a piece of wooden lathe with a nail in it. In his defense he didn’t know the nail was in it until I pointed it out to him, so to be nice about it, he turned the board around. But I’m getting off the subject here.

At the hospital, after they give you one of those peek a boo gowns that ties in the back and also unties in the back after you take two steps, they wheel you into the examination room. The good Doctor came in and introduced himself. He asked if this was my first colonoscopy and I told him no, it was the third and you did them all. I was thinking to myself right then and there. If he sits down on that little stool and says, “Oh now I recognize you,” I was coming right off of that gurney. After the procedure he told me everything looked very nice. Now I’ve never looked in there but if I was a Doctor and I had looked in there, I might have said “Everything looks in order.” Very nice Doc. is the sun going down over Crosslake on a summer evening.

Now comes the mea culpa. As much as I poke light of things like this, I thank the lord that there are good doctors and nurses available who look after our health and that when those nurses will wrap you up in a warm blanket, that makes you want to suck your thumb and hear your old Irish Grandma singing Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ra, just when everything looks so bleak. They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, even if its 64 ounces of prevention that you get two hours to drink and-- damn it Mike, get serious.

If you’re over sixty or have a family history of colon problems you need to do this. This disease can be managed with early prevention and did I tell you? —After the exam they feed you. Also if you play scrabble and you want to use the word colonoscopy in a sentence, you better have a lot of o’s.