{"id":208,"date":"2009-03-22T11:44:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-22T11:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2009\/03\/22\/208\/"},"modified":"2014-09-06T15:18:53","modified_gmt":"2014-09-06T20:18:53","slug":"208","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=208","title":{"rendered":"Smells of My Youth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Smell is a stronger form of sense than most of us realize.  That&#8217;s probably because it goes way back in the chain of evolution.  Before there was eyesight and hearing and taste, there were living things that could pick up chemical signals in the air.  Our brains are like Microsoft Office software; they are not designed from scratch, but are &#8220;layered&#8221; from basic software designs drawn up many years ago.  I.e., they still have the original programming design, but with a lot of additions and complexifications as to do more things.  As such, we still have a brain that gives a lot of attention to smell.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, it&#8217;s not surprising that smells can trigger dormant memories stored way in the back of the mind.  I was thinking the other day about how certain kinds of smells can &#8220;take you back&#8221; to your childhood in just a second or two.  You can be watching a baseball game or knuckling down on a math problem or reading an article about secularized sub-prime mortgage securities or pondering a vacation spot, and suddenly a whiff breaks your concentration; your mind wanders to far-away places from years and years ago.<\/p>\n<p>So I drew up a list of some of the smells of my youth:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Seagrams rye whiskey (my parents and aunts and uncles always drank it during the holidays, mixed with ginger ale)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Balsam (from a Christmas tree in the living room)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Clove oil (from the dentist&#8217;s office)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Tar (the city was re-paving the local streets; and also from the Flintkote roofing-paper factory up the road)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Creosote (Railroad track ties &#8212; every male child &#8216;walked the tracks&#8217; back then)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Perfumy flowers (funeral parlors and the local Catholic church at Easter time; for that, add the weird, resiny smell of beeswax candles burning)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Baseball glove leather and neatsfoot oil (ah, boyhood summer days)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Salt water (at the beach)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Yeast (pizza shops &#8212; back when they made their own dough)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Sweet baking smells (the local bakeries &#8212; we had two in my neighborhood)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Polished wood floors (the school gym)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>An odd, somewhat rancid damp smell (wet raincoats and galoshes stored in the school classroom closet on a rainy day)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Burning tree leaves (in October and November, back when everyone burned autumn leaves)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Beerwood&#8221; (the smell in an old bar or restaurant where everything was wood, and was marinated in spilled beer)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Many of these smells are mostly gone, because times have changed (e.g., pizza places now buy pre-made dough; dentists don&#8217;t use clove oil anymore for pain relief; you can&#8217;t burn leaves in autumn; and most Christmas trees sold are not balsam firs, or were cut months ago and have lost their smell by late December).    It just shows that I&#8217;m getting old.  But it&#8217;s still nice when an occasional smell takes me back for a quick mental visit with my youth, the days of long ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Smell is a stronger form of sense than most of us realize. That&#8217;s probably because it goes way back in the chain of evolution. Before there was eyesight and hearing and taste, there were living things that could pick up chemical signals in the air. Our brains are like Microsoft Office software; they are not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4569,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions\/4569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}