Well, it's all my friend Tricia's fault: if she hadn't made blogging so attractive, I wouldn't be here on a Friday night writing the very first lines of my very first posting on this brand-new blog. Once upon a time the sort of reflections I propose to put into words here might have been ended up in letters. That was during the era in which I wrote oodles of letters to the far-flung folk I knew in various states of the U.S. and in various other countries on a couple of continents. Now, of course, the ubiquity of e-mail has rendered a nice, long, handwritten (or typewritten!) letter a thing of the remote past, and the fact that many of us are obliged to communicate via e-mail on a superabundance of tedious topics five days a week makes writing a nice, chatty PERSONAL e-mail a bit less attractive.
But what happened this evening made me want to write about it to someone (though not to anyone in particular) and the subject, being a bit flimsy and inconsequential, didn't seem to lend itself to a poem. It's just this: as I got home today, two distant olfactory memories crashed into one another in my mind, prompted by the briefest of fragrances in the air outside my home.
Memory the First: a visit to one of my late mother's friends, who lived in some small East Coast location. I can remember her name but almost nothing else about her other than the drive up to her house, which wound between overhanging bushes and tall trees with dangling branches. I believe we had been a little lost en route; it wasn't someplace we had ever been before. It had been raining cats and dogs, and my siblings and I, jammed into the grey Dodge sedan, had undoubtedly been fighting in a similar fashion. Either it was a long driveway, or we were all so ready to get out of the car that it seemed extra long; I can almost still hear the slow crunch of gravel under the tires. When we were at last freed from the confines of the car, we were probably not outside for more than a minute because it was so damp and we were late. But half a century later, I still recall taking deep, hungry breaths of the air before we went into the cottage. There was something floral -- likely more than one flower's scent -- and a wild mixture of green: leaves, bark, some sort of vine, and underneath it earth so rich it almost seemed I could taste it as gladly as a worm would.
Memory the Second: a visit to another of my mother's friends, this one an Army buddy of hers, who lived in Vancouver, B.C. I hardly knew her, though she had been the stuff of legend in my mother's soliloquies about her time as a WAC in Algiers. I had been spending a few weeks visiting my aunt and uncle in West Van, and was invited to lunch with R-, who lived in a tiny house accessible only by a winding path from the street, encompassing 60 or 70 steep stairs; I'm not sure if I had the presence of mind at the time to wonder how the builders could have managed it. In any case, there were no near neighbors: the house was surrounded on all sides by what seemed like jungle in its rich foliage, its strange variety. It rained while I was there, and lunch had stretched all afternoon into the evening as R- and I talked for hours, so that when my uncle came to pick me up, the lights of the city blinked like distant candles as I descended the plant-strewn slopes, gulping the wild air as I followed the path barely illuminated by R-'s flashlight.
It had rained in San Francisco today, though only gently, and I guess it did so here in the East Bay as well, while I was at work. I parked on the hill in front of this place, and grabbed my bags before ascending the stairs to my door. I don't know which of the random plants in the front yard it could have been to suggest the green memories I have recounted here, but Proust was right: whatever fragrance it was had the power to transport me, instantly and completely, to two places I have scarcely thought about in years.
But what happened this evening made me want to write about it to someone (though not to anyone in particular) and the subject, being a bit flimsy and inconsequential, didn't seem to lend itself to a poem. It's just this: as I got home today, two distant olfactory memories crashed into one another in my mind, prompted by the briefest of fragrances in the air outside my home.
Memory the First: a visit to one of my late mother's friends, who lived in some small East Coast location. I can remember her name but almost nothing else about her other than the drive up to her house, which wound between overhanging bushes and tall trees with dangling branches. I believe we had been a little lost en route; it wasn't someplace we had ever been before. It had been raining cats and dogs, and my siblings and I, jammed into the grey Dodge sedan, had undoubtedly been fighting in a similar fashion. Either it was a long driveway, or we were all so ready to get out of the car that it seemed extra long; I can almost still hear the slow crunch of gravel under the tires. When we were at last freed from the confines of the car, we were probably not outside for more than a minute because it was so damp and we were late. But half a century later, I still recall taking deep, hungry breaths of the air before we went into the cottage. There was something floral -- likely more than one flower's scent -- and a wild mixture of green: leaves, bark, some sort of vine, and underneath it earth so rich it almost seemed I could taste it as gladly as a worm would.
Memory the Second: a visit to another of my mother's friends, this one an Army buddy of hers, who lived in Vancouver, B.C. I hardly knew her, though she had been the stuff of legend in my mother's soliloquies about her time as a WAC in Algiers. I had been spending a few weeks visiting my aunt and uncle in West Van, and was invited to lunch with R-, who lived in a tiny house accessible only by a winding path from the street, encompassing 60 or 70 steep stairs; I'm not sure if I had the presence of mind at the time to wonder how the builders could have managed it. In any case, there were no near neighbors: the house was surrounded on all sides by what seemed like jungle in its rich foliage, its strange variety. It rained while I was there, and lunch had stretched all afternoon into the evening as R- and I talked for hours, so that when my uncle came to pick me up, the lights of the city blinked like distant candles as I descended the plant-strewn slopes, gulping the wild air as I followed the path barely illuminated by R-'s flashlight.
It had rained in San Francisco today, though only gently, and I guess it did so here in the East Bay as well, while I was at work. I parked on the hill in front of this place, and grabbed my bags before ascending the stairs to my door. I don't know which of the random plants in the front yard it could have been to suggest the green memories I have recounted here, but Proust was right: whatever fragrance it was had the power to transport me, instantly and completely, to two places I have scarcely thought about in years.
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