breathe
The power of smell is an extraordinary thing. Sometimes the memory of fragrances and scents once tasted are our most powerful, our most intense.
One fragrance I will never forget, because it bore upon it such a momentous and complex mixture of emotions and meanings. Although I inhaled this fragrance many times, and my memories are peppered over with specific remembrances of it, one particular moment is more powerfully associated with it than any other.
I was six. We were living in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood in a suburban valley town near the San Francisco Bay Area. Summers were hot, winters mild. As my mother drove me home from school, she casually let slip that a little surprise awaited me, somewhere in my parents’ bedroom.
Racing inside, I lighted upon a neat little pile of perhaps six pristine, gorgeous Star Wars action figure packages, laid out in a little pile on my parents’ tidy, well-made bed. I can still remember the puzzlement mixed with the utter delight as I groped for the packages. It was not my birthday. I had not performed any particularly saintly act recently of which I was aware. Why the surprising act of generosity? I would ask my mom years later, and she could only shrug; she can’t remember.
Cracking the plastic shell off the cardboard backing: that waft of fresh plastic, sealed inside at the factory, like so much perfume for 3.5-inch sized people. I drank that smell in, sweet and fresh — it seemed to be the smell of wondrous imagination, of family, of comfort, of moving generosity. That fragrance seemed to punctuate, personify the excitement and the pleasure of these wondrous gifts, to tantalize with the promise of all the adventures to come.
Thereafter, drinking in the fresh smell would become an integral part of the ritual of a new toy for me, an important part of the thrill of its newness. But it was that one occasion, that sleepy day and the surprise which awaited me at home, with which I most associate the fragrance.
Of course, plastic fumes are probably toxic, and the fragrance was probably equal parts plastic outgassing and chemical paints, but it’s hard for me to look at it negatively, not through the prism of my scent memories.