I get settled into work and a co-worker comes in with something from the Institute cafeteria.  After a while I’m beginning to smell…Sauerkraut…???  Er…no.  It was a Ranchero something.  It’s Mexico week at the Institute cafeteria. 

Life with a nose like mine.  Something in the Ranchero sauce set it off.  But my sense of smell isn’t good at all, and getting weird feedback from my nose is something I’ve had to learn to live with.  I have about a dozen different kinds of incense here at Casa del Garrett that I’ve bought over the years…most of it from Chinatown in San Francisco…and time was I could distinguish between each of them and I had my favorites.  Swear to God it all smells exactly alike to me now.  But at least I can still smell it.

I’ve watched my sense of smell deteriorating ever since adolescence. You don’t really think of smell as being something you might miss horribly.  Eyesight yes.  Hearing yes.  But smell?  It might be a nuisance not having it working right, but what more then that?  Let me tell you.  Back in the mid 1990s I visited Ocean City, New Jersey again after nearly twenty years of not visiting the seashore at all, and was saddened to discover that I could no longer smell the ocean.  That tang of salt air that use to delight me as a kid, because it meant vacation at the beach, was gone to me.  I walked right up to the shore and waded in a bit and I still couldn’t smell it.  I really can’t describe that moment, other then the kid inside of me felt a bit heartbroken.

It can lead to embarrassments too.  I run my deep fryer a lot here at Casa del Garrett and the only times I can really smell it is when it’s at temperature.  Some months back a friend came over for a visit and when they walked in the door asked me if I’d been frying fish.  I had.  About a week previously.  So now I make it a point to open the windows and burn some incense after running the deep fryer.

Nowadays I can barely smell anything, and when I do I often have trouble identifying it.  They put a lot of things in their food south of the border but Sauerkraut isn’t one of them.  About the only thing I can still reliably smell in small amounts is whatever scent it is they put into natural gas as a leak warning.  Thank goodness I can still smell that.  Oh…and that really foul smell of burning wire insulator.  That’s a good thing to be able to notice too.