by Nils Peterson
A new word brings an old memory and starts me thinking – biblichor. The chor comes from petrichor, that wonderful earth smell after rain. Bibli, of course comes books as in bibliography. It reminded me of a piece I used a couple of years ago, and from that, as well you readers know, thought makes its way from thing to thing. It’s like crossing a stream on rocks.
From The Paris Review:
“The bookstore, and especially the used bookstore, is vanishing from New York City. Today there are a few, but there used to be a multitude of them, crammed between kitchen appliance shops and Laundromats and thrift stores. They all had temperamental cats prowling their aisles and they all smelled wonderfully of what a team of chemists in London has called “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.” I miss terribly this stimulating fragrance, and the books that produce it, when it’s washed from the city for good.”
This “combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness” is one of the world’s great smells. I fear it is on its way into “The Land of the Lost,” though my grandson told me of the strange smell at Shakespeare and Co in Paris which he visited a couple of weeks ago. That bookstore may be soon an Ishmael, alone left “to tell the tale.”
I wish there were a way to keep smells, a museum of lost smells. I thought of this while reading a bit of a memoir my brother and I wrote together years ago. He sent a bunch of do you remembers for my 70th birthday and I responded. My response to his note is in italics.
(Do you remember he asked) The smell of the cigar, pipe and cigarette tobacco at the Newspaper store where we always bought the Sunday Newspapers? The store was run by two brothers, both a little handicapped, both with a limp. One might have been slow, but able to handle the details of running the store. This is where I had my first taste of Coca-Cola on a Sunday going to get the papers with Dad, the big ice chest, red, a hot day, Dad got one and gave me a swig. I thought it was a magical. We would get The Journal American, The New York Daily News, and The NY Times. I’m not sure how much the Times got read, though we got it. Do you remember Mayor LaGuardia reading the funnies over the radio when there was a strike I think by the printers and no papers were printed? The Comics were a serious business in those days.
Reading this, I remembered the smell of tobacco stores. I gave up smoking cigarettes in my late-ish twenties, but I hung on to cigars for a few years after, as much chewed on as smoked. At last, I gave up the fat ones and settled on a Dutch almost cigarillo called Schimmelpenninck. You had to go to a tobacco store to get them and in a good store there’d be barrels of loose tobacco open out of which pipe smokers made their individual mixes. I had been in the drying barns of Kentucky and knew and liked the smell of tobacco leaves, but in the store, it was concentrated, rich, heavy. One’s nose swam delighted in what seemed a pungent mist of tobacco, or, maybe, if you can imagine it, a deep forest of whiskey barrels.
And then the pungency of the delicatessen where sometimes I went with my father to pick up a Friday night supper when we weren’t going to have pea soup and Swedish pancakes. Great open rounds of cheese with wedges cut out of them. Barrels of pickle, good fresh breads – pumpernickel, rye, (limpa, a good sweetish Swedish rye if it was a Scandinavian deli) – and in the glass cases, lox and herring, the sliced meats, the prepared salads. Maybe barrels of roasted coffee beans. Not sure of that.
And new mown grass and hay, and the apple cellar, and the great bins of compost ripening behind the greenhouse of the great estate where my father worked as chauffeur. The smell of the cellar of our first house on Lenox Avenue, dusty and a little chemically from father’s dark room, an overlay of laundry soap. Roses, jasmine, the smell after the plucking of a lemon. Those smells come back every year, but the lost ones, the lost ones, I mourn the lost ones. I do have one little bit of smell museum, a pillow of pine needles that brings back the presence of the pine forest primeval. A friend brought it to me from Maine.
The older you get, the more there is to remember and the more to mourn. Such mourning is not a sad thing, rather, a joyful tribute. Sadness is a kind of spice.
Interlude
Up and down the street
the jasmine is in heat
shouting out “Come hither
before my time to wither.”
Her perfume in the breeze
is how she speaks to bees.
And of course a Sound Museum is needed too.
Steam Heat
People with recorders are scurrying around trying to catch endangered sounds. I
hope one gets the sound of pipes knocking as the steam rises from the coal furnace.
Remember that joyful bang and clatter? How if you could stay in bed five minutes
more the chill would be gone from the room, though not the floor. Remember the
radiator beneath the window? – painted white, with a metal tray on top for flowers
in summer and how on the first cold day the black round knob was so stiff it could
hardly turn? Look now at the mist beginning to fog the window. Look while it’s
clear. All’s still there. Look! Quick while it’s still clear. All’s still there and if you
listen carefully, the knock of the pipes.
The best sound in the world is an orchestra tuning up.
A Memorable Fancy
Not With A Bang
There was not even nothing before there was anything, then everything entered
all at once, a great chord, all of the notes and all of the almost-notes between –
yes, all at once. So the universe began not with percussion, but the whole
orchestra tuning in a marvelous cacophony before the show. Then Maestra
Space-Time entered, opened the score of Whatever-Will-Be, and raised her baton.
The music of the spheres is really the Maestra humming as she keeps time of time.