Memory is the strangest thing sometimes. Here is a haiku I wrote the other day.
as I leave the building
a smell drifts by—suddenly I’m six again
the memories
—David LaSpina
I’ve often heard it said that smell is our most powerful sense. I don’t know if that’s true, but it certainly seems to be the one most connected with our memories, and a random smell can trigger a memory instantly and better than anything else. It’s funny—we don’t seem to really remember smells, at least not in the same way that we remember a tv show or a love affair or a best friend. We can’t recall any smell in the same way that we can these other things. At least I can’t—I don’t know about all of you. But ironically smells can remind us of things in a way that doesn’t seem possible.
I was leaving the library with my son and a smell hit me just right. I don’t know what it was. Tobacco smoke from some old guy smoking nearby mixed with the smell that asphalt makes when the sun has been baking it all day combined with the pollution from passing cars and who knows what else. This mixture of smells hit me and suddenly I was back at a pizza place in my hometown that we used to go to when I was only six or seven. It closed not too long after that. Great pizza place, but bad location, on the edge of town, and closer to the poor part of town at that. The owner, a guy named Howie, knew it was a bad location, but it was the only one he could afford. His family worked like hell to make the place work. It was a Shakeys franchise, but later they left the franchise and renamed it Howie’s Place.
I only remember all that background info because years later I had him as a journalism professor at my university and towards the end of the year he did a unit talking about his family business. There is a famous sociological study in America that has looked at my hometown, Muncie, several times in the past century, studying it as a typical American city. The year his business was failing happened to be one of the years the study was in our town. They made a movie about it.
But don’t let that background info dump mislead you—I haven’t thought about that place since college, and before having him as my professor I hadn’t thought of it since we stopped going when I was around seven. All I really remember about the place is the arcade games, the dark tavern atmosphere, and the picnic bench style tables. I remember it fondly, but I couldn’t really tell you why I remember it fondly. I suppose I was a kid and pizza and arcade combined to make it fun and that was enough to make me remember it fondly.[1]
Anyway, I smelled that smell and I was instantly back there. That wave of nostalgia rolled through me, then it was gone just as fast as it had come and I was left grasping at the smell, trying to hold on to it, but it was already gone and it took the memory with it.
I told my son to wait a minute, pulled out my notebook and jotted down a few versions of the above haiku. I still need to massage it a bit. It’s too long as is. I’ll revisit it again later. It’s into the haiku box for now. But I wanted to share it as is right now.
