Fear of OICS

I worry about OICS.

Odors I Cannot Smell.

Old people’s smell, oily hair smell, stinky feet, underarm odors, and the smell of sex or telltale odors from an insufficient wipe make me shudder. What if I’m not aware of such scents in my aura? What does that say about me as a modern American woman? Yuck? If I were from another culture that is less commercially-perfumed, might I value the information given off by my own and other's natural body scents?

I live in the United States of America in the twenty-first century. Sigh... I conform to the norm.

My high-school buddy Wendy used to ask me for reassurance, when we carpooled in my mom's VW Bug, that she didn't smell like bed... you know... that stale smell?

Laundering the pillow slips and sheets on a weekly basis reassures me I fit in the bell curve of acceptable. Letting my nose be the final judge on all I wear - especially collars, scarves and hats - is a habit. I find it workable to wash my hair twice a week. It seems that older people (yes, I am older) manufacture less sebum, grow fewer hairs, (except for those on our chins!), and have less active sweat glands, so over washing the hair just makes it fly-away-dry. I remember my Grammy’s frequent trips to the beauty parlor yielding a poofy white halo that gleamed under her hundred watt reading lamp in the living room and made it look as if someone had rubbed her head all over with an inflated balloon. 

While I have been accused of having a hyper sensitive nose that can discern the subtlest of odors, fragrances and smells, I know that as we age, all of our senses are subject to wearing out; they become less acute.  I worry that I won’t be able to discern whether or not I smell unpleasant - in much the same way that a barista at Peet’s may no longer be able to smell the coffee on her clothes. Similarly, we acclimate to familiar sounds. We tune them out, when the novelty has worn off, saving our gray matter for more important, perhaps threatening sounds.

I remember some of my elders being comfortable wearing clothes that had a slightly grimy feel and smell about them - as if they’d been worn while standing too near a deep fat fryer where the vapor of rancid oil coated and imbedded in the fibers of everything they wore.

When my mother was of a certain age, her paramour, also of a certain age, wore a cravat which should have been retired or at least sent for repeated treatments at the cleaners until it could no longer stand upright  all by itself when set down on his bureau. It was stinky with his less oft-washed eau d'neck.

Do we become allergic to bathing as we age? Or do we finally re-prioritize our finite minutes on the planet. I believe our culture is obsessed with hyper deodorizing behaviors.

When in my twenties, in the late 1960s, I supervised the fifteen-year-old son of my friend Maxine for two months while she went traveling with a friend to Bali, Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Katmandu, and Nepal. While in Bhutan, they met a young ethnomusicologist named Gabby. Gabby had traded a young herdsman, from the high plains, her transistor radio for his goat herder’s skull-cap. It had been his grandfather’s and father’s. He’d worn it every day for about ten years. Made of fine, black, tightly woven reeds, it had a tuft of feathers like a fountain shooting straight out the very top. It had four large bird beaks and some red, white and yellow glass beads sewn around the perimeter of the base. Before giving it to Gabby, he scraped the inside of the hat with his fingernails to get the essence from it, he said, so it would always be with him. Gabby entrusted Maxine and her friend Jan to ship it back to the United States for her to pick-up later when she returned stateside, after her music research was completed. 

Of all the stories Maxine shared with her son and me about her travels, as we helped her  unwrap sea-mail packages that arrived weekly for months after she returned - each bundle having its own marvelous musty smell from the holds of cargo ships - this one story and the aromas emanating off the cap of cook fires, green meadows, mountain winds, randy goats, their milk and the wooly coats of suckling kids stuck deeper within my heart than any other. I could see through Gabby's eyes, and Maxine's those Himalayan goats in their high pastures and the golden-skinned man who traded his cap, but kept its soul-essence under his black fingernails.

There is something primal about smell. The olfactory nerves hang down from cribriform plate, into the nasal passages bringing the scents of the world directly into the brain where they are instantly processed, made sense of, and responded to. Of the five senses, smell is, perhaps, capable of drawing out in us humans the most emotional and visceral responses.  Do you ever get a whiff of something that evokes an entire gestalt of prior experiences?

After she died, I could be comforted by the remaining scent of my Grammy on a few of her favorite napping pillows. In addition to her poofy halo of fine white hair, I remember my grandmother Florence for the almond scent of Jergen’s hand lotion and Pond’s Cold-Cream. 

In my later twenties, I attended my first home birth. Friend Rona labored outside much of the hot June afternoon, sipping only small bits of water. Toward the thirtieth hour of her labor, husband Jack grew quite concerned at the sickly-sweet smell of ketones on his wife's breath. That's the scent of the body digesting its own tissues to sustain itself. He transported his laboring wife - even as she protested - to the nearest hospital where their son was born by Caesarean section. It turned out that his fourteen centimeter head would not fit through her ten centimeter outlet. While disappointing to the mom, the dad's appropriate evaluation of sensory information and swiftly acting upon it prevented more wasted labor. She was too exhausted to continue, but couldn't recognize it. Olfactories to the rescue!

I set to work changing sheets, cleaning the fridge and making the house ready for the family to return to order and freshness. I shall always remember that ketone smell.... reminiscent of death itself.

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Part of me is maniacally meticulous. I care that the house and its occupants smell fresh. Other parts of my psyche are averse to spending time cleaning in corners, dusting the highest shelves and light fixtures, and moving all the furniture to vacuum underneath.

More to the point, I do not want to go into the world with my body smelling like an old person who no longer cares. On the other hand, what is my olfactory footprint? I aspire to roses, but will settle for memorable in any sort of pleasant way. What is my natural wreak? That of my beloved seems to be the fresh ozone smell of having been out-of-doors. So clean. I also aspire to that.

Please, Goddess, free me from all OICS! Keep my schnoz sensitive till I'm outa here feet first. And grant me the decency to respect the varieties of human odiferous emanations and let me value the information held within them. May I always cherish the olfactory uniqueness of humans and other creatures on this mud-ball-spinning.