Earlier today I was working on an article about perfect Chicago souvenirs and trying to avoid the obvious ones--snow globes and sports jerseys and giant overpriced tins of Garrett's popcorn and stumbled upon a Chicago-scented candle, which had me giggling to myself all afternoon because the first impulse had was to say that to be a real encapsulation it had to smell a little like pee and food cooking, which is actually not at all accurate (though certain alleyways you pass by definitely go hard on the former.) It does smell like food--fried, grilled, broiled, especially in high restaurant areas. Down near Columbia and the Fine Arts, it sometimes smelled like bbq when there was a restaurant still in the Blackstone Hotel. All the hotels had a smell like A/C--a blast of cool air--when you walked past the doors. In May, I could catch the scent of lilacs across the street in Grant Park when the wind was right. Sometimes asphalt and concrete, sometimes the lake, and sometimes like rain or cut grass. There is a particular spot near Randolph Street along Michigan that, on some nights, I could catch the scent of Blommer's Chocolate factory miles away. My little neighborhood on the north side mostly smells like the lake if it smells like anything, especially if the wind is off it. Maybe garbage in the alleys if it's been unusually hot. Every spring, Loyola lays down a mulch near their buildings that I swear smells like cat shit. My apartment building smells like laundry soap on the first floor and weed and cooked Indian food upstairs, and sometimes like Chinese takeout in the elevator which always makes me crave it.
I have an early poem in my first book, THE FEVER ALMANAC, that talks about the city--particularly Lincoln Park that subconsciously to me smelled like money and cashmere. When I was in grad school, I used to walk around the neighborhood at night with my sister when she was visiting and we'd try not to be too obvious about staring into the windows of palatial graystones and brick mansions. The well-heeled young LP Trixies riding bikes and walking golden retrievers one last time for the night, who have probably no doubt moved to the suburbs after marrying their Chads and popping out a few kids. It was a neighborhood that was beautiful, but even then I was sure I didn't belong there. I still associate certain smells with that apartment though. like.the thin tinge of gas from the stove that greeted you always. (My sister always says we made Chef Boyardee box pizza one time and it smelled like it for two years..lol..) There was a smell the streets had when the leaves started to fall and I will always associate that particular neighborhood with autumn in my mind, though I was there for two full years of other seasons. I also associate the strong smell of coffee from when I briefly worked at Starbucks one summer. Herbal Essences shampoo (which I still use) and the weird unpleasant smell of mint tea bags sitting for a couple days in mugs I kept leaving everywhere.
Scent is a sense that has even more of resonance than hearing for me. While music has its own associations and memories, they feel more like cognitive things. A few weeks ago, heard Adele's "Rolling In the Deep" song and immediately I am in a wood paneled bar in the summer of 2011, madly in love with someone who would never love me back, who turns and says, after we are quite for a second, "Wow, this is a good song." I hear Veruca Salt's "Volcano Girls" and I am in my car driving to play rehearsal in 1996. Smell, though, is not just mental memory, but bodily memory. Anytime I smell Downy, I think of my grandmother's carefully folded washcloths in a pale blue cabinet. How I would wet them in the bath and hold them over my nose to relish the scent while mice ran back and forth under the tub, terrified I would hear the snap of the traps she kept there. When I was a child and she died when I was around eight, I was convinced every time I smelled it maybe she was haunting me. And of course, it being a major brand, I smelled it a lot.
