The Smells of My Childhood

Sometimes a stock photo is perfect; keep on reading to find out why. Photo by Battlecreek Coffee Roasters on Unsplash

I got an idea for a blog post the other day when I walked into a bathroom before going on the train, and it smelled so much of chlorine that I was immediately thrown back 30 years to when I was in swimming lessons in the local YMCA. Nothing of any major importance happened during these swimming lessons, but the smell of chlorine was so potent that they are ingrained in my memory. The bobs in the pool, the kid in the changing room who took his sweet time getting changed and whose mom from outside would always accuse him of “dawdling” and “dilly-dallying”. I wonder where that kid is today. I’m pretty sure he was Russian with a very Russian name.

It melded nicely with something I had seen earlier in the day, I think on Facebook, about what is called the “Poor Man’s Alzheimer’s Test”. Apparently, you can measure the distance from each nostril where you are able to detect the scent of peanut butter, and if there is a large difference between the two nostrils, then there is something to be concerned about.

I’m not a neuroscientist, but this makes perfect sense to me. If smells and memories are so tightly intertwined then not being able to smell something could be seen as also losing the ability to remember. They could very well be stored/processed in the same part of the brain. When discussing this interdependence with a friend, she mentioned that it is a well-known (though no one ever told me) studying trick to chew highly-flavored gum while studying and then to chew the same gum (though presumably a new stick) during the test in order to evoke those “remembering muscles”. All is good though, I still passed school and got a good job without this trick (we also weren’t allowed to chew gum growing up).

So what other smells evoke memories for me? Perhaps the most common and enjoyable one for me (sorry Russian boy in the changing room) is the smell of coffee. My parents were not big coffee drinkers when I was in the house, so there wasn’t really a lot of coffee around the house. The exception to this was during Passover when my grandparents would visit. They enjoyed having coffee as soon as they woke up, so we had a coffee maker going during their stay. As such, the smell of coffee = my grandparents were in town. We only saw them once a year when they came to visit (the world before FaceTime was weird, I know), so it was obviously a special time. This memory was further reinforced when I noted how special the smell was to me when I thanked them during my bar mitzvah speech.

The next two aren’t smells, but rather tastes, but hey, taste is like 90% smell, right? Top among memory-evoking tastes is what I call “artificial banana”. I’ve seen things that say this is how bananas used to taste before we industrialized them and made them incredibly susceptible to disease and possibly extinction (but I digress). Anyway, this is how they flavored antibiotics when I was growing up and tasting this sweet elixir meant not only that I was missing school, but also that I was going to be getting better. On some level it just tasted really good and the only way to attain this taste was via antibiotics which was a rare enough occurrence to make it special as a result.

Lastly, and this one is kind of nasty, but the glue/cement that they use to affix braces to teeth was somehow both vile and sweet at the same time. It had a taste that while I thankfully do not come across it often, it is perhaps a “reverse taste” in that I can conjure it up in my mouth from thoughts alone. Perhaps the taste is so strong because I had two courses of orthodonture.

Well, I did it. Somehow, I squeezed out 716 words about smells (and tastes) that mean something to me, and I even worked in a little bit of science! What smells have the same effect for you? Why do you think the association between these two things is so impactful? Leave your comments below (and be the first commenter ever on my blog!).

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