Today's Smell
Smell memories are powerful memories. A burning scented punk has sent me down the rabbit hole. Someone a bit of time ago gave us some incense. Today a slowly burning stick sits in a glass bottle in near our oven. Don’t know why on this snowy day I felt like lighting incense but I did. Scented smoke has filled my kitchen with memories. Inhaling the fragrant scent, I am transported to another town and another time, a half century gone. With the smoke gently rising I find myself on the boardwalk of a Jersey seaside town. On an afternoon in one particular summer in the mid-1970s half afraid of what might happen if I am accidently spied going inside (by my parents or their friends), I dart through door of the Birdcage head shop. An outpost of the counterculture it sits in the 700 block of the boardwalk in Ocean City. Blacklights line the room. Day-Glo pictures of Hendrix and Joplin each bending back in a sonic primal scream of guitar and...
