March 2008

I was sitting to the right of Geof, enjoying an Over the Rhine concert that he’d talked me into attending, when I saw my silenced phone light up. The number implied Arkansas, and I had the familiar lump of dread that always came when a number starting with 501 showed up on caller ID.

It was my mother, and thanks to the ongoing performance, I had no way of answering it before the phone would go to voice mail. I watched, and waited, and saw no new voicemail notification pop up. No message.

When the musicians took a break, I called my mother back, and Geof was the only witness to the look on my face, whose look he told me later was quite priceless. The news? My mother’s engagement.

So what perfumes do you wear, you ask?

Old, odd, and unusual perfumes. Many modern-day perfumes smell one-dimensional and overly sweet to me. I think there's a trend now to create perfumes that are comprised of only perky and sweet ingredients, which I don't agree with. It's like smearing cake icing on your skin and calling it perfume.

It's hard to explain my idea that some parts of a perfume shouldn't necessarily smell yummy and edible on their own, because it seems contradictory — you want the end result to smell good, right? There's a reason that strong, even animalic undertones work well in perfume: contrast, dimension, and balance.

(Someone said once that their perfect perfume would be one that made her smell like herself, only more so and awesome. I thought that was a great description.)

I've been wrapped up in Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet for a few days now. I realized I was on to something unusual when I started flagging passages every few pages.

Comments from the narrator so far:

Dad -

I didn’t really call you that while you were alive, and it feels strange to call you that now, but I didn’t know any other way to start this letter.

I’ve become a person who grumbles at roadside memorials for victims of traffic accidents but who writes something about you every year on the anniversary of your death. I wondered about that for a number of years before I realized that I was closer to your death than I was to your life, and I’ve spent the years since trying to come to terms with your absence.

This entry covers it better than most:

“I think a lot of people who come to visit Mauna Kea come for a reason,” said James Kimo Pihana, a ranger with the Office of Mauna Kea Management. “People challenge the mountain. The mountain always wins; it is people who lose. But the mountain accepts challenges.”