For several years I have been using men’s grooming items from an upscale company. They were costly, but I really enjoyed the scent, and I received comments frequently about it. I watched the prices go up, the products change, the packaging change, and the prices go up again.
One day I was shopping in the supermarket and I spotted men’s toiletries by Old Spice. My memory button was pushed, and I could smell the scent of the Old Spice aftershave that my father used to wear. When I was first learning to shave (not very successfully for quite a while) I would splash some of it on, mainly because it soothed my skin, having burned it in my attempts to steer my way around adolescent bumps and bruises. But mostly, my memories are of the scent of it on my father.
Caught up in a wave of nostalgia, I bought some Old Spice products and began experimenting with them fifty years after my first applications. I had to ignore the late night comedy jokes about Old Spice, considered by “sophisticated men” to be a product for the lower classes. Those who joked about it didn’t realize how good the scent felt to me a decade after my father’s death.
Then, along came Isaiah Mustafa in a bath towel. The whole scene changed overnite. Suddenly Old Spice is the hottest item on the shelf and the 21st century icon for manliness and virility. I can’t claim those virtues; I just want to be reminded of the scent of my father every day.
This posting wasn’t meant to be an advertisement for Old Spice. I got here by listening to a couple of writers speak at the Summer Writer’s Workshop at Brown University this week. They talked about the need for a writer to get out of (his) head and write about the inspirations that come from the senses. It is the same theme that I heard last year at the Martha’s Vineyard Writer’s Workshop when I was encouraged to use my heart to write as well as my head. It’s a theme I have written about before in this blog, and it keeps coming back.
Today’s featured speaker was Wayne Koestenbaum, poet and author, whose book Hotel Theory is on its way to becoming a classic. In his commentary today, Koestenbaum echoed the previous authors in the series about the need to put restrictive conventions aside and be open to writing freely, having been led by the senses. He talks about liberating a writer’s senses and trespassing spaces which have been closed and unavailable. As a gay man his freedom as a writer is expressed in the openness available in this era to write about the gay experience without fear of rejection or humiliation. But that is only one expression of this freedom. The freedom to escape the constrictions of the mind which have been reinforced constantly by archaic rules and regulations for writers, is a liberation which takes an author in a whole new direction.
I have allowed myself to get diverted from the beginning theme of this post, but only to demonstrate how powerfully the senses, particularly the sense of smell, can excite a part of the brain which fuels the writer. I’d like to think that I am on the way to becoming an Old Spice writer, allowing myself to celebrate colorful memories and to create a kaleidoscope of thoughts which emerge from my desire to explore words and phrases which bring color to your life.
Photo Credit: songspeak.com
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Thanks, Marcella, for your comment. Being on top of that mountain right now might temper the 99 degree temps we experienced all day while driving to Roanoke, VA. Bring on the Chapstick!
This is a great point. It’s happened to me with recalling the scent of ChapStick while skiing with my family twenty years ago. There’s a particular color ChapStick that never ceases to bring me directly back to that family vacation, that feeling of being so cold at the top of the mountain, etc. You make a great point in that harnessing these senses, these memories, etc can fuel writing in a way much more powerful than by using just our minds or other conventional idea-means.
Thanks for all your comments. Glad this post was helpful.
There is also a negative scent: White Shoulders for women. It sickens me. I once knew a woman who wore it to cover her smell of alcohol. I could tell when she entered the building without ever leaving my office. I passed a woman the other day who was wearing it, and I could feel the perspiration break out on my forehead.
I always think of my dad when I see Old Spice……now I realize I need to also
“take a whiff” and allow myself to really go back over 50 years!
My father, too, used Old Spice, and your post brought back fond memories of times long thought gone forever.
Though I myself don’t use it, it is a key opening those chambers of memory often buried with years of guilt, years of rejecting, years of failing to come to terms with what might have been, what should have been, and the regret that goes hand in hand with having not done something.
For my tastes, the sense of smell is the one that triggers off memories most powerfully – the memory of my granny making bread, baking apple tarts, with exactly five cloves each – God as if it was yesterday, but instead it’s forty years ago.
And there was a perfume for girls, a heavy, musky, almost overwhelming perfume, whose name I’ve never known, but a scent I’d recognize blindly anywhere and any time, since a boyhood dreamgirl used it, and I was madly in love. If I close my eyes it’s as if we were sitting together on the park bench in the evening, whispering sweet nothings, as the cliché goes, all lovey-dovey.
Thanks for reminding me, and hopefully others, that we have a range of tools available both as humans and as writers, not that these are always mutually exclusive, of course, that can transport us any where we like in our own lives.
I really enjoyed these thoughts … and the noticeable (aromatic!) freedom that came with them. I, too, have heard Koestenbaum speak. He has a way of helping one to “unlock” one’s own conventions and to “re-approach” with fresh angles. He’s, in a word, ENERGIZING (to me, anyway). And the notion of Old Spice coming back to you in all these ways just as it seems to be making a comeback in today’s world — like some sort of sensual bridge from past to present — is TRULY RICH!!
I’d say you’re well on your way (not ‘there’ yet because this is a process and what would be the fun in having already reached your destination?). When I read your posts, I experience the ‘mind’ as the sixth sense—as you make me ‘think’ in a way that has a great amount of view, texture, sound, taste…and of course, scent.
And, my dad used to wear Old Spice, too…back when I was little. Since then, he’s become a connoisseur and has about 20 fancy and delicious bottles on his bureau…but I’ve always remembered and cherished that original and super-manly scent.