Tuscon Sam

I was three rows away from done when the mower began to sputter. "Please, oh please, oh please don't run out of gas," I muttered. But it did. It always does. I sigh. Now I will spill gas on my fingers and smell like petrol all evening. I am resigned. I have, it seems, a subconscious aversion to gardening gloves and have come to regard gasoline soaked skin after mowing, as inevitable. Which is how I came to be sporting parfum de la gas vapors at dinner with Grandma, the Diva, Best Uncle, Fave Aunt and mother at the local pub last night.

A distracting odor that ought to have ruined my meal but, in truth, I find comforting. In fact, when I was ten years old, I traded almost half of my sticker book for a scratch 'n sniff sticker that smelled like a gas station. I know! I really am the product of a bygone era. Can you imagine slipping a kid a gas scented anything to sniff these days without a lawsuit immediately pending? It's a miracle we've all survived to tell these tales.

The reason I traded half my hard won sticker empire for that one singular treasure was not my proclivity for getting high and killing brain cells, which didn't manifest until several years later, but because my father, when I was very young, was a gas station mechanic and that smell reminded me of him. And it still does, even though he hasn't crawled under a car in years and was already a trucker by the time I negotiated that trade decades ago.

So much of memory, and almost all of my nostalgia stems from my nose. Walking down the halls of my alma mater today to pick up transcripts, the smell of coffee and stale cigarettes emanating from the student body, I was punched drunk with desire to return to Uni this fall. I don't recall enjoying University that much. I don't recall ever missing it. But this afternoon, when the subtle pulpy undertone of ruled paper mixed with heady aloof scent of highlighter pen provoked my senses it took every effort of self discipline to not run to the bookstore, buy a tabla rasa virginal notebook whose destiny would be decided when I flipped through the course catalogue and plopped my index finger decisively down on the page:  "Conceptualizing Past Futures: Theocracy and Globalization in Mesopotamia". Sign me up, I want to stay here, where there's always someone in the room who knows all the answers.

Instead I go back into the asphalt, exhaust choked world where no less than five photographers shake their heads sadly and tell me they can't help me with a photo for my work visa.