Smells

Today has been full of smells.

• JT this morning, still smelling like Johnson and Johnson Baby shampoo from last night.
• The super minty smell of the pre-brushing rinse.
• My Docs that smell like, well, my stinky feet.
• Al John's pizza during the ride home. Good NY style pizza just waiting to be folded and bit into.
• JT's fart overtaking the smell of the pizza.
• Fresh hay when I rolled down the windows.
• Milk breath when JT attempted to lick my lips.
• Winston's corn chip paws.

It's almost eleven o'clock and I should already be on my way to bed but it's potluck day tomorrow and that, of course, means I be bringing the sausage balls. Myself, I can't stand to eat them anymore but I love it that people love them. So I just got back from the store. Yes, a 30 minute round trip for a roll of sausage and a bag of cheese. I happen to drive a very classy and very dusty 1992 Camry. The 3 good things about this car are its super cheap insurance, super high gas mileage and nobody wants to steal it. I wonder why I even bother stopping to lock the doors. Oh, it's not as easy as a click of the remote, people. This is 1992. Low end model. I have to grunt while reaching over and back to lock or unlock a door. Same thing with the windows. It's all in the arms, baby. Cruise control? Forget about it - I'm in control of the cruising. The radio leaves something to be desired. The buttons your normally push to change the channels is missing. All it shows is the little green LED lights that would light up the display panel. I have to use a pen, centered carefully, to push in one of six holes to change the radio. I thought I was doing good because I still had the tuner button. Last week that started coming off and it's dangling like a loose tooth. And just like I would be tempted to pull off a scab that's not quite ready or to keep wiggling that tooth back and forth, I'm tempted to pull the cover right off and be done with it. The prize of all this is the tape player. And that's the smell that I can't get out of my head. Remember when you'd open a brand new tape? There was less plastic back in the days but the cassette case had a particular smell. Can you smell it just thinking about it? I pulled out my tape that I hadn't listened to in about 10 years. Figures On A Beach is the group and once I get the sausage balls mixed, rolled and in the oven I'm going to google them to find out what happened to them. But there was something about the smell of the insert, the accordian page unfolding, revealing the lyrics to all 10 songs written in nearly unreadable print. But the smell of that plastic case brought me back 20 years. Even though I didn't remember all of the words, I wanted to keep driving and singing until I listened to the whole thing. I did that a lot when I was younger - just drove and drove so I could sing. I didn't drive anywhere in particular but I knew about 5 routes around Rochester that would take me from one side of the city to the other. I could drive a few of those with my eyes closed. Back to 2006. I have more of that tape to listen to and sausage waiting to be balled.