A Memory of Cloves (and some Anbesol)

In the area where I work there's always someone smoking cloves somewhere. I always smell it just as I'm walking out into the street after finishing lunch. It's a sweet smell that I really love. I never see the person or people who are smoking them but the scent just sort of lingers briefly and I breath it in nostalgically. I used to smoke clove cigarettes in college. Actually in high school under Julio's influence or was it M? She's the first person I ever met who smoked them which was just like her because she was always doing something that no one else I knew at the time ever did. So I guess we started smoking them because of her. Who can remember the sequence? It was her who I asked for the first time, where she bought them. Clove cigarettes were sweet and smooth with a sedative effect of varying degrees.The taste would numb the tip of the tongue just slightly. Cloves have a natural numbing agent and are recommended to rub in crushed form on the gums if you have a tooth ache. Kind of like nature's Orajel. That was actually how I first became acquainted with Ben. We became acquainted through Orajel, no Anbesol. To this day, I cannot think of Anbesol without thinking of Ben. But that's another story.

In High School we smoked Djarums. But by the time I was in college I had developed a sharp pain in my chest after a while and had to quit smoking them pretty much forever. So when I smell them now, I just sort luxuriate in the memories it evokes and of the Nat Sherman store just a block away where Julio and I used to buy boxes of fancy "Touch of Clove" cigarettes with gold colored filters.

I remember when I was girl and my mom used to have my brother and I do crafts all the time which she got from this book called "Wee Wisdom." One of them involved sticking cloves in an apple until it was completely covered. It was meant to place in a clothes closet or drawers to avoid staleness or moths or something. The smell was amazing but I can't ever remember ever having used the clove apples in drawers or anything. Maybe I should try that in my apartment.
: )

One More Look at You

Somewhere only we know

I don’t remember exactly how many times I’ve been back to Bard College after I dropped out in ’96. It used to be one of my deepest, most painful regrets. I think I kept going back to see if it hurt less each time I went. Bard is a strange and beautiful, improbable little place and I know now, why I had to leave, although I can’t quite verbalize it. I no longer feel there is a need to. This last visit though, may have been my last visit in true.

What’s weird for me about time, is that after a while, what ever I hold onto becomes internalized. I discovered a while ago that your memories of a place can never again be matched by the place itself, not quite and once you move on, you don’t need to hold as much anymore to the past. It’s just a sort of law of nature. There’s only so much you can hold on to at once in your mind and heart. In order to truly function and live you have to move forward, and be present in the now. Once you’ve made the decision to do that, old things, which no longer serve any purpose in your world are like dead weights that fall away. And all of a sudden, I’m riding without training wheels or without anyone holding me up. Sorry to throw that weird metaphor in but that’s how I understand it. It was like magic to me when I was a little girl, how my dad would try to teach me to ride a bike by first holding on to the back and pushing me for a while. At some point I would hear him and my brother yelling from behind me, “You’ve got it! You’re doing it! Keep on going!” or something like that. I would look back, see that my dad was not holding the bike any longer and stop and fall over just like that.

Fear had taken hold. I didn’t know how to get there by myself. Or did I? Many years later after we had left Brooklyn to move into a house in the Bronx, I taught myself how to ride one summer in our back yard. I was bored. There’s nothing like teaching yourself something you never thought you would be able to do. Nothing.

But getting back to memory, I realize as I get older that memory consists of holding on to a picture of physical spaces at a particular time in your life which will never come again. I have always believed that places have energy or a spirit.That energy or spirit combined with whatever time you spend there and the people with whom you form bonds with creates memories, which can never be replicated by simply visiting the place, because now there are only ghosts and projections. What you experienced now lives inside you. What lives inside you is yours alone.

There are times when I will go rifling through the attic of my mind for a deep wound, checking to see what progress it has made in healing and suddenly I notice, I don’t need to do that anymore, that it is very far from me, in another time, so fuzzy, it’s not worth squinting to focus on, because I’m to busy focusing on the now. And it’s so strange! Once upon a time it meant everything! It was so intense and dramatic, so desperate! And now it’s like a faded kiss, dissolving on someone elses' forehead in a drama played out in another world. I’m done. But I’m not finished.