Roses

I have never had an acute sense of smell. I only realized this in recent years, after marrying a man with a nose that detects and deciphers nuanced scents with a skill far beyond mine.

Husband can smell rotting food in the fridge long before I discover it by spotting the seepage from something that is devolving into a liquid morass. He has the keen ability to season the beans to an exquisite and delectable flavor, because he can connect the smells of the seasonings with the flavors. Me? I shake in some hickory smoke salt and call it good. Husband claims to be able to tell when whales are off the Pacific Coast, because he says they poof out a certain halitosis that drifts onto land, and his nose picks it up. Like as not, if you stand by him at a coastal viewpoint when he’s smelling whale breath, you’re sure to spot at least one of the leviathans surfacing out there. Husband not only smells these things, he can find the words to describe a smell—tangy, sweet, spicy, sharp, and so on—along with relating his detailed memories to accompany the scents.

Don’t get me wrong; I do have a sense of smell. I love the scents of sandalwood, of cedar wood, of lilacs in the spring, of bread baking, of milky-sweet baby skin, of spicy coconut curry, of my dad’s Old Spice cologne from my childhood, of the chempaka flowers on the tall tree I used to climb by the fork in the path between our house and the mission hospital in Malaysia. But my sense of smell lives only in the moment, not particularly in connection with memories triggered.

Except for roses.

My earliest memories of roses are of my mom trying to coax blooms out of her rosebushes set into the hard red dirt of Thailand. Somewhere long before me, probably in California where they grow well, Mama’s first love had been roses. She was bound and determined to have her own roses in Thailand as well. And when Mama was bound and determined, she generally got what she wanted.

My other early memory of roses—probably tied to my mom’s dedication to her Thai rosebushes—comes from my grandma’s house in La Puente, half an hour’s drive from downtown Los Angeles. Grandma’s driveway was lined with roses of every hue, but I don’t remember going out and sniffing at them. My more acute memory of roses at Grandma’s is of the rose perfume perched on the Pepto-pink sink in the bathroom of her old California bungalow.  I remember patting her perfume on my neck as a child, and coming out of the bathroom reeking. It left a rather unpleasant, cloying smell, and I quickly disliked the way it clung and seemingly clotted in my nose as I sat with my brother watching the morning cartoons on the TV. Fake flowery perfume, I have realized, is best avoided.

As I ponder it, I’m not sure if it’s the scent of roses that I remember the most, or the rose blooms themselves. Although I’ve received bouquets of roses through the years, I enjoyed how they looked more than how they smelled. For one thing, florist’s roses don’t effervesce like roses should. Perhaps in seeking to create the longer stem and more perfect shape and color, the horticulturists genetically engineered the scent right out of them. And so it is that my memories of scent have tended to dissipate as the rose fades.

I don’t remember smelling roses again until about a dozen years ago in Washington state. Husband and I had a route—“the loop,” we called it—that we’d take on our walks from home. We’d head out the front door, round the corner onto Davis Street, and climb the hill to the stop sign. Right there on the corner was an unremarkable house, one of those little ones with wood siding, almost too small to live in, with a big huge shade tree rising up out of a weedy yard. And roses along the sidewalk. 

Because the sidewalk came up alongside the retaining wall on Davis Street, those roses were just about at hip level as we climbed the hill.  They were enticing, scent unstrained by meddling horticulturists, for sure. As long as they were blooming, spring to fall, we stopped to sniff them. Husband and I would hopscotch each other along the wall, sniffing blooms side by side and remarking on the variety of scents. He would call me to sniff a particular one, and I’d accuse him of already breathing in all the scent and leaving none for me. Or I’d remark, “I like this one better,” and call him over to sample the one I’d discovered.

It was a ritual of sorts, smelling the roses at the house on the corner of Davis and 12^th Street, a nod to the folk wisdom that one should “stop and smell the roses.” And indeed, we should. There is something about the scent of a rose that fills the soul, a sweet and gracious calm, a reminder that just being in a beautiful way in this world, whether someone notices you or not, is a good thing.

So when my mom turned 90 years old last month--my sweet mama who also lives in the moment and doesn’t connect with her memories anymore, but who enjoys a gracious conversation with you if you stop by to have one--I thought of roses for her birthday reception. Pink roses.

I went to see the best baker in town with a Pinterest picture saved on my phone and asked, “Can you make these cupcakes with pink roses on them?” 

The baker looked at the picture and said, “Yes. But that is fondant icing and it will cost you about 12 dollars a cupcake, because we have to roll it out and shape each rose by hand.”  She noted the shock on my face as I pondered the cost of 75 cupcakes at $12 apiece. “We can do something different that will be beautiful but won’t cost as much,” she said. She went off into baker-vocabulary, describing how it could be done. As that is not my language, I won’t try to reproduce the description. But I arrived on Friday to pick up the cupcakes with the pink roses on them, and they were lovely.

And the rest of the decorations? A large pink rose bouquet and pink rose corsage, of course. Because at 90, with memories that waft in and out of your ability to snatch them back for a moment, you still are going to be in love with your first love.

Superstition

Offerings set out at the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts. Note the idols, food and joss sticks.
(photo from here)

Superstition: a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation.

Superstition lurked everywhere when I was a child. There were trees in which spirits were believed to live; you would see a red or yellow ribbon tied around the trunk and a little shrine placed at the base of the tree. The shrine displayed a few pieces of fruit, along with joss sticks stuck in a sand-filled container, aromatic smoke curling up from them.

If you lived where I grew up and shared the beliefs of most of the population, you wanted to keep the spirits happy with you--outwit them if you were clever, or at very least appease them. There were also fortune tellers and diviners to help you with this. The diviner could pick an auspicious day for your wedding, or a lucky day to open your new shophouse. Or he could write special words on a piece of paper that you could keep nearby to ward off evil. A priest or monk would sing and clash small cymbals together over the casket of your loved one before closing the casket, to be sure the evil spirits were warned away and didn’t follow your dead family member into the afterlife. In Thailand, pall-bearers would dodge down a narrow street and then race around another corner while carrying a coffin, trying to confuse any evil spirits who might be trying to hitch a ride and torment the loved one in the afterlife.

In Malaysia, where I lived during my elementary and high school years, the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts came around once a year. During this time the spirits of the dead were believed to emerge from the lower realms. People tended the graves of their ancestors during this time, tidying up weeds and debris, and placing offerings on the graves. Relatives performed rituals to appease the hungry ghosts and to ensure peace for their deceased ancestors in the afterlife. If you were more affluent, you’d purchase small paper representations of material goods from the real world—golden Mercedes cars, elaborate Chinese-style houses, fine clothes, ...and servants to go with them all—and then burn the paper models so that they could travel via the rising smoke into the spirit world. Thus your ancestors would be well-supplied and comfortable for their activities and leisure in the afterlife.

Although some practitioners will shudder at this, my dad employed the local superstitions at times in his medical practice. I remember him telling the story of his psychoneurotic patient who came to see him frequently in Malaysia. Medical examination didn't uncover any reason for her complaints. One day he told her, "Auntie, today is TUESDAY! You are wearing GREEN! You should NEVER wear green on a Tuesday. Please change that practice immediately, and you will feel better." When Auntie came back for her next visit, she reported that she was feeling much better now that she was avoiding wearing green clothing on Tuesdays.

Another time, my dad told us, a man came to see him and said that the diviner had told him that he would die on such-and-such a date. He was worrying about it. My dad examined the man, and there was nothing wrong with him.  But on the appointed date the man went home, had a last meal with his family, and then laid down and died. "You hear about living by faith," my dad remarked. "This man died by faith." Or superstition. There are some similarities between the two, if you think about it.

Superstition.

We weren’t into it, because after all we were Christian missionaries. So our mission hospital compound was free of any superstition. Except, it wasn’t. In our Saturday afternoon wanderings on weekends, we missionary kids found charms and amulets hidden in the open-air hospital laundry, brought in by workers who either were not Christians, or in typical southeast Asian eclecticism were hanging onto their indigenous beliefs along with their newly-acquired Christianity. They had all their bases covered, right? Guardian angels watching them, amulets and charms to protect their work area. Unfortunately we kids helped ourselves to the items, throwing out the amulets and ripping up the charm papers and scattering the pieces around. I'm embarrassed to remember that I saw our actions as a missionary activity, and giggled at the idea that people would be frightened that the evil spirits had ripped up the charm papers. Yep, we were little missionaries. No idol worship allowed on our compound. But we never told our parents.

While growing up, I also heard of superstitious beliefs from the western world and thought they were just as strange: don’t open an umbrella in a house, don’t go out on Friday the 13^th lest harm befall you; watch out if a black cat crosses your path, cross your fingers for good luck, and don’t break any mirrors. These were silly. People who believed them were silly. People who took action just to be on the safe side of them were to be pitied.

Superstition. 

To be clear, there were some things that were not superstition. We saw these things with our own eyes. I really did see people go into trances and not feel pain as they walked on red-hot coals. Our gardener put skewers through his cheeks at a Hindu festival to fulfill a vow to the god, and did not develop scars due to the protections of the devil. Evil spirits really did possess people and do them harm. These things were around us, and I still do not take them lightly. After attending just one firewalking festival as a young teenager and literally feeling the evil in the air around me, I promised myself to never go again. And I didn’t. And I won't. Evil is real. There are supernatural phenomena.

Superstition.

There were some other ideas that did fit into my belief community, ideas that arise because people are susceptible to superstition when they don’t think carefully and deeply. I remember going with a schoolmate named Bradley to the Christmas banquet my freshman year in high school and being quite relieved when we found something to talk about: whether or not the food tasted better if you said the blessing before eating. (Yep, I argued that it did. I was 14 years old and, well… there you go.) Then there was the time that my friend Betsy dropped her needle while doing embroidery on a Sabbath afternoon, couldn’t find it, and busted out with a lament that God was punishing her for not keeping the Sabbath. I was taken aback, never having heard that God had set a prohibition on embroidery on Sabbath. And then there was the superstition held by some in my community that when you enter a movie theater your guardian angels must wait at the door because they won’t go in to such a place where evil abounds. To be fair, after visiting an old theater in Tombstone, Arizona and hearing what went on in wild west theaters of the 1800s, I can see how that idea came to be, in the early days of my church. Were I a guardian angel, I would've waited outside, too.

As I think about it, I do believe that we humans attribute far more to supernatural causes, than actually are caused by the supernatural. Coming from a Christian belief system, I also believe what the apostle Paul said: “In all things God works for good.” (Rom. 8:28)  Much of what happens, I think, can be attributed to natural causes of some sort or another. However, I believe good outcomes can emerge from just about any occurrence, and that is caused by God’s good work in our lives. I believe in miracles, but I don’t think they are in any way ensured by anything we do. (Faith healers, in my opinion, should receive our focused suspicion.) We can't make miracles happen; they seem to occur with no consistent rationale. But we are capable of finding good in circumstances,. We are also capable of manipulating circumstances for evil. We have some agency in life, perhaps more than is assumed by those who are superstitious. That's where I have gotten to thus far in working out my own perspective.

Superstition.

It's pretty much not for me, I tell myself. I travel the California freeways with defiance on Friday the 13^th. I step on cracks in sidewalks. I open my umbrella in the house to let it dry out after I’ve been in the rain. I don’t cross my fingers to increase the chances of good luck. I don’t read horoscopes, nor do I have any idea what my zodiac sign says about me. If a movie review is good and it looks like I will benefit from the story, I’ll go see it in a theater. I bow my head before I eat ... but it’s an act of gratitude to God, not an incantation of any sort. I’ve had a couple of black cats and they were (described in alphabetical order of their names) personality disordered, and sweet and funny. I don't believe in praying before sports games, unless it's just for the grace to play with good sportsmanship. I don't believe that dead people return as ghosts.

And I can’t remember breaking any mirrors. If I did, I'd make a point to throw the shards in the garbage can and get on with my day, because superstition can really slow a girl down.

A Roadkill Christmas

The family gathers around in wonder

I knew something was unusual about this man when he sent me tarnished brass hearts and a baby bootie in the mail.  A friend had set us up to write to each other sixteen years ago, saying, “You’d be good friends if nothing else.” Well, we were building that friendship, but there were things I just didn’t understand about him… like a package of odd, scuffed-up items in the mail.

Turns out my husband is into roadkill.

Not roadkill like dead animals. The term “roadkill” has, long before I came on the scene, referred to items he finds when out running. In his funny man-way, sending me things he found discarded along the road was kind of like your happy dog that comes trotting in the door with a chewed up shoe in his mouth, wagging his tail as if to say, “Hey, look what I found! I thought of you!”

Through the years since I opened the packages with the brass hearts and baby bootie, many things have gotten dragged home to show me before being discarded properly—most of them—in the trash bin. A few things are deemed important enough to save. Or washed and put into the charity box to take to our church’s community services center. Husband is the king of roadkill on our morning walks, suddenly veering off to pick up some shiny object or other along the roadsides, closely inspecting various unusual items, and keeping his eye peeled for things discarded in the bushes by Graffiti Gulch, our favorite dirt road right here in the suburbs an hour outside Los Angeles.

A couple of years ago while out on our morning walk we hatched up an idea for challenging our adult kids for the next Christmas. I confess, it came from me in response to a less-than-stellar white elephant exchange a few days before. Instead of the white elephant exchange as the family grows ever larger, I suggested with no seriousness whatsoever, how about a roadkill exchange? Ours is a family that “notices things,” unlike my family of origin. What if we all collected our roadkill and then exchanged boxes of it at Christmas and remarked upon each other’s discoveries? Wouldn’t that be a kick? 

Well, Husband thought it to be a grand idea, and we launched it with the rest of the family.  I suppose you’d have to know our family to understand the excitement, brief though it might be, in planning a Roadkill Christmas.

And so, for Christmas 2014, the big roadkill giveaway took place. The grandkids watched to see who would pick which box (their presents were more conventional). My contribution was pretty unremarkable—pennies, a baby jacket, a packet of baseball cards, a container of pogs.  I don’t recall who chose my box from the stack of wrapped things. But there remained the pièce de résistance:  Husband’s huge box of roadkill. 

Our adult kids eyed it suspiciously. And it was the intrepid son who decided to risk his dad’s contribution. 

Ah, the surprises in that box of roadkill! Have I mentioned that this is a man who Notices Things? The box held golf balls, a couple of baseballs, a wire basket, a jacket (washed), a police officer head from a ceramic cookie jar—who MAKES these?--, a pink crown, an empty medical marijuana bottle or two, lots of coins, a $5 bill, a stack of CDs of Indian music not good enough to be used by Bollywood, a Hannah Montana plastic handheld microphone, and an old amplifier. We were all remarking on these items, laughter punctuating the air as jokes flew and each new item emerged. I was watching to see if Son was disappointed or pleased. At very least, he was intrigued. He has a mind like his father's.

And then Husband announced, “Wait. There’s one more thing.” He stepped outside the front door and brought back in the Thing That Could Not Be Wrapped,  [Drumroll, please]: a chainsaw.  

Seriously, who discards a perfectly good, small chainsaw along Graffiti Gulch? But someone had. It had lain there for several days, so Husband ascertained that someone was not coming back to reclaim it. Son was seriously impressed, and everyone else obligingly piled on with expressions of envy.

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” 

Yep. A Roadkill Christmas reminded us of that. And sometimes the treasure is simply the intrigue of what gets found, and the satisfaction of knowing that our world is a little tidier place.