I Love the Smell of Pine-Sol in the Morning!

Monday, October 27, 2008
Meters: 5,316
Time: 25;00
Strokes per minute: 2:20-2:21
Total Meters Rowed: 80,175

It’s amazing how a smell can bring back such specific memories, return you to such an exact moment in your life, isn’t it? One that you suddenly remember that you hadn’t forgot. Proust talked of that in “Rememberance of Things Past,” didn’t he?

“When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory.”

Of course he did.

And yes, dearest blog reader, you have suddenly remembered that you hadn’t forgot that I am absolutely and completely full of sh–, aren’t I? Like ther is any chanfce I would just sort of, you know, know that quote.

I know it only because I came across it completely and utterly BY ACCIDENT while trolling the Internet during the research for “My Father’s Heart,” trying to find some connections between the Golden Oldies you hear on the radio and the powerful “drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory,” as Proust wrote, that these old songs can conjur.

Oh, my goodness, I canNOT believe I almost used the quote in the book. I actually had something very nearly like that in a not-so-early version of the manuscript. That I saved myself from myself was the only intelligent thing I did anywhere near the vicinity of Monsieur Proust!

That said.

I cleaned the garage over the weekend, hosing it down and scrubbing the floor with Pine-Sol. And today, for the full 25 minutes of my 5,316-meter workout I was transported back to (wait till you hear this, Marcel old boy!) the bathroom on the first floor on the right side of the Boys’ Dorm at St. Mary’s Boarding School in St. Mary’s, Alaska, where I taught English, Reading, Drama and P.E. for two years in the mid-’70′s while a member of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.

Wait, Monsieur, it’s more specific than that. (A Pine-Sol-washed cement floor holds its memories well, apparently.) I am brand new to the school, still in the very first flower of the maginficence that is me for having volunteered to teach at this Eskimo-Indian boarding school, to have joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, to have gone off not just to see the world but to do nothing less than save it. And I have probably been there a day at the most, the school itself not to open for another week, and I am in that boys’ bathroom, mop in hand, swabbing the deck, unbelievably pleased with myself and just as unbelievably happy to be exactly where I was.

That was my workout today. Maybe that explains why — with no effort at all, none whatsoever — I was able to hold that 2:20-2:21 pace, a good couple of seconds faster than usual, the entire time. Save the word, indeed!