A few days ago, I went through a stack of back issues of The New Yorker, pulling out articles I wanted to read and tossing the rest of the issue (this is really the only way to deal with the relentless arrival of that magazine; sometimes I feel like it breeds in my mailbox…). Somehow I’d missed David Owen’s essay from the January 25th issue, “The Dime Store Floor,” about he and his sister very deliberately visiting their childhood haunts to see if they still smelled the same: the building where their dentist’s office used to be, an art museum where they went on many field trips, the titular dime store (“which had once been flavored mainly by dust, plus a sort of comforting over-scent that was related to mildew in the same way that cognac is related to wine” and was now “dominated by scented candles”). Visiting his childhood home in the midst of a renovation by the new owners, he notes the many things that had been changed along with the startling number of things that had not: “Each surviving detail was a pushpin holding the past to its easel.” And along the way, he looks back on things that aren’t places he can simply drive to and drink in for comparison’s sake—the smells that got snarled in his mind and formed the actual seed of his memories.
The essay ends with Owen reflecting on the indelible associations of things like shampoos and deodorants, how the smell of someone’s hair in high school can be the baseline of what you find attractive for the rest of your life, and how if you realized that time would inevitably move a particular product off the market, “you could have bought a few bottles and placed them on a shelf somewhere, for later sampling and contemplation—once each spring, perhaps, or during the final moments of life.” He buys, accidentally-on purpose, his father’s brand of deodorant, and “was almost knocked over by what I can only describe as a physical memory of my father.”
Owen (whose books include one about going undercover as a high school student, and one about the invention of the Xerox machine) is wallowing in the kind of naked nostalgia that’s usually seen as embarrassing and indulgent, old or aging men lost in the fog of their pasts. But it’s really different than Garrison Keillor’s arrogant, half-imagined approach to “the good old days.” Owen isn’t apologizing for lavishing time and words on the specific content of his memories; his approach is both forensic and romantic, largely (if unconventionally) evidence-based. His directness is sort of unnerving, and feels entirely earned.
Without a subscription, The New Yorker’s website only lets you access an abstract of the essay, which sort of hilariously reduces all its sensitivity and depth to what must be an automated (or intern-generated) summary: “Writer recalls the fragrances of his paternal grandmother, known as Gaga…Writer recalls the smell of cigarette smoke and the parties his parents threw when he was a child…”