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1 june 2001

maybe narnia was behind the towels

It is a rainy and beautiful morning today. Time for some remembering.

I was a curious kid. Most of the time, this curiosity didn't threaten mine or others' welfare. I was left with a few cuts and bruises, but otherwise made it here relatively unscathed.

Relatively would be the operative word.

To a kid, Gramma Holzer's house was a bonanza o' stuff. It still is, though she has purged much of the attic and given items to kids and grandkids. Gramma definitely has pack-rat tendencies, though, which made each visit to her home a regular treasure hunt. With any of twenty-six grandkid pirates scrounging around, she practiced a remarkable amount of patience with our "discoveries". From old ceramic lotion jars to exotic suitcases that once carried our aunts' stuff to Catholic girls' school, we were regular archaeologists.

I've read several accounts that smell is the sense most connected to memory. I guess that's why Kelli and I remember the medicine closet so well. Not cabinet--I said "closet". You collect a lot of remedies when you're raising seven kids in rural Indiana.

Gramma had most of them. It's still a liniment museum.

Getting cut or bit or scraped was an adventure at Gramma's house. Most especially, this was because I was in the last of the great Mercurachrome generation. If you don't know of or remember this liquid, think orange stuff. Burning orange stuff, applied with a whopper of a Q-Tip. Weeks after the cut was healed, you remained orange. You walked around like the great martyr to adventure that you were, wearing the orange heart of combat on your knee.

Damn, that stuff hurt.

Calamine lotion was also an ointment of choice, but not usually for me. You could usually find any one of my cousins covered in the stuff, though. Of all of the everyday things I am allergic to, I am not allergic to poison ivy. Or oak. Or sumac. Calamine wasn't quite as heroic as the orange stuff, but nonetheless conjured images of kid, impenetrable thicket, and "yay!". Full limb coverage was pretty cool. Full body coverage was, like, oooooooh ....

Our collective parents would have preferred that we stayed indoors at Gramma's house. They were a lot more conservative about digging in the liniment museum than we were, because they knew (and cared) that the expiration date had passed sometime during Eisenhower's presidency. We were kids, though, and Gramma's closet smelled like you did something cool. From the glass-jarred Tiger Balm, to Grampa's mystery glop, to metal-encased Band-Aids that opened with the little red string; it was a treasure trove. We didn't care if anything actually worked. We just wanted to smell like mentholating action figures.

Looking back on it now, I suppose our parents were justifiably terrified. Turns out that most of that stuff, with time, just becomes ineffective instead of poisonous. Maybe we all cut a break genetically. Maybe we just got lucky. But somehow, we all made it. And we are still intrigued by that closet. With a couple of pharmacist cousins, that's saying a lot.

I believe in initiations and rites of passage. My traffic-cone-colored knees were good landmarks.