Blog @ Work

Concerts, leap and smells

"30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  [13+]
Fun Fact Friday! On this day in 1973, musician Lou Reed was bitten on his rear end by a fan during a concert in Buffalo, NY....the male fan was ejected from the show. Do you have any fun or interesting concert stories involving bands you've seen that you'd like to share with us? Alternately, you can share any fun concert story you've heard if you don't have one from experience.

I’ve only been to a few pop concerts in my life. I've seen mostly jazz and classical concerts.

I’ve seen Genesis and Fleetwood Mac in the eighties. And I’ve been to a concert of The Dubliners and Joe Jackson in the nineties, I think. It was great, but too long ago to remember anything apart from them being great concerts and me very much enjoying them.

"In late February, frogs, salamanders, and other amphibians responding to early warm temperatures began migrating from their winter hideouts to vernal pools to begin the spring mating season. Some of the animals were chaperoned to safety by concerned volunteers across trafficked streets late at night in New York and other Northeastern states. Write an essay about a time in your life when you made a big decision or took a leap. Did someone arrive to accompany you or were you on your own? Was your emotional journey guided by a crossing guard who brought you to safety?" ~ Writers Digest(BCoFs)

To answer these questions I think I will use something I wrote last month. "Learning curve of a basket case"  [E]. I took a giant leap years ago, and was very much on my own without a crossing guard. The journey changed my life. Fortunately, I am in a very good place now!

Write your entry for today about a place that you have spent a considerable amount of time in--perhaps somewhere you lived or worked before--and whose smells are curiously linked with your recollection. Describe the emotions and events from that period that those smells conjure up, and the ways in which your memories may have been colored by your preference or distaste of those smells.(BC)

I am very bad with smells. That has something to do with me being a smoker. My nostrils are used to tobacco smell, it spoils any recollection. I know from faint memory that I have had those experiences: you walk somewhere; smell something and suddenly there is this memory of something out of your past. Smells triggers memory. Usually it is only a whiff, only a short memory and it apparently didn’t stick because I can’t write what they are. I just don’t know.

But wait: there is one childhood memory. A smell I cannot describe other than that I associate it with Indo-European people. It is a smell with a mixture of Indonesian food and spices, cinnamon and dust. I first smelled it when I was a child visiting a friend of my grandmother’s. She lived in a house up North. It had this distinctive smell that I now associate with Indo people. I sometimes have smelled it again walking at the annual Indonesian fair. It brings back fond memories of my Indo family of my mother’s side. A loving family, a very safe environment. Whenever I smell that particular smell I feel at home.