- Do you smell what I remember? - Column by Jim Carroll

posted 06/19/2008
I'm sure there is a name for it, but I'm nobody's champion at research or back-story: what I have been thinking about on and off for the last few days is the way certain memories are tied to smells or music. The ones that are especially poignant are those that are purely personal.

Most people have memories tied to the scents of the holidays, whether it is a turkey roasting in the oven or a pine tree in the house, or kugles on the cooling rack in the kitchen. Likewise, most folks will have some association with universal songs like "Happy Birthday" or "Pomp and Circumstance." But as an example of a more personal sensory memory, I'm remembering the unique smell that was a combination of dust, insulation, and chocolate that permeated the attic of my cousin's house in Tacoma, because my uncle was a sales rep for a candy maker. I didn't know this at the time. I just knew that smell went with that place.

In a similar vein, the song "Hey Jude" seemed to come on the radio a lot as I was driving home from my high school girlfriend's house, and I would sing it along with Paul while still able to smell her perfume on my shirt. Almost 40 years later when "Hey Jude" comes on, I am once again behind the wheel of the Fairlane, heading home.

Somewhere in the process of thinking about this concept I had a HUGE nostalgic hit remembering 6th-grade skating parties. I don't know if you had them when and where you were in 6th grade, but I suspect that maybe you did. I have talked to just enough people to know that I am not the only one who has deeply-rooted, intensely emotional, sensory-bound memories of these strange cultural events.

My memories will be frozen in place in South King County, because that is where I grew up, and in time around 1964 because that is when I was in sixth grade. The details of your experience will be different, but hopefully something will trigger your own deeply-rooted, intensely emotional, sensory-bound memories of your own skating parties.

The first thing I remember about these parties was that the feelings were intense. I suspect this is at least in part because this age in general was so completely hormonal. Everything was SO important! The bus ride to the skating rink is lost in my memory banks. Too many bus rides with too many kids. But arriving at the rink is where it starts.

I remember standing in line to get in, and turning in my ticket at the door. As soon as you walked through the door, it was a different world. It hit all your senses in sequence. The first thing you noticed was that it was much darker than outside - dark enough that it took a minute for your eyes to adjust.

While your vision was adjusting to the lowered light, your ears were taking in the sounds of skates on the floor, and kids talking all at once, and good music suffusing the entire experience. The early sixties was a GREAT time to be just getting into music. The Beatles were new and the British Invasion was gearing up for a full assault. Motown was cranked up and churning out the hits. Surf music was bringing California to the northwest in a good way. (Later, it would come and make our houses unaffordable). But for now, Little Surfer Girl and that fine 409 were awesome.

If you were there, just hearing the titles will "spin the wax" in your head again: She Loves You, Where did our Love Go?, Oh Pretty Woman, I Get Around, My Guy, Love Me Do, Under the Boardwalk, Glad all Over, Dancing in the Street, A World Without Love, Have I the Right, Walk on By, House of the Rising Sun, Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying, Dawn Go Away, Baby I Need Your Lovin, You Really Got Me, Louie Louie, Needles and Pins... 1964 – when some of the best music of the century was written.

You took off your shoes and stood in line at the counter to get your skates. This was a dangerous time for toes, as some of your friends already had their skates on and their favorite thing to do was to roll up to you and say "Hi". This usually resulted in them either stumbling and crashing into you or the person next to you, or better yet, to using your stocking-covered pinkie as a wheel chock. Ouch!

The teenager behind the counter would take your shoes and ask your size and bring you a pair of skates which he thumped down hard on the counter and then he rolled off to the next kid waving shoes. Grabbing your skates you hoped that you got a "good pair", because they always had a few that were somehow more classy – whether they had different colored leather, or maybe because they didn't have a big rubber pencil eraser of a stopper on them, or sometimes just because they had laces that matched.

You would dash off to a bench against a half-wall and stuff your feet in as fast as you could. Sometimes you got the ones that didn't seem to have any footbed in them, and you could feel the bolt heads that kept the wheels in place. You knew your feet would be sore before the evening was over, but you were so anxious to get rolling it just didn't matter.

While all this was going on, your sense of smell was being bombarded by a completely unique smell that is peculiar to skating rinks and maybe a few bowling alleys. The predominant odor, at least near the skate counter, is whatever that spray is they shoot into the skates to "sanitize" them. As if a kid cared. That scent was mixed with the smell of popcorn and candy and spilled soda and the slightly musty odor of the indoor/outdoor carpet that covered the floor. But even that doesn't include all the subtleties of fragrance. Back then the girls used lots of hairspray, and that was part of it, too. Fruit Stripe gum was big, and some of the girls wore perfume. All in all, it was a pretty heady brew.

Speaking of heady brew, this was one of the first environments in which boys and girls began to practice their "evening interactions." We were interested in girls by this age, but we still hadn't done much of anything about it. School was not a place for it yet. School was still about being in the "smart purple group" of the SRA reading program, where they took away the numbers and replaced the "levels" with colors, as if we were too stupid to figure out who was "smart" and who "wasn't."

It was about sports at recess whether it was 4-square or work-up softball, or tetherball, or any one of the fads that rolled through, including marbles, and Duncan yo-yos. There were also important trauma-inducing stunts on the playground equipment including the high-altitude swing-ejection, leg spins on the horizontal bars, king-of-the-log fights, and base-tag with base at the top of the jungle gym. In fourth grade I had discovered that the worst way to set the record for leaping out to the farthest rung you could reach on the monkey bars from the top step was to knock yourself out cold by hitting your head on the third one on the way.

There was a lot of talk about girls among the boys, and maybe about the boys among the girls - I wouldn't know. But other than a lot of talk about who was "going out with" who, when in fact nobody went anywhere, and some pretty inane phone calls that focused largely on who was going to hang up first, we mostly didn't have a clue.

As a sidebar to these initial interactions, I should admit that in 7th grade I got into a "fast group" of kids. We had parties in each others' parents' garages where we sat around and made out in the dark to music, including one variant where we shamelessly changed partners each time the record changed. "Kissing Swingers!" Who knew? Certainly not our parents. At least that's what we thought. But it was heady and wonderful and there is music that will always be tied to mysteries and sensations first discovered in Bryan McCourt's garage. But don't get carried away here. This was 1965, we were 13, and we were just kissing. Kissing like our LIVES were at stake, but just kissing.

Back at the skating rink in 6th grade in the spring of 1964 we were still a bit in awe of girls. We didn't know quite what to do. One of the things we did know how to do was show off, and skating parties allowed many opportunities for that. Cast your mind back and remember how it was: You get your skates on and stand up on the carpet and scoot your feet back and forth to check out what kind of wheels you got. Hopefully they were the smooth ones, and not the ones that rumbled like a shopping cart with a cherry pit embedded in the tire.

You found your best friends and all of you tried to talk the loudest and the fastest to make sure your other friend knew he had to hurry up and tie his skates because it was time to GO, man! Thank goodness it was an "All Skate," so you and a couple of your buddies tottered over to the half-wall that edged the rink. Not everyone was out there yet, so you clattered your way around the corner and out onto the slippery blue floor. This floor always had one thing going for it that you could bet on every time. It was hard. But you and your buddies were pretty natural little athletes, and this wasn't your first skate, so it wasn't long before you were tearing around the circle, weaving in and out of the less-capable, and yelling back and forth at each other.

It was a badge of courage to get told to slow down by the guy with the whistle in his mouth. You remember that guy? The one who was skating backwards and looking so incredibly cool? He could go faster backwards than you could hope to go forwards, and he was SMOOTH! But he was old enough he was no threat. He had to be at least 16.

Pretty soon we started to notice groups of girls skating together. Of course they were slower than us, because they were holding hands in a line and talking and laughing. They were trying VERY hard not to let us see that they were looking at us. Of course, we were trying to be cool and impressive by skating too fast and too close as we sailed by them. Typically one of us would shove or trip another of us into the girls without thought of injury or consequence, just to be able to get a reaction. If you crashed into them, at least you got to touch girls. As much as we talked about it, none of us had much girl-touching in our resumés, and we were a bit clumsy as to how to go about it.

By the time everyone was on the floor, it was time to do the Hokey-Pokey. As you remember, the Hokey-Pokey is the dumbest dance to the dumbest music of all time. But we loved it anyway. We all got in a circle and tried to be terribly competent and cool as we "put things in" and "put things out." "Shaking things all about" was a great chance to get attention by being REALLY good at shaking things, or by falling down and typically taking at least one person down with you. It was stupid and fun and it lasted too long and it was over too soon. It may not even be close to being "what it's all about," but at the skating rink, it's certainly ONE of the things it's all about. One of the other things it was all about was racing!

1964 was back in the days before lawyers roamed the land in stupefying numbers, and the cool skater dude actually put out orange cones and let us race each other in groups divided by age and gender. It was awesome! I was pretty fast, so I was usually one of the guys locked in a death battle with another one or two of my friends. We dragged our fingers on the ground as we sailed around the corners, skates chattering at the edge of traction and wheel bearings revealing their true nature. We never thought about it much, but good skates probably counted for as much as good skating. We swung our arms like speed skaters and battled it out for three laps, hoping to win the candy bar and a special look from MaryAnn or Renee. I think all year we only broke one arm. Concussions didn't really count unless you puked. Road rash was inevitable and expected. There's just nothing like the sound of skin squealing on a polished floor!

After the races they invariably went back to "All Skate," but we knew what was coming. "Couples Only"! The holy grail of 6th-grade skating parties: The chance to talk to and touch a girl without the compelling urge to shout about "cooties" and run off. We had to face and stare down our fear in obeisance to the hormones that would not be denied! One of my buddies asked "Are you going to ask her?" To which I doubtless replied "I dunno – stop bugging me about it," or something along those lines.

Here I have to make an embarrassing admission: I don't remember who "her" was. Though tacky, it's not surprising, really. Because at this time in my life, it wasn't really about "her." That would come later. At 12 and paralyzed by equal parts of fear and another set of sensations that we didn't have names for yet, I really wasn't thinking about her. Except in a way that paradoxically involved being unable to think about anything BUT her, or more precisely, her reaction to me. Of course all this self-analysis only plays in retrospect. At the time all I knew was that the lights were dimming, the big sign on the wall had just changed, and the illuminated letters that had read "All Skate" just a moment ago had gone dark. Suddenly, the "Couples Only" letters lit up, and the time had come.

We were trying not to look at each other, while carefully noting every move and gesture the other was making. It might have been Renee, or it might have been Jo Sullivan, who introduced me to another planet by parting her lips during a kiss in Bryan McCourt's garage the next year. But I really don't remember. Let's say it was Jo. What I DO remember, and will never forget, is that the song that came on was "Anyone Who Had a Heart" by Burt Bacharach, sung by the incomparable Dionne Warwick. At this age, bobbing in a cauldron of hormones and emotions that only those on the edge of pubescence can feel, this song had the power to make me cry WITHOUT mood lighting, swirling lights, and the presence of a girl who might very soon be holding my hand. I remember feeling completely disconnected from myself. People who have had near-death experiences talk about having the sensation of looking down upon themself as if from a height. Well, there I was, moving through a crowd of kids toward Jo, and seeing her seeing me coming.

It was one of the crowning victories of my childhood, mustering the effort it took to manage my soon-to-be-changing voice, and the trip-hammer of little boy-heart in my chest, and actually remembering to smile as I got out the words "Wanna skate?" without fainting or running away or pushing her down or something equally stupid. I will always remember my relief at her kindness as she smiled and said "OK" and grabbed my hand and led me out onto the floor. The next two and a half minutes as Dionne told this girl everything I felt for her - or more accurately, everything I wanted to feel for SOMEONE – was completely dreamlike. I can't remember much of it, except how amazing her hand felt, and that insane tenor sax solo. Dionne had been there, I could tell. So had the Beatles. "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" suddenly had meaning. We weren't ready for lips or mouths or heaven-forbid anything more serious. Not yet. For now this was enough, and it was mysterious and wonderful and the swirling brain chemistry and unused synapses that would begin to create a new adult were crackling and popping and flooding the pleasure centers with the intimation of new possibilities. It was the first crack in the chrysalis of childhood, and it was very good. Very good indeed.

The song ended. The sign changed. Jo's hand slipped from mine and she turned to find her friends and I did the same. Something huge had just happened, and yet already it had taken on an air of unreality – as if she and I had slipped through some wrinkle in space and time and been somewhere other than the rowdy place these noisy silly kids now occupied. Soon enough, I let it slip from the center stage of my mind and became another rowdy, noisy, silly kid again. It felt safe and easy and familiar. But in that two and a half minutes, something inside me had changed forever. It was just there in the wings, waiting for another turn on stage, still frightening, but now also exciting and potentially much more important than everything that had gone before.

Just then Stephen said something I couldn't hear, but it made everyone around him burst into laughter, including Lonnie. The really good part was that Lonnie had a mouthful of cherry coke at the time, and just couldn't hang onto it. He sprayed the entire group as he exploded in laughter and bent-double choking. Danny pushed him the rest of the way down because Lonnie had turned his white t-shirt into a mottled, sticky canvas of abstract pop-art. Dave and Mike grabbed Danny to prevent a fight, but Lonnie was helpless on the floor anyway. Stephen laughed so hard he fell down, dragging Mike and then Dave on top of him. The lights came up and the music stopped and we crawled to the benches to remove our skates. It was over.

Walking along on my no-longer-rolling feet I carried my skates to the counter and waited for my shoes. The strange sensation of walking on an earth that no longer rolled was a bit of a letdown as I headed toward the bus. Lonnie and Stephen were walking with their arms around each other's shoulders, and I took my place as third in the row, walking in the strange formation we picked up somewhere and sometime we could no longer remember. Dave took up a spot on the opposite end of the line. We broke up only to board the bus as the last group. The back seat had been left open for us by kids who knew it was ours. I had another look into that frightening, exciting future as Jo smiled at me as I walked past her seat, then I wedged myself into the back between the bony hips of my buddies, yelling and generally being a rowdy kid. But I kept stealing glances at Jo and a very different future every now and then, all the way home.

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Jim and his wife Hollie Swanson are native northwesterners. They moved here last year from Whidbey Island to take new positions as island caretakers on Brown (Friday) Island. They are enjoying life on a "real" island and have been exploring the San Juans in their little tug "Shulala." Comments can be sent to Jim at shu@sanjuanislander.com.