Somnambulist

Scrabble is not really a word game; it's a mathematical game played by weirdly obsessive people who do abusive things to the English language.  Also, as a biologist and a research professor studying climate change, I suffer from seasonal poetry allergies.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Syzygy

The stars blaze bright,

Unblurred by urban haze

That dimmed them, stole them --

A moment, a millennium ago --

From my childish gaze.

Viewed from this far-flung vantage

Deep in snow and silence

Orion stands undaunted,

The obsidian sky so timeless

That the dimmer details

Shine as lucid, as proud

As blue-white Rigel’s

Spectroscopic binary and Alpha Cygni variable primary.

Wide-eyed with wonder,

My own child looks, and points,

And asks about those fainter stars

Dangling from the constellation’s belt.

“Um, no,” I tell her. 

“That’s supposed to be his sword.”

Petrichor

My hands sink deep in loam,

Green-scented shoots exulting:

Live, live, live –

Waking from their fractal snowflake blanket

Rain-distilled and cleansed by sunlight.

Natural as wind,

As breath,

As birth,

As laughter.

Also natural as polio and damaging UV rays

And that spiny Amazonian fish, Vandellia cirrhosa.

Yeah.  That one.

Pentameter

I’ll wax iambic for five feet per line

And eulogize the symmetry of sound;

The assonance euphonious, labyrinthine;

The semblance of philosophy profound.

If onomatopoeia rings its chime

The tintinnabulation will be blithe,

The susurrus mellifluous, sublime,

The plink and chink and tinkle nimbly lithe.

And if a dactyl sets me widdershins,

Elision, anaptyxis let me cheat.

So anapest, clandestine, underpins

Nefarious trochee, erstwhile incomplete.

The sonnet’s lures snare logophilic nerds

Who wallow mathematically in words.

Luminescent

No matter how remote you are,

I’ll leave a light on --

A suffusing, fierce, embracing glow

That banishes the shadows;

A clear bright gleam that burns and waits,

Waits and burns,

An hour, a month, a year...

Even if unheeded, unneeded, unanswered,

Still it will shine, true and steady,

For you, for you, for you. 

It will not sap all energy or incinerate all hope.

It will not consume itself in its own endless heat.

It will not, in the fruitless space of decades, flicker and burn out.

These new-fangled LED bulbs sure are fantastic.

Apophenia

In raindrops coursing on the windowpane

I feel the rhythm of a long-forgotten chorus.

In ebbing evanescent clouds

I read a legend and a mystery.

The chaos of the circle’s ratio

Begs and whispers of the rational.

And in this complex dataset

I see pattern, shape, logic, reason,

Meaning, and truth – a bright epiphany --

Even though it totally isn’t there.

Crap.

Measure for measure

Mr. Government Employee Guy peered at my climate maps.  His brow furrowed. “You’ll need to convert everything to Fahrenheit,” told me.  “Nobody understands Celsius.”

Well, gosh, of course not.  And nobody understands kilometers or grams, either. That is, nobody except for the entire world -- outside of the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar (hi there, Liberians and … um … Burmese.)  

Why, why, why? My inner scientist is inconsolable.  The rest of the globe long ago graduated to a tidy, mathematically pleasing system in which one cubic centimeter of water weighs one gram, freezes at zero degrees Celsius, requires one joule of energy to heat one degree C, and has a volume of 0.001 liters.  Why is it that we Americans are still wedded to charmingly Medieval units whereby length is compared to the theoretical dimensions of a man’s impressively large pedal appendage; area is judged according to how much land your ox can plow in a day; volume comes in many handy and entirely logical increments: dram, teaspoon, tablespoon, pony, jigger, jack, gill, cup, pint, quart, pottle, and gallon; and the zero-point on our temperature scale is what Mr. Fahrenheit, back in England in 1724, thought was, like, super-duper cold?  [Ok, in truth, Daniel Fahrenheit supposedly generated the zero-point for his temperature scale by mixing equal parts of ice, water, and ammonium chloride and testing the resulting brine.  I’m sure he had a good reason for doing this.]

Metric (SI) units not only jive with what the rest of the world is doing and make overpoweringly more sense than our weird amalgam of body-part-based measurements -- they can also help prevent spacecraft from turning into fireballs.  Yes.  Seriously.  In 1998, the Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in the Martian atmosphere because Lockheed Martin provided thruster performance data in pound force seconds instead of newton seconds.  Way to go, America.

Nobody understands Celsius.  Hair-tearingly frustrating as statements like this are, I always used to assume that they reflected a simple lack of familiarity.  I used to think that when people moaned, “I don’t get centimeters” or, “How much is that in pounds?” it was simply because they were used to the old Imperial units (well, except for maybe the jiggers and pottles).   All folks needed was a simple conversion: “Don’t worry, my fine friends!  A kilogram is 2.2 pounds; a kilometer is about 2/3 of a mile; Celsius degrees are larger Fahrenheit degrees at a ratio of 5:9, and the two scales coincide at -40!”  Given this info, I thought everyone would be able to effect quick mentally-estimated conversions. 

Later, I realized that I was a moron. 

Professorial flashback.  “It seems that some of you are having trouble with units…”  This was an understatement on par with telling a roomful of elephants that they were having trouble with pole vaulting.  There I was, pinioned in front of a group of twenty-year-olds, all of whom were staring at me with semi-resentful eyes. They’d given me an answer – I can’t recall if it was eight-point-two, or five million and seventeen, or the square root of negative forty-two – but now I was demanding to know what the numbers actually meant?  I was going to withhold full credit unless they clarified whether we were talking about degrees Fahrenheit, tonnes per square kilometer, or pinches of fairy-dust per rainbow-sparkle unicorn?”  Obviously I was an Evil Professor with demonic delusions of world domination.  Obviously, I didn’t know how to teach math.

I still don’t.  I want to be good at explaining mathematical concepts to others.  I adore the intricate and interwoven world of numbers and logic.  Give me a conundrum involving an accelerating train, a leaking bucket, or an island inhabited by truth-telling trolls, and I will spiral into rapture.  Like any good zealot, I am always seeking converts.  Alas, however, I suspect that the inside of my head is such a peculiar landscape that inviting others to view its ecosystems and architecture is not only ill-advised, but also criminally impossible.

My brain has always been this odd.  I remember when I was a kid, and visited my family members in England during the period when that fine nation was suffering paroxysms of metrication.  Everyone was complaining – but I couldn’t imagine why, because the metric system was so clearly awesome.  By that point it was pretty clear that my little cousins were going to have to grow up knowing their centimeters and kilograms, so my aunt, trying to do what was best for her kids, was trying to use the correct terms in answer to a barrage of childish questions about sizes, weights, and volumes.  “Um… you’re about… ten centimeters tall?”  I was both amused and righteously horrified by how badly this esteemed adult – whose career was as a ballerina, not a mathematician -- was capable of massacring SI units.

Nonetheless, I suspect that my now-grown-up cousins are pretty comfortable with liters and joules.  Why? Because England forced the issue, while America waffled and whined.  It’s hard!  It’s expensive! We also trotted out the most powerful argument of all, in a country obsessed with personal freedom: We don’t wanna and you can’t make us!

To be fair, the distinction is not as clear-cut as I’m making it seem.  For one thing, British beer-drinkers refused to give up their pints. Meanwhile, the US is not metric-free; no, it’s much worse than that.  In America, we’ve created a nightmarish hodge-podge of unit-illogic.  Imagine tossing twenty jigsaw puzzles into a trash bag, shaking the bag violently, ignoring any pieces that fall out, and then trying to put together the remainder.  For example, your Advil, Sudafed, and Rolaids – and indeed all medications – are metric.  However, dosages by body weight are often in milligrams per pound.  (Yes, that is the sound of my head exploding).  Nutrition labels tell you about grams of sugar and milligrams of sodium, but refer to Calories rather than kilojoules.  I often run 5K or 10K races that are blithely signposted with… mile-markers.

I’ve long held the goal of avoiding another generation of this madness.  So, there I was in Natural Resources Management trying to get that classroom of kids (ok, twenty-year-olds are technically grownups, but I’m curmudgeonly, so I’m going to refer to them as kids) to solve a problem something like this: “A lake with a surface temperature of 12°C decreases in temperature linearly with depth, at a rate of 0.8 degrees Celsius per meter.  Express this temperature gradient in degrees Fahrenheit per foot, and report the temperature at 23 feet below the surface.”

College juniors and seniors.  None of them could solve this.

To their credit, the same students solved most of the other problems I assigned.  They gamely Googled conversion factors that allowed them to turn grams into ounces, acres into hectares, and board-feet into cubic meters.  Unfortunately, online calculators are only as useful as their users’ understanding of how they work.  Internet gizmos only convert absolute temperatures, not temperature gradients invented by psychopathic professors.  The zero-point on the Fahrenheit scale is arbitrary, kids; a real (absolute) zero exists somewhere (down at −459.67°F.) 

Even on the easier questions, quite a few kids effected their conversions backwards, never stopping to notice that as a result, their answers made no sense.  They shuffled digits around and plugged them into formulae without any clear notion of roughly what answer they were likely to get.  Um, did you know that miles are bigger than kilometers?  Yes sirree. 

Making sense is… well, it’s kind of a big deal to me.  Making sense is what I fall back on when my leaky brain refuses to hold onto details – which is, to be honest, most of the time. A lot of people have told me, self-deprecatingly or defensively, that they’ve forgotten what math they once knew.  I can relate all too well; I’m a champion forgetter.  I just had to look up the Fahrenheit reading for absolute zero.  I am a much crappier Trivia Bowl teammate than anyone seems willing to believe. Seriously, people.  I am not being humble.  I am BAD at this stuff.  Without sneaking peeks at the internet, I can’t list all nine Supreme Court Justices, tell you who wrote Gone with the Wind, or remember that our pottle-and-jigger-loving buddies are Liberia and Myanmar.

On the other hand, although I am a sieve when it comes to facts, I’m ok with concepts.  For me, forgetting mathematical concepts seems akin to forgetting how to read, or forgetting how to understand sarcasm.   I can’t tell you the formula for the surface area of a sphere, but I’d certainly be able to tell if my answer were off by an order of magnitude; a sphere is unlikely to have a surface area greater than a cube with sides the length of the sphere’s diameter, because – well, you know, THINK about it.  I also know, at the very least, that the surface area will be expressed in square units, and the volume in cubic units.  My students?  Well….not so much.

Not that I never memorize.  My understanding of measurement scales is, just like everyone else’s, based in part on memorization.  Twenty-six-point-two miles is a marathon.  One hundred and forty pounds is what I’d weigh if I lost fifteen pounds.  Three hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit is where you bake gooey chocolate chip cookies.   But my mental map is also based on a fundamental understanding that a scale – any scale – is merely a convenience, created and maintained by humans.  Days and years are real, inasmuch as they are units determined by the rotation and revolution of the earth.  Hours and weeks are not real.  Nor are miles, grams, or pottles.

I’m pretty sure the oddities of my brain at least partially dictate the oddities of my worldview.  From a mathematical and scientific perspective, what it comes down to is that any knowledge that I can’t turn inside out, view from all angles, and connect to fifteen other mental concepts is likely not to make it through even a single mental laundry cycle.  Oh, sure, I can learn something for a quiz; there was a fifteen-minute period of time, back in 1987, when I knew every country, capital, and major river in all of Africa and Latin America.  But Lesotho and Djibouti failed to link themselves to any of the detritus rattling around in my brain, and I now have no idea which is which.  Really, logic is the only thing that holds my brain together at all.  And the metric system is logical. 

What I finally came to realize is that most Americans love the old Imperial system for exactly the same reason that I love the metric system – because we’re lazy clods, and we want to fall back on what’s easiest.  The difference is that if memorization is your strength, then “easy” means sticking with what you already know, even if it’s illogical.  If memorization is your Achilles heel, then you long for a system in which all you need to recall is how many base-ten orders-of-magnitude to apply to your milligrams, kilometers, and terabytes.

Maybe, eventually, our nation will bite the bullet and actually force us to change – although that might be too much Big Gubmint to pass muster, politically.  Maybe, eventually, the infiltration of 2-liter soda bottles and fat-grams will render that lovely, logical system familiar enough that it will be acceptable even to people who Just Don’t Get Units.  Maybe one day we’ll stop accidentally burning things up in the Martian atmosphere.  Maybe, by the time I retire from this-here career in science, Americans will understand Celsius. 

Until then, Mr. Government Employee Guy is right, of course.  We’ll have to change the maps.  Except, of course, for the ones we’re producing for our neighbors in the Yukon…

How to be a Zero

Your Overall Performance…

Yes?  Yes?  I wasn’t sure I bought into the idea that this webpage was going to tell me anything non-bogus, let alone insightful, but I was kind of curious.  I mean, who wouldn’t want the scoop on their Overall Performance? 

No, this was not an I.Q. quiz.  Nor did it claim it would tell me what my patronus is, what video game character I am channeling, or how many  minutes I’d survive after the Zombie Apocalypse. The test at hand had been provided by the BBC’s Science and Nature department – not exactly peer-reviewed literature, but dorky enough to seem credible.  The purported goal of the survey was to provide “an indication of where you fall in the male-female brain continuum.”

In truth, the whole concept made me squirm.  What is “brain-sex”, exactly? I’ve always railed against the mindset that brought us Teen-Talk-Barbie (“Math class is tough!”)  I’ve always maintained that beyond the obvious hormonal and physical differences, the two genders aren’t as inscrutably alien to one another as we insist on pretending they are.   Women can change tires!  Men can change diapers!  Come on, people, trendy books notwithstanding, we are not actually from different planets.

Or… are we?  Being of an analytical mindset (how very male of me), I’ve never given much credence to joke-memes about male vs. female shopping habits, communication habits, and showering habits (except to note that I am invariably doing it wrong, and don’t own a loufa).   However, present me with a few salient facts about hemisphere dominance and the relative sizes of the inferior-parietal lobule, the limbic system, and the parietal region, and I start to take notice. 

It seems that researchers have found measurable differences in brain structure and function, which yield significant disparities in performance.  According to the BBC webpage, the average female respondent tipped the scales at 50 points in the “womanly” direction.  The average man leveraged fifty points on the opposite trajectory.  As I worked on the test, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering where I’d fall – and I couldn’t prevent my defensive pre-reaction:   Hey, whose inferior-parietal lobule are you calling “small,” buddy?

I’ve always felt justified in my knee-jerk reaction to gender rules.  After all, many of the cultural trimmings and trapping of male vs. female are so obviously arbitrary.  The color pink is not scientifically linked to estrogen.  George Washington and his compadres wore high heels.  Tailors and seamstresses do exactly the same job.  In some cultures, only women are allowed to go fishing.  And I do like a man in a kilt.  

Besides, I’ve known for a long time – forever, possibly – that I can’t cram myself into the mold of most female stereotypes.  I have no sense of fashion, I am terribly out of practice at crying, I studiously avoid shopping, and I sigh longingly over power tools, science fiction, and higher mathematics. 

Then again, male stereotypes don’t usually do it for me either.   Beer pretty much tastes like sump-water to me, and I don’t give a rat’s fundament what kind of vehicle you drive.  I enjoy reading aloud Shakespeare. I reserve the right to snuggle with cats and small children

I sometimes think I come across as a defensive boor in my all-female writers’ group; I keep trying to inject science and logical theory into other people’s Very Personal Essays, and I want the novelist to know whodunnit before she crafts the first three chapters of the murder mystery.  This group is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a girly bunch of females.  This is a split-your-own wood kind of crowd.  And yet I still feel, sometimes, a bit like an interloper.

On the other hand, not surprisingly, I also feel like an interloper when I’m part of a boys’ club, although (thanks to the good graces of some fantastic male friends) I’ve been there often enough.  Many years ago, I spent three summers working on a trail crew with a daunting gender ratio.  Despite my participation in wrestling matches, Tabasco-drinking dares, and farting contests, I never got male bonding 100% right.  I wrestled without first consuming cheap canned Budweiser, and I drew the line at eating horseflies on a Ritz cracker.

In other words, I screw things up in both directions.  I tend to think that when a woman tells me her problems, it’s because she wants me to solve them, rather than Just Listen.  Note to self: she doesn’t.  But when a good male friend tells me about his softball victories – or lack thereof – I’m not really there for him the way I should be, either. 

Could a BBC brain-quiz explain any of this? I had my doubts.

Whatever was up with my brain, I was pretty sure it was a congenital and permanent condition. As a kid, I adored climbing trees, making up stories, wrestling, giggling, playing checkers, and playing with dolls.  This mostly worked out fine; I made up stories in trees, giggled while wrestling, and played checkers with my dolls (yes, really).  In the years that followed, I didn’t mind being the only girl in the Huntington Public Library Dungeons and Dragons Club, and the only girl on the fifteen-person Metropolitan New York All-Stars Mathlete team… three years running.  (We were bused to Penn State to compete in the national championships.  We played bridge, discussed calculus, and did logic problems en route.  One year the bus caught fire in the middle of the night on the way home.  It was, in a word, awesome.)

On the flip side, I was also happy to attend all-girls sleepover parties and watch LadyHawke and The Princess Bride approximately eleventeen times.  Moreover, there was a goodly portion of my brain that deeply, secretly, shame-facedly, wanted Sweet Wesley to accompany my sorry little teenaged self through the Fire Swamp. I was pretty sure I’d be more use against the ROUS’s than Buttercup, but still… Farm Boy?  Fetch me that linear algebra textbook…

Such daydreams were clearly less-than-obvious to all the people who, over the years, implied -- or flat-out stated -- that I was most definitely a lesbian, or that I ought to be attracted to women.   What’s a butch straight girl to do? [Note: moving to Alaska helps]. Someone out there is probably cursing my flippancy, because being gay in our society – or any society – still is not piece of cake.  I know that.  I also know that it’s not a choice, one way or another, because it was never my piece of cake.

Annoyed at assumptions and generalizations, I tried to compartmentalize.  Gender differences were merely physical, I decided.  Brains were gender-neutral.  Brains were unbiased.  Brains were fair.  But the data was stacking up against me.  And now, here was a test purporting to measure – quantitatively! – mental traits that really do differ, on average, between the XYs and the XXs. 

What traits were they, exactly?

The results are based on the angles, spot the difference, 3D shapes, and words tasks.

Even as I worked my way through the test, I felt the scores slotting into place.  Angles?  That was probably a boy-task, but it didn’t seem too hard.  Words?  Oh, indubitably, I am an unrepentant logophile, girlishly besotted with perspicacious badinage.  Spot the Difference was a different story.  Women are supposed to notice subtleties – in shades of lip gloss, in friends’ hairstyles -- but I am the sort of person who permanently loses a pair of heavy-weight hiking boots in a thousand-square-foot home, and who once failed to notice when her housemate shaved off his full beard.  If asked to determine what items have been removed or rearranged from an arbitrary assortment of line-drawings of teapots, lawn chairs, and hats, my brain sneaks away to hide.  On the other hand, mentally rotating objects… well… don’t tell anyone, but I do it even when not completing online quizzes, just for kicks. 

Of course, life isn’t all rotating objects and missing teapots.  What about other purported differences between men and women?  What about the social, emotional, and communication stuff, the “He just doesn’t understand me!” stuff?  Truth be told, I’m even more leery of this kind of touchy-feely analysis than I am of Spot the Differences.  However, this BBC website wasn’t the only one I’d stumbled upon in my virtual perambulations.  The internet is always a great way to erode your sense of self and waste time, all in one simple step. 

Based on the fairy reputable Baron Cohen indices, I’d already learned that I “empathize” (that is, obsess about other people’s feelings) about as well as the average woman.  I “systematize” (which, as far as I can tell, means act like a cross between a train-spotter and a computer geek) about as well as the average man.   No mention was made of how either of these scores panned out in terms of diaper-changing and tire-changing, but I had my suspicions that whatever the mold was, I wouldn’t fit it.

And now, here was a moment of truth.  Your Overall Performance…

I scrolled down.

Your personal brain score: Zero.

Ah.  Well then. 

In a world of male 50s and female 50s, I was hanging at the fulcrum, in no-brain’s-land.  I was a Zero.  A Nothing.  A Nada.  And I wasn’t one bit surprised

In a way, it was relief to earn scores – scientific results! -- that so tidily matched my suspicions.  Still, the inevitability didn’t help me much in knowing what to do with my new label as the Null Set.  If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, was I out charting my own interplanetary orbit?  Did I simply not belong in anyone’s gravity well?  Was I likely to be evicted from my writers’ group?  Was I recalled with disdain by my trail crew friends?

Or… was there perhaps a role in this world for a Zero, after all?

As I pondered my Zero-ness, it occurred to me that in all-female groups I sometimes play the (annoying, but perhaps balancing) role of devil’s advocate.  What do you want with wilting flowers in the middle of February?  So what if he pees in the shower?  So what if he mentally rotates objects?  C’mon, it’s fine, all guys do it. 

And in male groups?  Well, I may not have gotten things 100% right among the Tabasco-drinkers, but maybe it was sometimes better to be a little bit wrong.  On trail crew, I was useful as a Giver of Backrubs.  Straight boys will not do this for each other, ever, no matter how long a day they have put in with a crowbar and shovel -- but they are so pleadingly grateful for a girl with strong, callused hands.  I also read aloud in the tent at night, like a peculiarly mud-splattered parody of a Cub Scout leader.  All those large, sweaty guys begged for just one more chapter of the Hobbit. 

I now realized another salient fact, too.  The bell-shaped curves of Normal Distributions being what they are, I am not the only Zero out here.  Yes, science shows that male and female brains differ, but they differ on average.  Even the BBC page admitted to the word “continuum”.  Statistics are meaningful at the population level, but they tell you nothing about whether little Susie thinks that Math Class is Tough.   Maybe Susie likes to mentally rotate objects.  Maybe – shocker – she’s a Zero too.  If so, I want to meet her.

When I find myself with other Zeros – suspected or confirmed, male or female – I feel a thrill of camaraderie.  When I encounter someone who mixes math-nerdery and word-nerdy into a single fruity cocktail, who sees no inconsistency in cracking raunchy jokes during a Serious Discussion of Feelings,  who gets wildly distracted by trying to explain an esoteric scientific principle to a small child snuggled on his or her lap… I get it.  We’re the Zeros.  We’re bilingual. We’re interplanetary.  We’re at once both total misfits and missing links.

I still get all edgy when too many “him vs. her” jokes clog my Facebook page.  I still want to eviscerate Teen Talk Barbie.  But I don’t need to deny the existence of Venus.  I don’t have to pout at the mention of Mars.  Even if I don’t inhabit one of those celestial orbs, I’m not adrift in space.  After all, there is a planet between the second and fourth rocks from the Sun… and I hear it has a way better atmosphere.

You Stink

“Mmmmm….”  Molly burrowed into my lap, long legs tucked against my stomach and face somewhere in the vicinity of my armpit.  She sighed happily.  “I love how my mama smells like mama,” she said.

I stared down at her. She smiled back up at me beatifically.  I quickly calculated when I’d last showered.

Having determined that it had been within the last 24 hours, I felt at least marginally exonerated.  Ok, so by the standards of Middle America – and most other people who think that running water is not optional – I wasn’t 100% clean, but I didn’t actually smell, did I? 

Except that, of course, I did.  My daughter had just told me so.  Moreover, I was fairly sure I did not smell like soap, or shampoo, or deodorant, or flowers, or chocolate chip cookies.  I smelled like mama. 

Probably, I thought, I should change my shirt.  But I had a kid on my lap, and when not inhaling my armpit aroma, she was reading aloud Mr. Putter and Tabby Clear the Decks.  I didn’t want to miss a moment of the action; who knew what Mrs. Teaberry’s good dog Zeke might do next? 

I considered telling my daughter that, her complimentary tone notwithstanding, people aren’t supposed to smell, and that both the smelliness itself and the act of commenting on the matter are generally considered gauche.   At almost the instant the thought crossed my mind, I recalled learning the same lesson myself, at roughly the same age that my twins are now. 

It was Christmas.  For weeks, a brown-paper-wrapped parcel emblazoned with lots of little Queen-of-England stamps, fascinating U.S. Customs stickers, and indecipherable postmarks had been squatting in my mother’s closet.  Granny always sent her gifts early – Thanksgiveing-early – perhaps based on the assumption that postal technology was still somewhere in the speed range of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.  However, in my mind, this was exactly the way parcels should be mailed, because Granny could do no wrong. 

When I visited Granny at 3 The Crescent, Tunbridge Wells, Kent I entered a magical world in which milk came in bottles with the cream floating on top, homemade baked goods and fizzy lemonade were considered an important afternoon meal, and everyone’s voice sounded a bit like my Mummy’s.  Granny was willing to play infinite games of Eye Spy and Parcheesi.  She had a vast, ancient, important-looking metal biscuit-tin full of Cadbury’s chocolates -- in sumptuous varieties unknown on our own side of the ocean.  She let me trail her around her lush garden with a tiny watering can, and she allowed me to shell peas more delicious than any pea that had ever before graced my plate.  At Granny’s house, the bathtub had feet and the towels were pre-warmed. At Granny’s house, I was allowed to operate the Lettuce Spinner, and the spinach was magically delicious.  Thus, the opening of the Granny Parcel was imbued with weeks of pent-up anticipation and long-distance adoration.

From amidst the glittering scattering of sweeties in the box, I pulled out a soft Christmas-wrapped item with my name on it.  My name!  Carefully, I unSellotaped it.  The paper fell away to reveal a hand-knit sweater.  Now, normally, clothing was no more thrilling to me than it is to any red-blooded six-year-old.  But this was a special sweater, a sweater made by the marvelous age-spotted hands of Mummy’s own Mummy.  I pressed it to my face.  I inhaled deeply.  “It smells like Granny,” I sighed.

My family’s less-than-positive reaction to this statement took me by surprise.  “Granny doesn’t smell,” snorted my big sister.  My mother, more gently, tried to explain the finer points of scent-related etiquette: namely, that according to the official rules of polite society, no one smells.  Ever.

Except that we all do.  We smell.  Telling me it wasn’t so didn’t make it not so.  Telling Molly the same thing now, as she snugged herself down in a book-and-mama lap-sandwich would only be hand-me-down disingenuousness. 

Officially, sight and sound are the channels by which we humans communicate, educate, and interact with the world.  Sniffing things is deemed animalistic -- and heaven forbid that anyone notice that humans are, in fact, animals.  We try to sidestep our distaste by claiming to have no ability in the realm of aroma-detection.  Granted, we’re not bloodhounds.  But plenty of studies show that humans are far more nose-gifted than we care to admit.  Via t-shirt-sniffing alone, a typical human can easily differentiate her own scent, or her lover’s, or her child’s.

Of course, most people don’t take up shirt-sniffing as a hobby.  Nor are they willing to crawl around with their faces half an inch from the sidewalk or press their noses to their friends in order to prove a point.  Richard Feynman, however, had no such qualms.

As well as being one of the most brilliant physicists of the twentieth century, Feynman enjoyed a plethora of quirky and iconoclastic pastimes.  One of them was smelling.  At parties, he liked to figure out which beer in a six-pack had been touched by whom, using his nose alone.  (I’m never even half that interesting at parties, regardless of what percentage of the six-pack I’ve personally touched).  But he wasn’t really trying to demonstrate that his ability was superlative.  He was trying to show than anyone can do this, if they have the right warp on life, and cheerful disregard for anything approaching “company manners.”

I didn’t start reading Feynman’s popular works – the aptly named “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” and “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” until junior high, when he leapt to the spotlight because of his astonishing and damning demonstration, in the wake of the Challenger disaster, with an O-ring and a glass of ice water.  Long before then, in the wake of realizing that ones grandmother is not supposed to have an aroma, I’d tried to take anti-nasal injunctions to heart. 

Like the good little social-rule-learning child that I (mostly) was, I internalized the tenets governing which smells were considered terrible and unmentionable (anything poop-related, for starters).  Oddly, it was ok to mention non-biological odors that were, to me, much yuckier than poop or sweat: gasoline, Windex, oven cleaner, and most perfumes.  At the same time, I didn’t entirely let go of my faith in my sense of smell.  The school milk, back in those days before magically Ultra High Temperature pasteurized dairy products, was sour about 10% of the time.  I got in the habit of sniffing before sipping, and became something of a lunchroom expert in the subtleties between fresh, on the edge, and seriously nasty beverages. 

I also learned that although smell seemed like a big part of the world around me -- filling me with emotions ranging from doctor’s-office-antispetic-trepidation to dry-leaves-soft-hummus-joy-- there was a limited vocabulary to express this richness, and an even more limited context in which to use it.  The Crayola box might offer fifteen words describing different shades of blue, but I had no adjectives to properly describe the mingling pre-dinner scents of slightly burned garlic, bubbling minestrone, and brownies in the oven.  There were no words for the smell of the dampness that precedes springtime, the reek of overheated tar in a July parking lot, or the licked-clean scent of a cat’s fur as she purrs on the bed.

I liked sniffing fruit too.  I still do.  How else can one reliably judge a fine, ripe melon?  A good pear has an aroma to be reckoned with.  Apparently most Americans rely on sight to choose their tomatoes, apples, and oranges, which means that we are offered fruit that are round, shiny, brightly colored, and taste like Styrofoam.

I was secretly thrilled when, in junior high, one of my more radical hippie teachers instructed us to examine soil samples based on not only texture and color but also odor and flavor.  He wants us to eat the dirt!  Everyone expressed overblown horror at the thought, and decided that of course it must be a joke.  A few boys tried it out, with exaggerated bravado.  I tried it out with excited curiosity.  The earth tasted the way it smelled, loamy and complex.  Not good, precisely, but fascinating.

At about this same junior-high age, all my compatriots started to have much more interesting odors, shifting from the warm-skin uncomplicated-sweat milk-and-peanut-butter scents of childhood to the tangy whiff of pheromones and angst.  This was definitely in the do-not-mention category.  My mother bought me deodorant.  I’m sure she didn’t tell me that this was shameful… but I was pretty sure it was shameful.

It was at around this time that I discovered Feynman.  I was fascinated by his writing because I was fascinated by physics, but I found that his take on other aspects of life was equally riveting.  He cracked safes, played the bongo drums, and won a Nobel prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics.  He was, above all, someone who refused to believe something was so simply because that was what everyone else believed.  And, of course, he liked smelling stuff.

I will not, alas, ever make any fabulous discoveries in the field of particle physics, but I can still aspire to be an oddball scientist.  In this spirit, who am I to undermine my kid’s appreciation of one of her fine and subtle senses?   If I loved the smell of Granny when I was a first-grader, who am I to say that mama-scent is icky? 

We have only so much time to soak in all the nuances of our information-laden world, and a scent can be worth a thousand words.  In addition to the mundane usefulness of telling us whether the cantaloupes are as juicy-delicious as we hope they are or warning us away from the bench that is newly painted, odors are deeply emotional and achingly evocative.  They can send our minds whirling back to the mud-puddles of childhood.  They can imbue a sweater with memories of a grandmother a year unseen and an Atlantic Ocean away. They can conjure joy.  And they can whisper to us with poignancy, fondness, tenderness, or frank allure: you are my beloved.  Beauty resides not only in the eye of the beholder, but in her nose as well.

In my lap, my child turned a page of her book.  I pressed my face to the top of her tousled head, and kissed her. I considered good manners and propriety.  Then I unconsidered them.  “I’m glad my Molly smells like Molly,” I told her.

.