Henry’s got me thinking about smells.

            Dogs smell much more than humans. Their noses and ears inform more than their eyes. When I toss a mangy tennis ball for Henry to fetch, he listens rather than looks, then figures the ball’s whereabouts, first, by its thud, then by its scent. When he pees or poops, he deliberately inspects his result, refusing to be rushed. Is this a health check, or saunter down memory lane, or mode of augury?

            Humans are embarrassed by our smells. Feet, armpits, eructation, defecation, urination, man, do we stink! Is there an adult odor we don’t try to mask? Why this shame, one wonders. Maybe our delusion of superiority is to blame – that we’re angelic, spiritual, not earthy like other creatures. Do the gods fart!

            For many, I’m guessing, their smells are a guilty pleasure. This is a hard topic to research because few would report candidly. Even to pose the question – do you smile at the whiff of your feet hot from their socks? – would be resented as intrusive. Truth is, we’d rather be animals than angels, it’s so much easier, no guilt or heaven-worries, only such carnal acquiescence feels a surrender of our promise. For old people, a sour scent may evoke senescence, an impression we’d defer indefinitely.

            We remember smells as we do sights, sounds, flavors. Henry’s puppy smell – fading, alas – whooshes me to my boyhood, with a pause in between. Henry is my third and final dog. The first accompanied my adolescence, Ophelia, a demure German shepherd, my confessor and confidant. The second, Paddle, brought joy to a young family with growing pains. Henry must accompany my slip-slide to oblivion. If Henry achieves his life expectancy and I exceed mine, we’ll part company when I’m eighty-seven, too old to commence with puppy four. (I teared up typing the preceding.)

            Our consumer culture deplores authentic scents. Soaps, tissues, candles, fabrics are perfumed vilely. Children’s toothpaste aspires to recall bubblegum in flavor and odor. A deodorized room or cab makes me want to shower. Why must we flee who we are! Are humans the sole self-hating species?

            Scent, like most of what we create, is a social marker. The colognes and sachets of the rich smell expensive. For my rebellious generation, B.O. blazoned our rejection of parental values. (How many years since I heard that abbreviation for body odor!) A mild acridity was sexy in college if you were lucky enough to get that close. I’ve fantasized if I encountered my soulmate and Henry’s namesake, Henry Thoreau, I’d recoil from his whiff instead of hugging him close. Poor me, an irremediable elitist and snob deep down.

            Everyone’s sense of smell differs. Olfactory propensities, local mores, memory shape our responses to aromas. Our need for our noses to defend ourselves diminished as we fortified our barriers to nature. For sure a native tracker smells incalculably more than I. Parents teach their offspring smells mostly to avoid them. (“Do you smell something?” is an ominous, not a promising query.)

            My sense of smell is weak. I marvel at oenophiles swooning as they sniff. Invited to extol a drawn cork, I fake it, not to seem a rube. Some authors smell more. Dickens’ nostrils must have flared like a bloodhound’s. (He liked dogs too.) Our language is stingy with smell words, most of them opprobrious, so writing about smells one risks toppling into banality. (How am I doing?)

            Bless Henry for directing me to the vast kingdom of smells. Existence is so exciting if we pay attention. The wonder of the world is up to us.