Visually and aurally beyond splendid: The ineffably beaded and befeathered Wild Man roars through the crowd chanting “Make a hole, make a hole,” and stately behind him proceed the Big Chief and all his beaded and befeathered retinue drumming and singing, and another tribe confronts them, and chanting and huffing and ritual posturing ensue. Joseph’s Night, we watched Mardi Gras Indians assemble. If you can’t smell there, you can’t smell gumbo, jasmine, mule plop, and street characters, combined. I reside three months of the year in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
I have a book about food coming out next year. When I take a bite of tomato or chili, or anything, after coming off a spell of smelling impairment, the tomato-ness, the chili-ness, brings tears to my eyes. It takes the long, reflective, and sharing mmmmm out of eating. But I miss so many subtler flavors it’s a damn shame. I still get sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami and spicy-hot, which is essentially pain and the basic textures, which to the tasting impaired are as invaluable as the Seven Dwarfs: Crunchy, Slick, Crumbly, Crackly, Gooey, Juicy, and Chewy. Because when you lack a sense of smell, your sense of taste is sharply limited. According to Gary Beauchamp of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, six million Americans never smell anything at all.Īnd here’s a reaction I frequently get to that statistic: “Some of the smells I get, I think I’d take that deal.” (What a dog, or I, would be doing in such a room is beside the point, as is whether, in seeming to exclude the category of fancy women from that of cigar smokers, I indulge in sexist stereotypes.)
#PHEW STINK FULL#
Other times, I am hyposmic, or smelling impaired, which is like being a dog with a bad cold who knows there is a dropped meatball around here somewhere and is desperate to home in on it, in a room full of cigar smokers and fancy women. Intermittently, I lose my sense of smell entirely. I didn’t say I don’t smell good, though I do generally have to take on faith, absent wifely intervention, that I am not in fact being offensive in that regard. Your immediate jocular reaction would have been, “Hey, you smell okay to me,” or “Phew, don’t I know it.” When I say I am anosmic-suffer from anosmia-I mean that I don’t smell well. Before I tell you what that means, please take a moment to stifle, in advance, what is likely to be your immediate jocular reaction. There is a word for someone like me, and after twenty-some-odd years of being this way I have just now learned that word: I am anosmic.
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