The Windsor Road Dispatch: The Smell of Summers Past

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As I have opined more than once in blogs, too often in the fiction and songs I scribble, is mostly always churning in back-burner of my mind, I am one of those people who “chase the madeleine” in life. Lots of people live in the past; I want to buy a furnished condo there! And having lived where I have for most of my 54 years (and when not here for ten of them I lived not a mere five miles away) all too readily I am thrust back to past times by the look, feel…but mostly, the smell of summers past.

Yes, it’s that time again here in suburban New Jersey on the northeast coast of the U.S. where the insects buzz, the days stay lighter longer and I smell just that right combination of scents (from where and what I do not know exactly) that throw me whiplash-like to my earlier days (and daze). Surely, many of us look back on our youth with rose-tinted glasses, but I find these scents such heady inducements my glasses are akin to those “Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses” featured in the seminal sci-fi satire The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. The character Zaphod Beeblebrox often wears these glasses when trouble is on the way, with the first hint of something untoward the JJ200S-C PSS’s lenses turns totally black, thus preventing the wearer seeing anything that might alarm them.

My glasses, only ever show me the very best memories of my youth.

Deleted are images of break-ups, long hot days of trying to find something to do other then walk the neighbourhood, waiting for my best friend Tom to get home from his job working at a Chinese restaurant, or trying to figure out how to talk to the small gathering of girls hanging around with us at the park those lovely fragrant nights of my teen years.

As we all know, from Jack Finney novels to any good science fiction T.V. show episode, if you were ever to really go back, you’d only muck things up. Sure, try to kill Hitler as a baby, but then travel back to your time and see what other kinds of evil you let loose by messing with time.

Paradoxes are a bitch nobody wants to contend with.

I don’t want to go back, really, despite some very real pining. I warn Facebookers time and again that looking up old high school sweethearts is a recipe for disaster. It’s tempting to relive, I grant you that, and that soft slightly cloying breeze wafting through my window even now tempts me to undue rumination of when I first heard Hotel California or received my first kiss. But in the end, I have no choice but to stay in the here and now and deal with it, best I can, even while sniffing the that breeze.

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