can't you smell that smell

Last week I commented on Facebook about my showering habits. This fueled a vigorous discussion led by my good friend Sam, who, during finals week of his last semester at Harvard Law School, went 100 hours without showering. He’s the smartest, stinkiest guy I know. I don’t take many showers these days. And occasionally I smell. I don’t care. I take that back, I do care. However, I know when and why I care and I shower accordingly. The rest of the time, I don’t care. Sorry guy in the library next to me. And thank you guy in the library behind me – your stench is a reprieve from my own tang.

As I sit here smelling myself, my olfactory senses whisk me back in time to the paternal smells of my childhood.

Regularity. Dad's bowels moved (your welcome, grandma) at precisely the same time, every day, for the first 17 years of my life. This coincided with my morning shower. I remember being shocked when using shampoo my first week of college. “Wait, shampoo smells good?”

Smoke. The people dad worked with, both his co-workers and his clients were surely chain smokers. All of them. And as my father listened to their problems, and said ‘yes’ to them more often than he should have, he also absorbed their smell. Every night, like clockwork, Dad came through the back door at 5:14pm. While my friends’ fathers were beginning their evenings at the bar, Dad came home smelling like one.

Wood. My father, as far as I can tell, has three real passions in his life. Family. Church. Wood. We’ve always had a wood burning stove in the northeast corner of the kitchen. And that stove is fueled by wood, which my father cuts with his own two hands (and a chainsaw). Because this love of wood was always preceded in priority by the first two passions, Dad only got to spend a handful of Saturdays a year in the woods for a marathon chainsaw fest. I didn’t join him on enough of these Saturdays, but when I did, or when I rode in his truck after one such marathon, the smell was wood. I have no idea what kind of wood (although I’m sure he told me…many times…in many different ways), but the smell was thick and delicious, and I never cared that I usually had saw dust in my eyes and was always WAY too hot in the kitchen during the coldest months of the year.

Sweat. When I had a job that required showers and suits, the kids would beg me to get out of my work clothes when I got home. They wanted me in a t-shirt and jeans, because that meant fun. My dad was the same way. I didn’t want the smoke. I’d already had my daily dose of poop. I could go to his truck for the wood. Sweat meant that Dad was home. The shirt was probably pulled from his gym bag where it had accompanied him on a sweaty dash ‘up’ the stair-master at the Jacksonville YMCA earlier that day (Exercise: passion number 4). No logos. Some holes. A mark where the pocket used to be. Relaxed and alive, Dad was home, and he was ours. And after he mowed the lawn, the sweat mixed with fresh cut grass to produce an earthy fragrance which to some would certainly be malodorous, but to me was life.

To the best of my knowledge, my father’s body has never been polluted by cologne, aftershave, or any anti-bacterial body wash. If it’s not a bar of plain Ivory, or Dr. Bronner’s magic, wordy, Jesus soap, Dad won’t touch it. His aura and his aroma are inextricably connected. And his aromas will be forever with me. A feat I may be unwittingly passing along to the next generation of Franz children. As it should be.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.