The Life of Lou Ruppert

The way to a man’s heart…

I love the smell of roasting garlic, especially when I haven’t eaten all day. It’s impossible not to be hungry when I smell the sweet rich scent of roasting garlic. If the myth of Sirens was written for deaf and blind readers, the Sirens would probably have lured sailors to their deaths by transforming themselves into the scent of oven-roasted garlic. If life was a fairy tale, and I was given a quest to win the hand of a fairytale princess, appealing to nothing but her sense of smell, I wouldn’t use some magic cocktail of pheromones or citrus tones. I’d roast a bunch of garlic. (Of course, that might be why, at age 35, I’m still riding solo.) The garlic tells my nose to pass a study hall note to my mouth. The note reads:

Something great is on its way.  Get ready.

               -Signed, the garlic.

The way to a man’s soul…

My favorite smell, though, isn’t a food smell at all. It’s the smoky diesel exhaust smell that an old tractor kicks out. It pairs well with the blue-white smoke and chipped paint, and tells the five year old boy inside of each of us that it’s going to be a great day. Whenever I smell that sweet diesel tractor smell, part of me thinks I’m about to go cut down trees with my uncle Charles, the Evil Knievel of Logging. A run down tractor trailer or bulldozer takes me by the nose and transports me to a much simpler life, where milk actually comes from cows, and eggs from chickens. My day’s plans are simple in that world. I’m sitting in a corn field watching my dad sketch pictures on cardboard at twilight with my crayon stubs. Maybe I’m walking over ice-crusted snow, looking for dry branches to feed to the wood stove, or picking apples from the tree I’m blissfully unaware will get bulldozed for property development the following year. I’m definitely not brooding over an IDS screen, or fixing a broken laptop while a fat guy screams in the distance. My world has infinite possibilities, and none of them involve leaving my dinner half-eaten because a pocket sized phone says so.

Science and sensibility

A lot of European languages have the same root word for smelling things as feeling them or understanding them. I think we’ve lost the sense of what that means in our antiseptic world. We don’t really use all of our senses. The sense of smell isn’t something we provide treats for in the same way that we do our eyes and ears. We watch movies, decorate our houses, and listen to music, but nobody buys things to smell for their own sake. We buy scents to hide other scents, but not to admire on their own. Nobody buys paintings just to hide holes in the wall, or music to drown out the Darth Vader noises the congested guy in the next cubicle is making. In order to really enjoy the world fully, and to really know it, I think we need to stop and smell the garlic from time to time.

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