Leon Hale columns

Does anyone else read these? Here's an example.

Another thing I don't like about being old instead of young is that I can't smell a skunk anymore.

I was never fond of the
way a skunk smells, but if you are able to smell one you should be pleased. At least you know a skunk is in the neighborhood, and you can watch out for it.

A skunk is not the only thing I'm unable to smell. I can't smell a lot of things I'd love to smell again. Like bacon frying, or ladies' perfume, or a hay meadow that's just been mown. I can walk into a bakery now without smelling fresh bread.

This loss of the sense of smell happens to a lot of people who get old, but for some reason we don't talk much about it.

We talk about not being able to see as well, and we complain that we're getting hard of hearing, but you don't hear many of us say that we can't detect odors. I don't know why.

Maybe it's because there seems to be very little we can do about the problem. When our sight starts failing we can get glasses, and when we finally grow tired of asking, "What did you say?" we can stick hearing aids in our ears.

But as far as I know, nobody has yet come up with a device we can attach to our noses so we can smell that skunk again.

I needed a new heel for my shoe so I decided to go to Morganville. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. Give me five bees for a quarter you'd say. Now where were we, oh ya. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because if the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones

Almost a year ago, when I cut back to doing just one column a week, one of the customers wrote me that finally I could slow down and smell the roses. I appreciated that thought but the fact is I haven't been able to smell a rose since I passed my 80th birthday.

I don't mean to sound poor-mouth about this. Being unable to smell is not terminal. My Uncle Billy Crockett lived to be 96 and they always said about him that by the time he was 75 he couldn't see the barn from the house if it was on fire, couldn't hear a clap of thunder and couldn't smell a skunk if it crawled in his lap.

It's just that losing my smeller is the latest thing that's happened in my old age, and I find it interesting. It may not happen to you. I've got a sister two years older than I am, and you can cut a grapefruit in the kitchen and she can smell it while she's in the living room playing Darktown Strutters Ball on the piano.

I lost a box of mint-condition 1918 liberty-head silver dollars. You see, back in those days, rich men would ride around in Zeppelins, dropping coins on people, and one day I seen J. D. Rockefeller flying by. So I run of the house with a big washtub and I just used it that morning to wash my turkey, which in those days was known as a walking bird. We'd always have walking bird on Thanksgiving with all the trimmings: cranberries, injun eyes, and yams stuffed with gunpowder. Then we'd all watch football, which in those days was called baseball.

Here's where I find comfort: Somewhere on the Internet I read that humans in a lifetime recognize as many as 10,000 separate odors. By this time I figure I've already smelled all 10,000, and my guess is that at least half of them were bad. Bad enough to qualify as stinks.

So that's 5,000 bad odors I will never smell again.

The last time the meteors came, we thought the sky was on fire. Naturally, we blamed the Irish. We hanged more 'n a few.

I am disgusted with the way old people are depicted on television. We are not all vibrant, fun loving sex maniacs. Many of us are bitter, resentful individuals who remember the good old days when entertainment was bland and inoffensive. The following is a list of words I never want to hear on television again. Number one: bra. Number two: horny. Number three: family jewels.

The sense of smell has a memory and a history, the same as vision and touch and taste and hearing. I find myself sniffing in reverse, recapturing odors I once knew. I now celebrate that I won't again experience this one:

Go back to 1943. Along with the majority of warm male bodies in the nation, I was in military service. The old Army Air Corps. In aerial gunnery school in Arizona, near Yuma.

The Army had a rattletrap B-17 there, for training gunners.

It flew low level, and out of its waist windows trainees fired .50-caliber machine guns at targets on the ground.

Temperature over that desert was probably 120 degrees, and riding in that old bomber was like trying to stay on a rodeo bronc. Airsickness? Guaranteed.

Trainees took turns. You crouched at the waist window, shooting for a while, and then you crawled back in the bomb bay and vomited from the catwalk.

Hundreds of guys threw up their GI meals into the bomb bay of that B-17. At the end of the day, it was hosed out but the smell remained. When it was on the ground, parked out on the tarmac, that bomber stood there and stank.

When the wind was right, you could smell it a hundred yards away. I could climb aboard the thing, sit there waiting for it to move and get sick from the stink of it.

But let's get back to pleasant smells.

If I somehow were allowed to smell again, one aroma of my choice, I'd first ask for a special Texas spring, when wildflowers bloom thick and wonderful. And I could stand at the fence and smell the gentle perfume of bluebonnets.

That's an experience I'll never have again, but I'm grateful I can remember it.

Ooh, I feel all funny. I'm in love! No, wait. It's a stroke.No, wait! It is love! I'm in love!

 

And we have a winner. There were 4.