Scents of spices breeze into the room where I sit and drink a ginger ale after a long day. There is a nice restaurant in my apartment building and the scents that they permit to escape are most delicate. This cardamom scent replaces the green wick aroma of the tree where plump robins gather.
Now that heat is here, my habitual perfume retires. It is a syrupy spice scent: absinthe and crème brûlée. What does summer require? The scent of quinine (in tonic water) and blueberry-mint sorbet, I suppose.
Which scent would make a dog howl like this majestic guard dog in a Chanel commercial?
- or make a woman adopt the balletic arm movements of this pretty girl?
Jeff Zeleny, longtime Obama-covering journalist, asked the President a four-part question at the White House last week. (More info about Zeleny, and a link to his question, at The Atlantic.) As the rest of the White House press corps giggled, he insisted:
During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office, enchanted you the most about serving in this office, humbled you the most, and troubled you the most?
Let's try it, shall we?
1. Surprised at the timing of kindness and hope when assuagement seems least likely and most needed. To those who smile and nod on the sidewalk, to longtime loves who smile at hard times, to new friends who boost me forward on my job hunt: un grandissime merci. Destitution never felt so luxurious.
2. Enchanted by the falling of the "Profzi scheme" -- the Ponzi scheme, or pyramid scheme, known as graduate school. The schooling I loved and left has no choice but to change or starve. I had to make the same choice one year ago: I chose to change, to leave academia, and pursue enchantment and cold lessons.
3. Humbled by the glory of springtime and the love of mon homme. Also humbled by wild animals, freshly published books on my goodreads reading list, and the thrill of watching Twin Peaks for the very first time.
4. Troubled by a cherry.
On Friday, I took a friend to the Walker Art Center to gape at a cherry, weighing surely one ton, swinging from a crane. The big cherry flew over a lawn, hovered over a pond and was caught by workmen who fused it to the end of a large spoon.
As I write from my apartment, this funny homage to Versailles rests across the street. Between me and the cherry is a pedestrian bridge cocreated by John Ashbery, a poet. The beams of the bridge are pale blue and butter yellow, and one poem by Ashbery is wrought into the beams, to and fro.
