Grape-Nuts and Arpege

You know how certain smells lodge themselves in your memory bank and just set there, waiting to jog your memory at random, unannounced times? My grandmother used to wear Arpege--Arpege perfume, Arpege powder, Arpege, cologne, Arpege everything. Her bathroom wreaked of the stuff. To this day, the faintest odor of Arpege reaches my nostrils....my head starts to spin and my stomach tightens into a golf ball. So fast forward to now. My mother's favorite perfume is....of course, Arpege. So when the bath-aide comes to give Mom her sponge baths, the finishing touch is always (and I mean ALWAYS) a splash of.......you guess it......Arpege perfume. The smell is so repugnant to me that as soon as the bath-aide gets here, I have to open my office window to create a cross-breeze.

Here's another one. My mother has the same breakfast every morning, with few exceptions. And by exceptions, I'm talking maybe two or three times a year. The rest of the year, its Grape-Nuts and Mocha Mix. Same bowl even. And what's with the Mocha Mix anyway? I'm afriad to actually try the stuff. I'm not a coffee drinker so the fact that it's called "Mocha" puts me off right away. I mean, I don't want my cereal tasting like coffee for cryin' out loud! Plus, I have to buy the quart sized cartons of Mocha Mix becuase the gallon cartons are too heavy for either Mom or Dad to pour. Consequently, I end up getting usually five or six cartons at a time. The grocery checkers inevitably ask the begging question, "Wellllll now, somebody likes their Mocha Mix don't they???" Yeah. It's even better when I'm getting Depends too.

But I digress. Back to the Grape-Nuts. So Mom's standard breakfast is not something new. In fact, I remember Mom having her Grape-Nuts even when I was small. I even ate them once in a while. But here's the thing, when the Grape-Nuts nuggets soak up the milk (or the Mocha Mix, whichever the case may be) it turns into the most gawd-awful looking mixture, and the smell isn't any better. So when Mom has her breakfast, then leaves her cereal bowl on the table with just that little pool of Grape-Nuts/Mocha Mix at the bottom, I have to hold my breath to wash the bowl. In the first place, I don't quite understand why Mom can't rinse out her own bowl, but that's another blog, and in the second place, one whiff of that stuff and my face prunes up faster than you can say Mocha Mix.

And while we're on the subject of smells......there are a lot of odors and aromas that permeate the house that I know are connected to elderly "things." My mother's bathroom smells like something I can't even begin to explain (that's BEFORE the bath-aide comes), and my dad's bedsheets (before they get washed) have a fragrance I couldn't even begin to assign words to.

So here's a tip to anybody who ever needs to extract confidential information from me--simply wave a bowl of Grape-Nuts soaked in milk in front of my nose. Follow it up with a spritz of Arpege and I'll gladly tell anything to anybody.