Scent Memory

This morning I found myself standing in the middle of the North Hollywood Post Office, closing my eyes and imagining myself in the most exotic locale of my youth.

The coatroom of a classroom in Watts.

My brother and I went to school in Manhattan Beach in the 70’s. We provided the diversity, my cousin likes to say that I was raised in a sea of blondes. Being Jewish in a sleepy white burb wasn’t all that difficult, but parts of it weren’t easy either.

Manhattan Beach and Los Angeles School Districts were on different schedules so periodically our mother would have to teach on days that we didn’t have classes and we would get to go to school with her.

Mom’s kids were behind, we knew that our classmates were ahead of them, but we didn’t know why until much later in life. Mom’s kids were sometimes a little dirty, not all of them had homes, my mother called them squatters. I thought they were incredibly mature and their incurious stares intrigued me. In retrospect, I recognize they were hungry.

Mom’s school in Watts had a certain smell, the smell of wet wood, and too many bodies. The ceilings were high and the colors were muted. I imagined they’d taken bright yellow paint and magically added 15 years of cigarette stain and sun damage to provide the institutional blandness a school like this would require.

The windows were tinted, but unlike my school, there were no fields, knolls, or ponds to gaze upon, there were blacktops surrounded by chain link fences, and topped with barbed wire. It stuck out like bad icing on a store bought cake.

In the mornings Mom’s kids would go to the coatroom where they would put their jackets, sack lunches, and bags away in milk crates that had their names written on them. Few kids had sack lunches, I believe almost every student at South Park was on free lunch, certainly 100% were reduced. Because the coatroom provided privacy, no adults would go in there, only children, and I’d stand white in a sea of dark faces listening to them laugh and talk, just eight miles from home but in a very different English.

They were just like me and I was nothing at all like them. Our mother loved her kids. Those kids, she loved them with her whole heart.

The musty cramped coat room where Mom’s other boys and girls laughed and jostled each other. That space where I wasn’t one of the kids, but we shared a very realistic fear of my mother. That’s what I smelled this morning. It was musty and beautiful.