I Use Public Transportation, Walk, Or Ride Bike

On the bus into Seattle last Thursday morning I saw the striped sweaters on the trees in Pioneer Square. Then I had a few peanuts as a snack and gradually realized I was staring at an old clock – it was nine o'clock - on the sidewalk where the jewelry store was a hundred years old. I walked around a block to Westlake Center and as I passed a clothing store a door opened briefly. The aroma that swung out was the artificial holiday department store atmosphere-scent from days when I was a girl going to department stores at a mall. My earliest downtown shopping for Christmas presents had not included a solid wall of immense perfume – what I remember while I was a child selecting a tie for my father was something more subtle.

That brought me around to an old clipping about Nose knows: Smell a potent link to memories – this list of identifiable aromas from decades of birth is still on the internet – except, in my clipping from Friday, December 25, 1992, the 1940s also responded to gas.

Gas was memorable to me – although I have never owned a car, I was at the flying red horse station Mobil with my mother when the attendant, who had been there for a long time, filled up my mother's tank. Well, I use public transportation, walk, or ride a bike. I do not really know where the idea of smell a potent link to memories lost the smell of gas.

This is from the internet:

1970's - Baby powder, mother's perfume, moth balls, plastic, hair spray, suntan oil, chlorine, felt tip pens

1960's - Baby powder, mother's perfume, chlorine, window cleaner, dad's cologne, detergent, paste, Play Dough, disinfectant, refineries/factories, motor oil, exhaust

1950's - Baby powder, mother's perfume, dad's cologne, crayons, pine, Play Dough

1940's - Baby powder, mother's perfume, hay/cut grass, flowers, sea air, roses, tweed

1930's - Flowers, hay, sea air, pine, baby powder, burning leaves

1920's - Flowers, grass, roses, pine, soap, manure

Attended Kenneth C. Davis Skype Event at Library

In the past I have not been onscreen during a Skype event, this time the screen showed the meeting room of the Wheelock Library, which had been part of the McCormick Library before the Wheelock Regional Library was built. The room is special and lovely but free of books, except when there is an event there.

Several people attended and several asked questions about the Civil War and about his books, "Don't Know Much About The Civil War", among them. Davis said he had been familiar with the song "What a Wonderful Word" for a long time and especially the Sam Cooke version. (The song was from 1960 and written by Sam Cooke, according to the internet.) Davis makes an emphasis on the important special stories about people during historic times.

Skype. I worked at McCormick Branch Library from 1965 to 1967, during high school.

October Books At Twelve-Ten - Breakfast At Sally's by Richard Le Mieux

Three people met on Tuesday, October 11, 2011 for Books At Twelve-Ten. Our book was Breakfast at Sally's by Richard Le Mieux. We agreed that imagery invoked a place successfully, at one point Richard's second-hand typewriter is accidentlly left out in the rain on a picnic table. More rain scenes portrayed Puget Sound.

We discussed many characters included in Breakfast at Sally's and the serious message conveyed regarding poverty in our present time. "Sally's" was the Bremerton Salvation Army, where Richard drove his van most mornings for breakfast. His dog, Willow, was along during all his experiences.

The reading group is using Tacoma Public Library Book Kits for our choices at this time. The kits include ten or a dozen copies of a title, a reading and discussion guide in a folder, and a plastic carry box with a plastic lid. The ten or a dozen copies circulate within the reading group from the personal library card of one member. All the books must return to the member who checked out the box before the kit can be returned.

On Tuesday, November 8th, 2011, the Books At Twelve-Ten group will read Desert in Bohemia by Jill Paton Walsh. From the internet: "a novel of the effects of communism on the lives of ordinary people in the aftermath of World War II chronicals fifty years in a small European town."