Smelly Cat

First of all, I'd like to thank all of you for your insightful commentary on "Quality Time." You've given me a lot to think about.

I think there seems to be a general consensus that both individuals in the relationship need to have reached a certain level of emotional maturity and/or openness to a lifelong commitment. Also---and this appears to be especially true for men---most folks expect to have completed their formal education and established themselves in some sort of career before they start seriously thinking about happily ever after. And all of that has been the case for generations. But it does seem to be taking longer and longer to reach that point (the average age at first marriage is now 25 for women, and 27 for men, which is the oldest it's ever been in America.) I imagine this is due in part to the fact that a graduate degree is fast becoming what a college degree used to be--i.e., a ticket for entry into the middle- and upper-middle classes.

So it's taking people longer to finish their educations and move from proto-adult mode ("Look, Ma! I can take care of myself!") to mature adult mode ("I can take care of myself and other humans"---typically a spouse and/or children, but this could also mean dependent parents, siblings or extended family).

I'm definitely a proto-adult right now, because I'm really only responsible for myself. But I'm eager to transition into the land of mature adults. Jury's still out on where Engi'dear fits in this schema, but he's all done with grad school and really loves his job. Stay tuned...

Yeah, so obviously this post won't be about a smelly cat. But I did love Phoebe's rendition of that song on "Friends." And with that non sequitur, I'm going to segue into my contribution to Kjerste's smells and emotion topic. I've decided to focus on the smells of my childhood days in daycare.

Smells Like Disappointment: Off-Brand Chocolate Sandwich Cookies

I spent a few years with an in-home daycare provider named Becky. Every day at snack time, I would hope against hope that the cookie tin would contain real Oreos. But instead they were always generic knock-offs, and usually stale. Some good things about my time with Becky: She taught me to play chess. She let me watch "Punky Brewster," even when the smaller kids wanted to watch cartoons instead. She tried in vain to get me to stop biting my nails.

Smells Like Frolic in Sunshine: Honeysuckle

During part of my fourth grade year, I was enrolled in an after-school program in Palo Alto. I spent the afternoons outside tearing around on the playground, and when dusk fell I would come inside and read Garfield books. The chain link fence that surrounded the playground was covered in honeysuckle, and sometimes my friends and I would bury our noses in it, or chew on the little green plant shoots. Good times.

Smells Like Love and Guilt: McDonald's French Fries

Sometimes, when my Dad had to work late, I would be the last kid at the center when he came to pick me up. He would often find me playing a half-hearted game of checkers with some staff member who wanted to go home even more than I did. I would be positively ravenous, so we'd stop by McDonald's before driving home to our (then-new) house in San Jose. I would ask if I could just have a large order of fries for dinner, no burger. He would enthusiastically say yes, and he would go on to expound upon the nutritional merits of the lowly, unsung potato. And then we would both feel better.