Only the nose knows

Sometimes I change people’s names to protect the innocent. Sometimes I do it just for the creative freedom; calling someone “Pimplejuice” five times in rapid succession gives me that old thrill I thought I’d lost when I stopped shooting spitballs at teachers’ desks in middle school. When they say “It’s the simple pleasures,” they’re not lyin.’

 

Now, though, I’m in the position of having to talk about someone’s unfortunate affliction. So you’ve got to believe me when I tell you that this person’s name is absolutely, positively not “Betty Boogerbubble.”

 

The problem with Ms. Boogerbubble, see, is that she smells like a dead skunk wrapped in an old gym sock. Sounds harsh, right? It would probably also sound harsh if I said that her appalling scent was like horse dung burning in a field full of bicycle tires, or a cluster of pickled eggs in a locker room shower stall.

 

Stop me when you’re grossed out.

 

Sadly, this is but a slight exaggeration of the truth. Even more sadly – for me, anyway – is that this Betty Boogerbubble, of the eye-watering, kill-me-now aroma, was once my date.

 

It didn’t last long, for obvious reasons. When you’d rather eat a box of shattered Plexiglas than venture within a three-foot radius of a human being, you know things aren’t exactly headed toward a joint bank account. In modern parlance, this is what’s known as a dealbreaker.

 

It wouldn’t be fair to Betty to let it rest there. She’s an incredibly nice person, and what’s more, the issue of her paint-peeling funk may not be wholly her own fault. It’s not an unclean odor that she emits, necessarily; it’s not as though she habitually sweats for an hour on the treadmill, hangs out at her local waste management facility, and then throws on her Sunday best for a night of cow-milking and horse-grooming. That kind of behavior would result in a smell that transcends space and time, opening up wormholes to other dimensions, and precipitating attacks on our planet from disgruntled, Men In Black-type space aliens. Thus far there haven’t been any three-eyed mercenaries from the Gorgon Galaxy battering down her door and demanding she take a shower. To my knowledge.

 

So it’s not a hygiene issue. Rather, the problem here is likely one of body chemistry – that mysterious alchemy which speaks to something more elemental in our natures. Attraction is an enigma; no one quite knows why one person may “feel” right, while another repels like so much bug spray. If I knew the answer, I’d be writing this from a nicer home. One with spiral staircases and hallways festooned with paintings of bananas.

 

I freely admit that this gripe smacks of superficiality, and I’m not proud of it. In a way, it’s a very “Seinfeld” problem to have. The characters of that venerable sitcom were, to put it mildly, some of the most shallow human beings on Earth; in one episode, Jerry explains to a friend that he once dumped a woman because she ate her peas one at a time. While I’m not venturing quite that far into the land of the absurdly nit-picky, it’s frustrating to be hung up on such a silly issue as body odor. I’m sure there were things I could have done to address it. Like stuff my nostrils with rose petals. Or gone on dates wearing an astronaut helmet. Or, you know, talked to her about it.

 

But that word – “dealbreaker” – remained stuck in my mind in flashing neon letters. You just can’t get over certain things. 

 

Now I’m no Mr. Perfect. In thinking about this issue, I realized I’ve got a pretty hefty collection of traits that could easily be dealbreakers, and a handful that may even indicate deep mental disturbances. A few off the top of my head: an obsessive-compulsive fixation on even numbers; an interest in Batman that’s wholly inappropriate for anyone over the age of 12; an inconsistent shaving schedule which often results in my looking like a train-hopping hobo; a chest that’s so hairy it makes a tearing Velcro sound when I take off a shirt; an irrational fear of cake; and a tendency to second-guess my own second-guessing, resulting in fourth-guessing to the eighth power. Which at least comes out to an even number.

 

On an unrelated note, I am now accepting referrals to psychiatrists.

 

Point being, there are things about me that another person may find unacceptable. We’ve all got things like that. Maybe you’ve got a nostril that always whistles when you exhale. Maybe you’re constantly fidgeting with rings, or blowing squeekers in public and blaming them on innocent children. Your spouse or significant other loves your nostril-whistling, ring-fidgeting, gas-passing ways, but that squeeze who dumped you during sophomore year in college? Not so much.

 

If a person is an assemblage of vices and virtues, then matching up with someone is a matter of accepting them, and having ours accepted in turn; our traits and values interlock like the teeth of a zipper. Why certain teeth mesh and others don’t is anyone’s guess. The term “dealbreaker” is a relatively new one in the dating lexicon, but it refers to an old phenomenon – that each of us, whether we’re aware of it or not, draw our own lines in the sand. In that sense, choosing a partner isn’t that much different from choosing a friend, pet, sweatshirt, or powdered doughnut. We like what we like. Simple.

 

I hope Ms. Boogerbubble finds the other half of her zipper. I do. Somewhere out there is a man who thinks she smells like fresh-cut grass on a spring breeze, and they’re going to make each other happy. 

 

The fact that he probably reeks like a hippopotamus belch passing through an onion is completely immaterial.

 

Scratch that

She seemed friendly enough, so I figured I’d start rubbing her face to see what happened.

 

“She,” by the way, was a Labrador retriever.

 

That made the whole scenario a lot less awkward. Actually, it was rather pleasant – a hard dose of puppy love to inject some innocent warmth into the workday. I was at the dog park in Biddeford, seeking some fun photo opportunities for the front page, and within five minutes I had a stash of adorable pictures of the year-old lab, bounding across the grass and leaping for soggy tennis balls. I’ll call the lab “Sasha,” not to protect her identity so much as to conceal my terrible memory for names. I call my dad “Dad” for the same reason. I think his real name starts with a “G.”

 

In Sasha’s little doggy brain, I was a Brand-New Human, so it was inevitable that she would come over to check me out, sniffing at various sensitive areas. I already had permission from the owner to grab her picture, so the next logical step was to indulge the panting lab and give her some good scratchin’ around the muzzle and ears. That’s my way of communicating to other species, “Your mug is so dang cute I could eat it up with a side of cabbage.”

 

That’s something you can get away with when it comes to K-9s. Try rubbing a random human’s face and you’ll probably get socked in the kisser, and deserve it. You’ll be trading teeth for a fun anecdote. It’s all about priorities, I guess.

 

There’s a different social protocol for every species we interact with. None of the rules for a friendly greeting are ever quite the same. For humans, the process goes something like this: Say, “Hi, good to see you,” or some variant thereof. If it’s a man, shake his hand – firm grip, single pump. If it’s a woman, a light hug may be appropriate, with two light finger-taps on her back, and an appropriate space left between torsos; no prolonged contact, lest you be thought a creeper or affection-starved hermit. These are the unspoken rules that govern society, and prevent family reunions from disintegrating into all-out war, with salad tongs and spatulas employed as short-range melee weapons. 

 

While these practices greatly reduce incidents of gut-punching and noogies, social rules change drastically when you meet, for example, a cat. Hypothetical: You’ve been invited to a friend’s house-warming party, and she announces it’ll be a pot luck, a veritable melange of salads and casseroles that taste vaguely like Tupperware. Not wanting to be outdone, you whip out your grandmother’s time-honored recipe for banana-nut-raisin-jalapeno-seaweed-Junior Mint cakes, which won a blue ribbon at the Penobscot French-Fries-and-Cow-Droppings County Fair. You outdo yourself. The finished product smells like a heavenly marriage of dryer sheets and Dr. Pepper. You bring over two trays of cakes (because one won’t be enough), make the rounds, secretly sneer at the mayo-rich pasta salad, and then, boom. Standing on the kitchen counter, whiskers twitching, is Poop Deck, a tabby cat so named because he once dookied on his owner’s yacht.

 

How do you greet Poop Deck? Do you reach out a hand, shake his paw, and tell him how lovely his home is? Does he hand you a glass of wine and make small talk about his scuba-diving expedition off the coast of Thailand? No. He sticks his butt out, and you scratch it. He purrs. Then he turns around and forcibly inserts his head into the hand-space once occupied by said butt. You start getting into it, working him under the neck and belly. Then he walks away and you never interact with him again in your life.

 

Now try scratching a random human’s butt and see where that gets you.

 

Guinea pigs, gerbils and other squirming mammals require perhaps the least social maintenance, whereby a greeting merely consists of acknowledging its existence. You simply point at it and say, “Hey, nice pet,” and then politely turn down a request to hold it because you don’t feel like playing pants-goalie to keep it from wriggling into your trousers. Splinter the Rat is just some strange presence in a plastic cage tucked into a corner of the living room, one’s constant awareness of him due mainly to a faint fur-and-wood-chips smell reminiscent of a poop-covered tree trunk. 

 

If, instead of a rat, Splinter were a juice-sipping toddler, this just would not fly. You’d make small talk, tell him you like his Spider-Man pajamas, and not comment on the fact that there’s a booger shaped like Slovenia dangling from his nostril. You might still have to keep him out of your pants, though. Finally, some overlap.

 

We homo sapiens have an odd relationship with the various critters of the animal kingdom. We cuddle the cute ones, eat the tasty ones, harness the strong ones and kill the annoying ones. We breed and feed and hunt and swat. The lines seem largely arbitrary. Who’s to say we couldn’t keep a cow as an outdoor pet rather than razing it for milk and beef? Who’s to say a pig, usually a meat source for sandwiches and Easter dinners, wouldn’t be equally enjoyable as a couch companion while we watch “Family Guy” with a tub of ice cream? The mere thought inspires me to start picking out names. Like Petey the Pig and Dairy Harry the Hulking Heifer. Jeez Louise, I need a damn hobby.

 

But when it comes to saying “hi,” nothing beats the staples. Cats may be distant and standoffish, but they offer us fuzzy butts, a handful of which can obliterate the blues with a pillow-soft injection of interspecies companionship. Plus when they purr it feels like a miniature vibrating recliner. That’s too weird to not be cool.

 

Dogs, well, they’re the masters of friendly greetings. When I was finished rubbing Sasha’s face, she leaned in close, suddenly curious to know more about this strange person showering her with affection. After a few sniffs around my cheek and chin, she tentatively stuck a tongue out and licked me once just below my right ear, as if to say, “Hello to you too, human! I like you. Let’s be friends.”

 

It wasn’t quite a bro-hug and complimentary beer, but I’ll take it.

 

Car go spinny, car go boom

There are no shortage of reasons to get nervous during the middle slog of a New England winter. This is gut-check time, when our nervous systems are assaulted by a smorgasbord of threats. Slippery sidewalks, car-burying blizzards – even walking outside to collect the mail is a pain in the tookus, what with temperatures that can cause an instant snot-mustache. By the time we get back inside, we’ve got more germs on our face than a dumpster-diving plague rat.

 

Then there’s driving. Things can get a bit dicey here.

 

I readily admit, I’m one of these guys who gets all high and mighty when it comes to his winter driving skills. Every year, when snow accumulation turns our neighborhoods into crystalline mazes of soul-draining hardpack, I can be heard muttering some version of the following: “Here we go, first storm of the season, and everyone’s forgotten how to drive in this stuff! Not me! I can drive in a squall with my eyes closed, one hand tied behind my back, and my pants stuffed with live bullfrogs! Bring it on!”

 

Reliably, you’ll hear this from some vainglorious boob. I am one of these boobs.

 

Is the boasting warranted? Possibly, in some cases. If you’re talking to a professional stunt driver, or one of those robot vehicles from “Transformers,” then sure, they can probably handle the slick conditions. I don’t see Mario Andretti experiencing much difficulty during a six-inch blast, unless snow and sleet is somehow accompanied by pianos and air conditioners. In that case, it may be best to just stay inside and start making plans for the apocalypse. I suggest whiskey and crying.

 

My own claims of automotive superiority may be slightly exaggerated. In a handful of instances, I may have found myself in a car that was kind of, sort of, a little totaled. Rather than take ownership of these events, I’ll attempt to blame it all on circumstance, while retaining a completely unjustifiable confidence in my roadworthiness. Let’s see how I do!

 

The most horrifying incident occurred just few days after Christmas in 2008. I was a sportswriter at the time, up to my neck in balls. I had just attended a girls basketball game at Massabesic High School in Waterboro, and was driving back to Biddeford in a nutty snowstorm, the kind where most of the creatures on the road are either snowplow drivers or directionally challenged penguins. I wouldn’t have been out and about had it not been for work, since conditions are typically safer on a NASCAR track pockmarked with landmines than they are on a Maine road during a Nor’easter. Not to mention that my car at the time was a front-wheel-drive travesty of a Buick, about as sure-footed in snow as a three-legged camel.

 

All was going well until I started a steep decline down a dizzyingly vertical hill. Normally I would have coasted, since braking on an unplowed road is only marginally safer than wandering into a lion’s cave wearing roast beef underwear. But traveling in the opposite direction was a van, just approaching the foot of the hill as I began my descent. Stupid vans. Always shady, even when they’re not transporting bricks of Turkish hashish.

 

I did what you’re supposed to do. Rather than slamming on the brakes, which would have caused me to carom down into the quasi-valley in a series of gnarly doughnuts, I tapped the brakes lightly, trying to maintain control. Except there was ice. Lots of it. And I totally blame it for the head-on collision.

 

Collisions, I found out, are what happen when your wheels lock up. Fun! Now fortunately, the van people could see what was going to happen, and had come to a complete stop – leaving me to slam into their front end at about 10 miles per hour. That wasn’t enough to hurt anyone, thank goodness; the surprisingly unshady group of adults and children was shaken, but physically fine, as was I. The force of impact was, however, enough to crumple my grill as though it were a discarded Pepsi can. The wheel well looked like the Shredder’s helmet at the end of the first Ninja Turtles movie, and if you get that reference, you’re dorkier than I am.

 

The Buick was no more. I had it towed away, got a ride back to work from a nearby friend, and did what comes naturally in these situations: Wrote a story about a basketball game. It may not have been my best work. 

 

There have been other incidents, including an unwise highway excursion during a snowstorm in college – in which I completed at least three 360-degree spins at 50 miles per hour down ice-slicked blacktop, a feat to make Evel Knieval soil his knickers. I credit my survival to blind panic. I mean instinct.

 

But you know what? My confidence hasn’t been rattled. Maybe spins, slides, and crashes have lent me the requisite experience to handle these types of situations. Or maybe I stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that I’m sorta crappy at driving. It’s one of the two.

 

Either way, I’m the guy you hear bragging, oblivious to the many snow banks he’s straddled while out on pizza runs. If you see me or any of my trash-talking brethren out on the road, probably the best thing to do is to pull into the nearest gas station, exit your vehicle, and hide behind one of the pumps.

 

I may say I won’t hit you, but with the major thaw still weeks away, there’s really just no way to tell.

Snow big deal

“Blizzard” has become something of a dirty word in recent years. That comes with age. What once was an opportunity for all-day video game marathons and movie matinees on the television is now a daunting assignment: Shovel your way out from underneath nature’s diarrhea-dump of snow, try not to blow out your back, and stumble into work with icy nostrils and a renewed distaste for the masochists’ paradise that is winter. Then maybe in the evening you start looking at time-share opportunities in Arizona.

 

And here I thought we’d have a chance at avoiding that fate this season. I am, to put it mildly, a foolishly optimistic ninny.

 

Can I be blamed for that? We’ve had it pretty easy so far, you have to admit. After a mild December, I delighted in what appeared to be the complete and total wrongness of the Farmer’s Almanac, which predicted a snowy, brutal winter – the kind of winter you hear old farts reminiscing about over gin and coffee in front of a crackling fireplace.

 

“Remember the blizzard of ’68, Herb? We were buried in snow up to our nipples and had to burrow our way to the mailbox like moles. We survived by wrapping ourselves in molten lead. It was all Bev and I could do to keep from going stir-crazy, but hey, nine months later Junior was born, so it wasn’t a total loss! Hawhawhaw!”

 

Well, I don’t have a Bev.

 

What I do have is bitterness over the relentless one-two punch we’ve taken on the chin this week. I still don’t put much stock in the Farmer’s Almanac – historically, it’s been right only about 50 percent of the time, which are the same odds you get from coin flips and lucky rabbits’ feet – but at the moment, it appears its authors are laughing their silly heads off. Winter’s been storing its nastiest accumulation for a handful of epic events, the kind that revive those old snow-day memories like reanimated zombies.

 

Only, like a zombie, this new incarnation of the snow day is twisted, evil, and should be shotgun-blasted in the face. Not to be graphic or anything.

 

It’s all about the stage of life in which you find yourself. Hop in the time machine with me and take a trip back to January 1994, will you? I was 12 years old, a sixth-grader at Martel Elementary School in Lewiston, and I had nothing ahead of me but time – oceans of it, stretching into an infinite future of Batman comics and rock candy. Because time moved so slowly, a single snow day held the promise of everlasting adventure: Snow forts and snowball fights, books and blankets, cheese ravioli for breakfast. There were no rules during a snow day. It was a temporary vacation from my own life, a connection to my rough-living forebears, who spent four months of the year nibbling on pre-dried squirrel meat and blowing on their fingers to keep them from falling off. In my young boy’s imagination, I could envision myself as a stoic Puritan settler, but with the bonus that I could break from this fantasy at whim, curl under an electric blanket, and play “Super Metroid” while blasting “I Saw The Sign” by Ace of Base. That was a big song that year. YouTube it, it’s embarrassing.

 

Earlier this week I experienced my first real snow day since those halcyon times, although the vibe was pretty far removed from the ice-chucking days of yore. For one thing, it wasn’t a true snow day in that I worked. Granted, I worked from home, taking frequent breaks to experiment with which foods in my home could be shoehorned into a sandwich. But still, work is work. I don’t remember doing much math homework during snow days when I was 12. Or any other days, for that matter.

 

The other big change is that I’m now The Responsible One. A snow day is no free pass for The Responsible One. Far from it. No, The Responsible One is charged with Buying Provisions, Sticking It Out, and Maintaining the Home, all phrases which warrant capitalization. I’ve traded snow forts for shovels, video games for ice-caked eyebrows, and movie marathons for pushing cars out of snowbanks. Jack Frost holds us hostage so completely you’d think he was an armed terrorist. The difference is that armed terrorists tend to be nicer.

 

There is, however, something to be said for coziness. Once the sore-muscle chores have been completed, and the cold showered out of my bones, all that’s left is hot tea, good books, and a giant bowl of Fruity Pebbles – which, if fired from a cannon, could blow a hole in the hull of a submarine. 

 

It’s a far cry from a child’s winter nirvana, chiefly because it’s a mere reward for the hard work and spirit-sucking responsibility that comes with cold-weather survival. But it’s something. This past Tuesday, I stood at my kitchen window, warm beverage in hand, watching nature’s tempest transform my street into one of Jupiter’s frozen moons, the glow of streetlamps my only indication that I remained on Earth. Angry winds lashed my building, snowdrifts formed knowing smirks of white powder around the edges of the windowsill, and I knew the following morning would be all grunting and heaving, scraping and groaning. Yet there was a pocket of time – the ever-fleeting present – in which I remembered those giddy mornings lying next to the radio, listening for that blissful cancellation announcement. The long afternoons, the snowmen and sledding; those old feelings are only a snowstorm away, if you’re lucky enough to know which parts of yourself to access. Maybe you’ve got to be in a certain mindset,  but there was a moment, standing there, when I thought, “You know what? This is okay.”

 

Then I tossed on some Ace of Base. ’Cause when you’re feeling nostalgic, man, only those old sweet sounds will do.