My husband can clearly distinguish and identify the subtle differences between colors that to most of us look the same.  He’s quite proud of his 20/20 vision too.  I have something similar but a little farther down.  No, not that far down.  I have a disturbingly acute sense of smell.  I do appreciate it sometimes because I am a gardener and I’ve been able to distinguish petunia colors with my eyes closed.   I swear I can do that with Mr. Lincoln and Chrysler Imperial roses even though CI is a parent of ML.   And, foods!  I can get orgasmic over the blend of sautéed onion, garlic, and ginger that begins my carrot-ginger soup but who wouldn’t.  I’m particularly grateful for the time I could smell the difference in my cat’s breath and got her to the vet to discover she was suffering from kidney failure.  She’s still with us thanks to some miracle drugs. 

There are a lot of things I just really don’t want to smell though.   There are mornings on my walk to work that I have to cover my nose because the smell of car exhaust is truly too much for me to take.   No one else seems to notice.  I can hardly stand the smell of my clothes because I can distinctly smell the gas from the gas dryers.  Perhaps one of the most interesting things is my ability to smell someone’s pot stash.  I like to start “impromptu” discussions about weed just to torture them a bit.  Maybe I can get a city job in the K-9 unit.  Husband thinks I’m nuts. 

But the one thing that really makes me wish I was born like Patrick from Spongebob is the presence of all the colognes and perfumes out there.  I walk through the throngs of midriff-baring, makeup-wearing, hair-gelled, shaved chest eurotrash and their wannabes clustered in front of the clubs on my street and it’s like every annoying department store perfume sampler just parked their polluting selves right up in my olfactory.   I’ve taken to timing a deep intake of breath so I can let it all out as I walk through them but I swear little scent monsters jump off like fleas and attach themselves to me as I pass.  It takes another half block to brush it off.  Once, I got a quesadilla from the Chexican place across the street only to discover I couldn’t eat it because the bag I got it in smelled very strongly of some hideous drug store cologne that the nice Mexican guy at the grill probably used to cover up the fact that he’d already worked two other jobs that day.  The stuff got on my hands and wouldn’t wash off.  There was one morning when I got stuck on a very crowded subway next to a woman who absolutely must have spilled the stuff she was wearing.  It wasn’t winter time so I couldn’t pull a scarf over my nose even if it would have helped.  It was truly torture and left me with a sore throat and a headache. 

The other day, I was on my way to the post office to mail off a package to  a fellow OSer when I stopped at the diner to indulge in a good old grilled cheese.  There is something I love about sitting  by myself in a diner.  It’s a fun exercise in people watching/people ignoring.  The whole experience is just benign and average enough to let yourself get lost for a little bit.  About midway through my grilled cheese and daydreaming, these two guys came in and sat in the next booth.  I suddenly had a brand new meal – grilled cheese and Gray Flannel.  There just isn’t a good way to get that off your tongue. 

I’ve come to realize that it’s generally organic smells in which  I can take pleasure and the man-made ones that make me wretch.  I feel like a canary in a coal mine and I’m the only one who can warn the rest of the world about the damage being done to all of us by the overwhelming presence of chemical pollutants.  But that’s hard to do when those less well-situated in the smell department look at you like you’re loony when you ask “do you smell that?”