Gordon Davidescu wrote this article.
It all started a few nights ago. It was sometime early in the morning, far earlier than I would ever consider waking up. I was in the middle of what seemed to be quite a bizarre dream. I was with my father at his house and we were listening to the music of Adriano Celentano – with good reason, I think.
I was proud to be a resident of the State of New Jersey yesterday as Governor Corzine signed into law the abolishment of capital punishment.
It’s Thanksgiving and I spent the morning helping Janna get on a Continental Airlines flight from Newark, New Jersey to Council Bluffs, Iowa via Omaha, Nebraska, so she can bury her father.
Continue reading → The Continental Airlines Bereavement Fare Scam
Handguns are made to kill people. We know this in our bones because of murders in Far Rockaway and Fulham and Orange and now, once again, in Newark. The bloodshed in New Jersey, spewed Gangland style, killed three kids and injured another on an abandoned schoolyard in a tonier part of Newark — where this sort of thing doesn’t happen — called Ivy Hill.
I thought the whole reason we are slogging through the war in Iraq is to keep the Terrorists “there” and not “here?” That, at least, is the war drum President Bush has been beating and still beats. In a 2003 interview — published on the White House website — Bush makes it clear the Terrorists will remain “over there” as long as we stay there engaging them in Iraq (emphasis added):
Q: Well, what about the suggestion from your critics that while you won the war, the peace is being bungled? THE PRESIDENT: They’re wrong. We’re making great progress in Iraq. We’ve got a pretty steep hill to climb. After all, one, we’re facing a bunch of terrorists who can’t stand freedom. These thugs were in power for awhile, and now they’re not going to be in power anymore, and they don’t like it. And they’re willing to kill innocent people. Their terrorist activities — we’d rather fight them there than here.
The other day Janna went into one of the local shops in our Jersey City neighborhood to buy some food. Janna is Deaf and she usually chooses not to use her voice with strangers because if you use your voice then you are expected to vocally communicate on both sides of the conversation and that puts her at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding what is being spoken by a large immigrant population with many accents and unique vocalizations that are impossible to always comprehend and interpret.
Yesterday in New York and New Jersey we experienced the strang
e and pungent odor of natural gas. No one could explain then and no one, even today, can begin to explain now. What’s going on in the urban core?
The olfactory mystery in the New York region was matched by strange activity elsewhere. In Austin, Tex., police cordoned off 10 blocks of the downtown business district early yesterday after more than 60 birds were found dead overnight along Congress Avenue, which leads to the State Capitol.Air testing there failed to find a cause, but preliminary results determined that people were not at risk. In New York, the piercing odor was the talk of Manhattan, and it called to mind another mystery: the maple syrup odor that people reported smelling on separate days in late 2005 and whose source has never been established. In yesterday’s case, several people said they were overcome by the odor.
There are two pencil factories in Jersey City. One is the 150-year old Dixon Ticonderoga pencil factory that now warehouses 467 apartments instead of pencils and erasers. The other is the 120-year-old General Pencil Company that lives a block away from me on Fleet Street.
Orange, New Jersey Detective Kieran Shields was pronounced dead on Tuesday at University Hospital in Newark. A shotgun blast, aimed from above in an ambush-style slaying, penetrated his neck and shattered his collarbone just missing the protection of his bullet-proof vest.
In a recent article, Every Time I Talk to You, I Hear Sirens, we discussed how sounds define your environment. Today, using the same places described in the previous article, I hope we can investigate if smell is even more strongly related to place and memory than sound.
Is smell more valuable than hearing?
Washington, D.C. – Eastern Market:
We lived near the Eastern Market Metro station. There was a large, indoor, sort of farmer’s market nearby – that gave the train station its name — we passed through every day. The food was always fresh. The smell of raisin scones embedded in your clothes was a warm and welcome scent that perfumed you throughout the work day and reminded you that, no matter what happened, your scones always loved you.
New York City — Columbia University:
When we were living in Morningside Heights near Columbia, The City had a garbage strike. When an urban core has to deal with a garbage strike in the dead of summer things quickly begin to rot on the sidewalk. And in the streets. And in your mouth. And there is no harbor from the stench of six foot mounds of black garbage bags that line every sidewalk and street corner. Even if you breathe through your mouth you still smell the putrid sting of vomit that bleeds into every crevice and populates every pore.
Continue reading → Every Time I Think of You, I Smell Something
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