Posted by Erin
on
17 June 2010
One of the people who made the biggest impact on my early life was my maternal grandfather. After a hardscrabble childhood in Glasgow, he immigrated to Canada as a young man with his parents and sister to train as a draftsman and parts engineer. An aptitude for the work and for study in general made him a success within a few years and he was soon able to provide his family with the sort of respectable, cozy comforts that they had always aspired to in their homeland.
People of his generation and background approvingly described him as “a careful man” — a certain sort of sober fussiness being viewed at that time as one of the proudest and most patriotic of Scottish virtues — and he was as meticulous and discerning about his pleasures as he was about everything else. Our own, less kind era might hang the label of “OCD” on his morning hygiene and dressing routines, his fastidious care of such household objects as clocks, vinyl records or decorative biscuit tins, or his use of a level to straighten all the picture frames in the house once a week.
Despite his enjoyment of many small, bourgeois luxuries, I am proud to say he was an optimistic, open-minded and politically progressive man for his day and one of the most enduring, if frivolous, symptoms of his faith in the goodness and intelligence of all human beings was his insistence on ordering a very specific gin martini (very dry, one olive, glass frozen) wherever we went…
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Posted by Erin
on
30 March 2010
When I was pregnant with my daughter, my husband and I attended prenatal classes. Discussing strategies for birthing pains, the instructor asked us to practice visualizing our so-called “happy place”, the location in each of our lives that felt the most comforting, peaceful and self-affirming. She suggested mentally escaping the delivery to a favorite beach, a summer cottage or a honeymoon hotel in Europe. My husband frowned at me sternly. “Are you visualizing being in bed?” My guilty look confirmed this. “Not helpful. You’re going to be in a bed,” he said, shaking his head, “and it won’t be restful.” I try to make a point of acknowledging the occasions when he is right, and boy, he was spot-on that time.
Luckily, no labor, viral illness or bout of the vivid nightmares to which I am prone has ever lastingly tainted the experience of my bed for me. It seems only natural to perfume that place of refuge, my land of dreams. Sometimes, close friends or relatives ask why I bother spritzing or dabbing scent on at night, just before I fall as insensible as a stone. It is hard to describe to someone who is not a fragrance fanatic the secret joy of waking in the wee hours, when the world is black and hushed, to snuffle at your wrist. Or the feeling of well-being that comes over you on a sun-washed weekend morning when you wake up under a gently-scented duvet…
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Posted by Erin
on
27 November 2009
My guess is that most obsessive perfume samplers have the equivalent of Robin’s purgatory basket. As someone who suffers from chronic indecision, I have a large collection of scents I just can’t decide whether I like or not, separated into a series of elegant “snack-sized” plastic freezer bags. Every couple of months I retrieve all of these baggies and place them on my bed, along with two larger plastic tubs, which house, respectively, fragrances in the current rotation (scents in good standing) and samples that I see every couple of months when I perform this ritual (the tub of no return). I spread the contents of the purgatory bags over my duvet and begin picking through the vials and atomizers, sorting them into piles: judgement rendered, cult favorites that need one more try, scents that have somehow eluded skin-testing. Like Robin, I always end up with a pile of scents that stubbornly resist categorization and tubbing. As my spouse looks on with bafflement and mild disapproval, I return these fragrances to the twilight, limbo land of the snack bag.
The firmer, sterner souls among you probably agree with my husband. With multiple new fragrances being launched every single day, why does anyone bother trying to puzzle out their complicated relationship with one? Well, my problem is that I often prefer the interesting to the simply likable…
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Posted by Erin
on
2 October 2009
I come from a family of what you might call theatre people. In university, my mother starred in a number plays, including a nationally reviewed production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which featured my mother — smoking! cursing! — as Martha as well as a young Martin Short as Nick. After school, she was accepted to train at Canada’s largest classical repertory theatre, but she decided to go to teacher’s college instead. As a drama teacher one of her most enthusiastic students has been my middle brother, who has acted and written for the stage and is now pursuing his doctorate studying Modern American theatre. Since she retired, Mom mounts annual plays or musical revues, often with a cast involving sixty or more residents of her small town. Though my father, youngest brother and I are seldom assigned lines, we are always called upon to prompt, to manage props, spotlights and sound boards, or to play corpses.
It is time to admit that we do not have “presence”. I don’t think any member of my family has ever attempted to sweep majestically into a room… unless the entrance was preparation for a pratfall. (Both of my brothers have a talent for slapstick.) I will never be the woman Angela conjured out of Jean Patou’s Que-sais je?: “elegant, with a difficult background and maybe bipolar tendencies”. There are days I am relieved by this, of course, and especially the bipolar part. Occasionally, however, it would be nice to feel a bit like Greta Garbo, and a little less like somebody from Waiting for Guffman. One of the wonderful things about fragrance is that I can scent myself as if I am the star of my own life…
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Posted by Erin
on
14 August 2009
The first and only time I went to Italy I was sixteen, and on a six-week trip of Europe with a large group of girls who had fundraised for the trip through Girl Guides (Scouts). Using the blitzkrieg method of Old World sightseeing favored by many generations of North American young people, we “did” Italy by spending a day-and-a-half in Venice. It was high summer and with the callousness of youth, I wrote Venice off with a few lines in my travel diary: “It’s like a museum covered in pigeon poop. The canals smell of sewage, and there is a haze hanging over the water. No oilies as of yet.” This last bit was because our uniforms apparently made us look like an enormous gaggle of young stewardesses and so we attracted camps of hopeful, slick fellows most places we went. Despite their absence in Venice, I came away with an impression of the place that might have turned me into the sort of traveler who discouraged Kevin. The recent garbage strike in my hometown of Toronto has made me realize you can catch a city on a bad day (or month) — but even in 1993, years before my perfume obsession began, I was hypersensitive to smells, good and bad. As far as I was concerned, Italy stunk.
It was puzzling, though, that my parents kept returning there. “Table wines are cheaper than Coke,” my father explained, when I asked why they kept going back. (Perhaps this brief, thrift-related response helps clarify that my parents are not of Italian descent and therefore returning to visit the mother country; Scotland is the land of our fathers.) Since my parents are not enthusiastic photographers, I tried to determine the attraction of this region listening to stories of their travels…
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