Several years before I was born my older cousin, Tom, gave my mother a bottle of perfume. She loved the stuff but by the time she used it down to a little brown bubble at the bottom of the bottle label was gone. I can still remember her Sunday church smell. She kept the plain looking bottle in a red fake leather jewelry box.
She looked for more but never found it so I took up the search; I really wanted to please my mother. I kept looking through half of my adult life. Every Mother’s Day, birthday, Christmas, and Easter, and in between I never found the scent I remembered.
When I was too young to shop alone my Dad took me. First I’d sneak into my Mom’s room to entrench the scent onto my memory. Lifting the lid of the red box I inhaled deeply because the little bottle infumed its insides. Dad and I looked, or rather smelled, our way through town but never found it in either Omaha nor Lincoln Nebraska, so I usually settled for a set of handkerchiefs. Disappointed, I talk myself into knowing I’d found such a wonderfully odd color combination that Mom would forget all past handkerchiefs I’d given her.
My Dad would wonder then assure me the color I selected was perfect, although he was color blind enough to see them as only variations of greys. He was no artist as Mom and I claimed to be; the only visual he attempted was photography; producing boxes and boxes of slides.
Throughout the fifties my father, along with many others, collected a month’s worth of slides then pull out a monster, big black, heavy chunk, of a metal. A slid projector. He placed it on a metal hostess table, on wheels. He’d stationed this at one end of the living room and he’d position a large thing looking like it launched satellites at the other. It stood up on small tripod legs. He unhooked the top of the screen, rotated it perpendicular to the floor, unrolled it, and hooked its top metal loop to secure it from unrolling and we were set.
During the set up time Mom made popcorn and we’d cozy down into our favorite chairs munching as Dad explained, in detail, each piece of scenery as he click clicked each slide through the projector. My family was lucky enough not to have too much money when I was growing up so I’d only gone to the movies three times before I was twenty. While sitting in the dark we’d pretend we were at a Disney show, although I never could quite pull that one off.
The slides were seen by Mom, Don, and I as a first run through. The second showing was given to the neighbors with the same slides and words, but a new batch of popcorn. The sides piled up in the basement and I don’t think were ever saw again after the two showings, but the EVENTS made memories
John bought an old projector and screen for us about ten years ago. We photographed my art and I went around to galleries making appointments. We’d set everything up, but the popcorn, and I gave the gallery owners a slide show. I sat in a chair like my Dad explaining all they saw.
I was shocked the first time John unrolled the screen. IT SMELLED LIKE MY MOTHER! MY mother’s jewelry box was mock plastic. The same material the screen was made of! All those years I’d been looking for a perfume that smelled like a PROJECTOR SCREEN!
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