The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
My grandmother celebrated her 90th birthday at the small, tumbledown house where she raised 10 children. There was a huge store-bought cake (a rarity in my mom’s family of proud bakers) with a decorative plastic crown in the middle holding a single candle. After the festivities had ended, the various family members got in their cars to return home. Since we lived just a few miles away, we were the last to leave. The remnants of the cake had been wrapped and put in the fridge for Grandma to enjoy – even at her advanced age she had a sweet tooth – but the crown had been set aside and was going to be discarded.
“Can I have that?” I sheepishly asked my mother.
“Why on earth would you want a plastic crown?”
“Oh, I have an idea for it.”
Mother shrugged and handed it to me, absently licking the last bit of icing from the base.
When we got home, I was anxious to see if my hypothesis had been correct and was pleased to find that the plastic crown, still sporting a stub of burned-down candle, fit perfectly on the head of the statue of the Virgin Mary we kept on a small table against the wall in our dining room. Mom stared blankly, trying to decide if this was sacrilege or reverence, but ultimately landed on the latter, and the crown stayed. A day or two later, I decided that to REALLY honor Mary, I should probably light the candle. After doing so, I returned to the cartoon I was watching in the next room. It wasn’t long before I smelled something burning and hurried back to the dining room to find the smoldering remnants of the crown melting down Mary’s face onto the table below. You know that scene at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” with the Ark of the Covenant and the Nazis? Yeah, kind of like that.
I have no recollection of what the punishment for my heretical transgression was – the human brain blocks out such things as a way of maintaining sanity. Suffice it to say that my mother could come up with methods of discipline that would make the creators of the “Saw” franchise queasy. The enduring result was that it was a very long time before I was again allowed access to the matches.
The Virgin conflagration aside, I’ve never been a firebug. The flames themselves don’t interest me that much, but I’ve always had an odd fascination with the smell of scented candles, potpourri, incense and even pipe smoke or the haze from a good cigar.
Smell is the only sense that is processed directly by the cerebral cortex. Because scent skips the thalamus, smells can enter our brains and attach to memories without our consciously registering or processing them. Research shows smell is the only sense that is active even while we sleep or are in a coma. It is also why smells can evoke such powerful memories and emotions. The lone bathroom of my parents’ house got a lot of use, and a can of air “freshener” was kept within easy reach of the commode. Mom always purchased the same rose scent. That scent, which I imagine conjures thoughts of fresh bouquets of pink and red flowers to most people, evokes in me a gag reflex.
Raised in the Catholic faith, I was no stranger to the ceremonial purposes of incense, but it wasn’t until junior high I realized it could be used as a common air freshener, as well. One of my teachers burned a cone of strawberry now and then to keep the classroom smelling good. (Not sure you could get away with that today, but, well … the ’70s.) I convinced my mom to buy an incense starter kit on our next family shopping trip. It came with a green ceramic pagoda-shaped burner and a dozen assorted incense cones. I took to it like a chain smoker to unfiltered Camels and burned through the assortment in a couple of days. My favorite was wisteria, although I also liked sandalwood and pine. I was less enthusiastic about the fruit flavors; who wants to smell a lime burning?
I would dabble with incense on and off through high school, but it wasn’t until my junior year I found what I would come to think of as my “signature” scent, coconut. For an Ohio boy trapped in the chilly bedroom of his snow-covered house, that smell was a welcome olfactory journey to a sunny Caribbean beach.
I still light one up from time to time; incense, that is. My taste these days tends toward frankincense, which, ironically, is the smell of those long-ago Catholic masses. I guess all that is old will indeed be new again. And that’s why I have a firm “no crown” cake policy.
Author’s note: I may not have been the only one to have a problem with that cake-topper. In researching this column, I searched the Internet far and wide for a picture of a similar crown candle and found nothing even vaguely similar. I suspect a few too many ruined cakes.