Parfum

Summer after my sophomore year of college my mom and I took a trip to France. We did lots of fun things like roam around the countryside looking at churches with C. and eat rich food with silly names, and we also went perfume shopping. Perhaps I had just been reading too many gay men's memoirs where they talked about how stylish their mothers were, but I decided that I really needed to have "a scent" [you know, for my nonexistent gay son to remember me by] and I smelled 100 little strips of cardboard in an effort to find one, and finally I did. And I really, really liked it. I started wearing this perfume pretty much every day from about June 2000 to June 2002, when I decided that the most important thing was to smell as unappealing as possible in an effort to scare away fatal-disease-carrying mosquitoes.

And then I came back to the US and the last remaining milliliter of perfume sat in its little bottle and I made $7 an hour and tried to distance myself from all things collegiate. Until I went to New York last month. And I visited the enormous Times Square branch of the Parisian perfume megalopolis and started smelling the little sticks again. Which, of course, all smelled ickily like perfume. Until I got to the one that I used to wear. Which, oddly enough, just smelled like me.

So I came home, discovered that Amazon sells it for 40% off, and bought a bottle. That arrived today. And, am now probably part of a very small group of people proud to say, "Hey, I smell just like I did in college."