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Smell what you will

It’s getting on towards bedtime as we drive home from church. There’s a powerful odor of boy-feet wafting from the back seat. Professor and Jackrabbit are altar servers, which means they’ve been afflicting the priest, deacons, and other servers with that foot funk. I announce that they’re taking baths when we get home.

The negotiation begins. The negotiation is always the same. Do we have to wash our whole body? All of it? Surely not the hair, Papa. Please, we beg you, not the hair.

It’s been a long week, so I agree to limit my bath fatwa to their feet. On account of I can smell those feet from where I sit. We get home and they set to it. I hear the water running, the splishy-splash of washing, the inevitable tumble off the bathtub’s edge. Finally, they present their feet for inspection.

Nobody warns you that crouching to smell feet and sniff breath will be among the duties you adopt after you procreate.

They don pajamas and prepare for bed. I draw them close for hugs, and this is when I smell in their hair the sweetest admixture of little boy and incense. Somehow they smell both familiar and otherworldly.

Holy, even.

I read once that smell is one of the earliest senses to emerge in babies. It’s how we tell our mamas from the frightening multitude of not-mamas out there. As a consequence, smells can affect us deeply. They don’t just remind us of lost loves, of mama’s kitchen, of that terrifying night in the ER—in a way they can pull us into those places again.

And maybe sometimes they can even draw us heavenward.

C.S. Lewis observed that every person we meet is either an immortal horror or an everlasting splendor. “There are no ordinary people,” he wrote. “You have never talked to a mere mortal.” Of course he didn’t mean that every person is purely evil or purely good. We all bear within us some profanity, and some divinity. Over the course of our lives, we choose which part to nurture.

And we choose also which part we see, and hear—and yes, smell—in others, including our own children. The stinky feet or the heavenly hair.

And what we see in them, well, that’s what they learn to see in themselves, isn’t it?

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The ripple effect

My son is staying home from school today because he’s afraid he might get shot. Rumors are swirling about a group of kids talking, possibly even planning to bring guns to school. We’re told the authorities are involved. Who knows what’s real? My son says one of the supposed plotters doesn’t like him. He’s afraid he’ll be looking down the barrel of a shotgun or pistol or whatever else children can nowadays get their hands on regardless of their mental state.

I don’t know anything about that kid, and I doubt most of the rumors are true. But I know, you know, our children know: This is our world now. The world we’ve made for our children.

I say We because of the ripples we all of us create during our lifetimes. I’m thinking of the old neighbor who always welcomed me into his workshop while he tinkered, to ask all the questions I wanted. Of a woman on my street with a house full of books and no TV that I ever saw, who used to welcome me in, give me cookies, let me sit dropping crumbs all over her nice chairs, and talk with me. I have no recollection what either of these adults ever talked with me about. I only know that to this day I love to be in workshops and rooms full of books.

Mister Rogers and Officer Clemmons

And I think as well about the people I’ve either wronged or been kind to, and how they went on to wrong or be kind to others, perhaps the momentary decision turning on how I treated them. And so on, and so on. Yes, this is the world we’ve made. Are making.

There’s a wonderful essay by the reporter portrayed in last year’s movie about Mister Rogers, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. In it he ponders what Fred Rogers would have thought about school shooters:

“The easy answer is that it is impossible to know, because he was from a different world, one almost as alien to us now as our mob-driven world of performative slaughters would be to him. But actually, I think I do know, because when I met him, one of the early school shootings had just taken place, in West Paducah, Kentucky—eight students shot while they gathered in prayer. Though an indefatigably devout man, he did not attempt to characterize the shootings as an attack on the faithful; instead, he seized on the news that the 14-year-old shooter had gone to school telling his classmates that he was about to do something ‘really big,’ and he asked, ‘Oh, wouldn’t the world be a different place if he had said, “I’m going to do something really little tomorrow”?'”

He went on to devote a week of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to talking with children about how being little doesn’t mean unimportant. How they can do big things by first doing little things. He gave them hope that their lives matter, that everyone’s life can be a good one.

Which I suppose is true for any of us. It’s why we focus here on building up small fathering habits. Because of the ripples all around us. C.S. Lewis once wrote that everyone we meet is either an immortal horror or an everlasting splendor. And if you believe in ripples you understand that, intentionally or not, you play a part in which of these a person becomes.