When I smell jasmine, I think about brain development.
Earning a thorough grasp of child psychology is the end result of years of formal education. You learn neurology, you learn body chemistry, you learn brain chemistry. You learn how speech works, how the brain alters itself for language. You learn empathy. There are entire books about empathy. It's easy to visualize brain development as a product of CGI: brain grey like an electron scanning microscope, pulses crusing through neurons visibly, like electricity. But it's quieter than that. Invisible, and more beautiful.
Children rescued from closets have taught us that if you don't learn to speak before puberty, you never will. We are born with a pliable brain. It evolves with language, with interaction with other humans. As we grow older, our brain becomes less pliable, less evolutionary. And development of speech requires a lot of moving wires.
My brain and my mouth don't work in sync. Somehow my wiring didn't develop correctly. So when I say a sentence off the cuff, half the words are mispronounced. Vowels get switched, or my mouth and throat simply stop working mid-word. Expressing complex thoughts is out of the question much of the time.
So when I speak, when I really control my speech, it frequently takes the form of short, terse, deliberate sentences. My auditory memory's a bit fibbled too — a lot of "what did you say?" The information's there, it's clear, but it doesn't get absorbed. So real-time communication is difficult. Occasionally I can get past it, speak fluidly: then I'm asked where the eloquence came from. But I'm not a phone person.
It's fine, though once it wasn't. I wouldn't be the same otherwise. I wouldn't regard words with the same respect. Being a goofy speaker has taught me valuable things. When you make a habit of silence people really listen when you talk. I like that.
The point here: clipped tone, asking the person you're speaking with to repeat themselves at least once — not good for dealing with children. Kids don't enunciate; they don't speak clearly. The language barrier with kids is much wider than auditory memory.
And they cry when you're terse with them.
So, having kids around equals feeling like the Frankenstein monster.
I worked in retail, in a chain store that sells expensive furniture and housewares. I tried to stay away from customers as much as possible, passing my time processing stock — much of which was glass or earthenware. I sympathize with food servers who elicit claps when they drop glasses. The same thing happened to me whenever a hand-painted charger or a vase of subtly-glazed terra cotta chiseled with exotic flowers slipped from my hands and loudly became dust on the floor. Clap, clap, clap.
I worked the Christmas season. Working retail at Christmas is hard. One day in a mid-December I was adjusting shelves for scented candles, thinking of the routes of the amygdala, of the Proust effect, thinking that from hereafter every time I would chance to smell a jasmine blossom I would think of these paraffin pillars for ten dollars, and what it's like to have twenty minutes until my break.
The shelf slipped, fell, candles clattering everywhere. The metal brackets that hooked into slats in the wall came down, cut my arms. I Grit my teeth. Didn't cuss.
Dude by the door started clapping.
A minute or two passed, people milling around, me groping under furniture for candles. I looked up and saw a pair of very small feet.
This was a girl standing there about three years old. Fat in the arms, holding a candle out to me. I took it, put it on the shelf. Said nothing. She walked a few steps, picked up another candle, brought it back, held it out to me. We repeated process maybe five or six times, me afraid to make any sudden movements, or any sounds, as though I were face to face with a bear.
People passing by stepped over candles. As I kneeled, someone stood next to me to reach the top shelf for some of our new cranberry citrus scents. She braced her knee against my shoulder a little. The little girl, emboldened by the success of her efforts, proceeded to return the candles to the shelf herself, one at a time. She put them back crooked, some sideways, but I didn't fix them.
Eventually, I said, very carefully, "Thank you; you're a good helper." And I braced myself for her to take off running.
Instead, she smiled huge and thrust a candle to me. I'm a good helper. Here.
Someone passing by said, "How cute is that?"
For the first and last time that day, I smiled huge. "Do you like these candles?"
She nodded. Yes I like these candles. Here. Handed me another. Smell of jasmine.
Today, the scent of jasmine reminds me of the development of empathy, of neurons connecting with imagined flashes of electricity; and moreso, of being happy, of feeling warm with a sky overcast with cold.
I still like jasmine.