Sometimes if I try really hard I can summon a smell in my head. It doesn’t work with taste or with sensation. And since I’m the only measure for man, I suppose it can’t be done. If it could be done — if you could raise feelings of touch and if you could raise tastes just by thinking — masturbation would be tons better. It’s probably better, now that I think of it, that it can’t be done. Or that I can’t do it, which I already said is the same thing. Still, I can do it with smell. But only when I’m trying really hard. I’m trying really hard. It comes and it goes. Like bad reception on an antennae television. But it’s thrilling when it comes.

I’m picking up the smell of my hometown post office right now. My hometown post office smelled (smells, the last time I checked) unlike anything else and it always smelled the same. Not just when I was a kid but when I was a teenager too, it smelled exactly the same. Winter. Spring. Summer. The same. It’s difficult to say of what it smelled. Because nothing else smelled like it. It smelled warm. Perhaps of paper and ink and glue. But soft and gentle. Pervasive and unmistakable too, but, still, soft and gentle. It smelled of Manila. Not the city; the color. I really don’t think it was a cleaner they used because the building kept the smell. I loved that smell. It smelled like, well, the smallness, the easiness, the coziness of a hometown.

My hometown was very small with more cows than people and only one stoplight. It still doesn’t have a McDonalds. And it didn’t get a Tim Horton’s until about ten years ago. Meanwhile, and always, the post office. I don’t think our town had home delivery. We didn’t. No. You went to the post office. Some of the finer people I suppose used the antechamber room with the silver boxes. I was never jealous. It’s only by working it out backwards that I figured people with the silver boxes had more money.

By the time I was 8, I was fetching the mail. I’d walk up to the counter, just tall enough to see over it; and one of the three ladies who worked the counter would hand me my mail. Our mail wasn’t even locked up in metal boxes. It was in plain view in wide open wooden slats.

I suppose I must have been about 8 the last time I got a letter that called me Master. I was 12 the first time I got a letter that addressed me as Esquire. I was confused and concerned. I was about to go to a day of orienteering in high school, and I wanted to have the right book. I had requested a book from the Law Association about how to become a lawyer and so they sent me a book about me and the law. The book was called “You and the Law”. They had sent me the book and put Esquire after my name and I was worried. Your name is permanent. And so, to have something attached to my name, I took quite seriously. I took an awful lot seriously. I don’t think I had yet managed to assuage my fears that I was now an Esquire but I still took that book to my day of orienteering and I still pretended to read it.

Even though I continued to receive mail order comic books from the post office until many years later.

SS, Esq.