My sister, who lives somewhere in an undisclosed town in the Great Mid West, usually gifts me a sack full of beauty products every time she visits me. Subtlety was never her forte I suppose.
A week ago, I opened this exquisitely packed set of 'body butter' that she gave me this Feb.(Note to all boys who are reading this post: body butter is a schmanzyfancy name for moisturizer, which is something we women rub on our skin to prevent it from drying among other things) There were six medium sized tubs packaged in pastel colours and sleek black lids, quaint seeming words printed in fonts evocative of a bygone era. Each tub had a separate name, for e.g, the tub I first opened was labeled "Warm Ginger Bread".
Other labels were, "Vanilla Pound Cake" "Caramel Something Something", "Crabapple Eatable Thingie" and "Vanilla Yada Yada". And, just below the label was an old school recipe for warm ginger bread or vanilla pound cake or caramel-something-something with simple directions.
I was amused by the pretentiousness. That was before I opened the tub. After I pried the lid open, the whiff of warm ginger bread wiped the cynical smirk off my face and my rolling eye balls faltered mid way. For a micro-second, I was back in Georgetown Mercantile, a tiny store in the sleepy town of Georgetown tucked in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. It was right after Christmas and the store was awash with Yuletide decorations and brimming with mouth watering freshly baked candy/goodies on sale. There was holly everywhere and the warm store smelt of heavenly warm ginger bread . If you haven't already guessed, more than sights and sounds, the olfactory senses trigger memories better. (read this)
I quickly ripped open the rest of the tubs. And sure enough, each one smelled like those grandma's recipes from some mid western town or the Old Country.
While, I was impressed with the marketing genius of these products, a thought occurred - isn't it plain awful that we no longer smell ginger bread baked in their grandmother's kitchen? Instead we have to settle for smelling in a wad of moisturizer? Do any families, Indian or American, have recipes handed down through generations of mothers and daughters, anymore? Or have we begun to get them off a tub of moisturizer too?
Remember those beautiful miniature wooden ships inside these old glass bottles as kids? Do you remember being fascinated by them as a kid? Couple of years ago, during one of my trips to Walmart, I saw a cheap plastic ship-in-the-bottle. Worse, the plastic bottle had a latch at the bottom which could be flipped open and voila, the ship slipped in and out. It was like discovering there's no Father Christmas, or that the Tooth Fairy is really your dad. The beauty about those ships-in-the-bottle is that you are supposed to marvel how the ship got into the glass bottle in the first place.
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