THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 27, 1996 TAG: 9603270529
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
In the doctor's waiting room were many magazines, including a Cosmopolitan from a while back with advice from neurologist Alan R. Kirsch on staying calm - not a bad choice for a doctor's waiting room.
``Scents that trigger vivid memories of a happy environment are calming,'' he advises.
Kirsch, director of the Scent and Taste Treatment Foundation in Illinois, says the aroma of fresh baked bread works better than any other.
Well, maybe not any other; but the crusty fragrance of corn pone baking to a turn is as fortifying as if you are inhaling its essence.
Kirsch also mentions the scent of lavender and of green apples - remind me to sniff the green-apple bin on the next foray to the grocery - and cites scents from childhood, such as Play-Doh.
Easterners succumb to flowers, Westerners to barbecued meat, Midwesterners to farm aromas. All these overlap regions. May I ask what moves you?
A cookie, a madeleine dipped in lime-flower tea served by his great aunt, unlocked the floodgates of memory for Marcel Proust's novel, ``Remembrance of Things Past.''
In French, the title is ``A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,'' more expressive in being a recovery of lost time; but the English version, from Will Shakespeare's sonnet, will do.
Fragrances, flavors, gustatory sounds and sights of people eating make Thanksgiving the most calming holiday. Christmas can be a roller coaster scaling heights of joy and plumbing depths of despair in our quest for just the right gifts with not quite enough cash.
Heck, all you have to do for Thanksgiving is show up and eat; the more you eat, the happier the cook, which is why the sensitive ones of us, always thinking of others, ask for thirds. It is a Herculean labor to keep going back, the 13th which Hercules tackled after doing the 12 that people talk about. You ought to hear what ol' Herk ate. He said that test was toughest.
Not if the cooks are good, as were Mama Dell's three daughters and six daughters-in-law who pitched in Thanksgiving. Why you haven't et unless you tasted Zeph's sweet potato pudding roofed with toasted, puckered marshmallows. We children, waiting famished for the second table, fretted lest no marshmallow layer be left. When Aunt Zephyr realized our agony, she took to making a second bowl of marshmallow-topped baked pudding.
And when my mother read from ``Bulfinch's Fables'' about the gods on Mount Olympus dining on ambrosia, she didn't need to explain it was made by Ida of sliced oranges and fresh grated coconut, of which she let you sip the milk, and candied cherries and fresh whipped cream.
And remember Sallie Fan's - but I'm out of room and must push back from the table. Let me hear from you! ILLUSTRATION: [Color illustration]
by CNB