Common Scents (part 2 of Big City Neighbors and Small Town weirdos)

I love the zoo. We have a membership to the Buffalo Zoo and go several times a year, just the two of us. It was one of our first dates nearly six years ago. Any time visitors or family come into town, we make sure to spend half a day showing off our zoo—and getting our money’s worth out of that membership fee. We love The Buffalo Zoo, so much so that the day before our wedding, we took all of our closest family and friends for the day, just to show off one of America’s oldest zoos.

Buffalo’s zoo is small and sits on the edge of Delaware Park in the Parkside neighborhood on the city’s northernmost end. When I tell you the zoo sits in a park in a neighborhood, I’m telling you the zoo is in the middle of a residential area. The monkey house is zoned residential! (Not really. For legal reasons, I need to clarify that statement was a joke.)

There’s a zoo…in a neighborhood.

A nice neighborhood!

A zoo!

Residents of Parkside can look out their second-floor windows and see a giraffe family galloping from one bucket of leaves to the next. Commuters can spend their redlight stops watching a rhino mother leading her baby around its enclosure, then they can look to their left and see a coffee shop, candy store, or insurance office. Where else are you gonna find that? Huh? Tulsa? Tampa? Tuscaloosa?!

As with most wonderful things in life, the zoo does come with a small number of drawbacks, most having to do with smells. The smells by themselves I can handle. I was once a 14-year-old boy who spent time in locker rooms and buses with other 14-year-old boys. I’m ok with stank.

Where my brain begins to cave in on itself is with the sensory-punishing activities that accompany the smells that create a too overwhelming mental experience for the smells alone to be forgiven. It’s like eating shrimp or chicken. You know it was once a living, breathing thing. And as long as you just think of it as a meal on a plate, you’re fine. It’s when you smell it too closely, remember it once clucked or mooed, or think about the pet pig your grandparents had that you spent just a moment too long staring at one sweaty Indiana afternoon. Bertie!

Ok. Enough nonsense.

A godawful smell is one thing. But when sight or sound or taste or touch of that smell are added to it, the experience reaches from moderate annoyance or pebble-in-the-shoe perturbitude, to anger, avoidance, or vomiting.

Here’s the thing: I expect such bullshit—or rhino, elephant, or even pig shit—experiences at the zoo. Where I don’t expect them—and should not ever tolerate them is in my own backyard and the backyard of my immediate neighbor.

So, when, I noticed our neighbor Pete—the first guy to welcome us to the block a few months earlier—standing in the rear of his driveway with a shovel and a hose, I assumed he was scraping weeds from the edges of his blacktop or hosing box elder buds into the yard.

Within minutes of noticing Pete’s efforts, I became overwhelmed—overwhelmed by a smell—a smell so harsh, so acidic, so offensive to the—wait, I’m not done—so abhorrent and sinful, destructive and unforgiving in its density, heft, and stickiness—that it begged not just for attention and awareness, but for identification and possibly the immediate presence of a HazMat team.

This smell, as awful as it was, grew worse as a second sense was introduced to the moment. Rusted metal scraped against ages-old cracked concrete. Like a dental drill hitting an unnumbed molar, the staccato scrape, scrape, scrape, pierced my brain and send bolts of electricity from my ears to my feet by way of my spine and tail bone.

What was Pete doing? What had he killed, cooked to room temperature, and then killed again? What bottle of dead fish had he left atop his hot water heater for months on end, squeezed into a chimichanga, and then microwaved in the garage? What was that?

Then it hit me. This man—the only neighbor whose door I would feel comfortable knocking on in case of a missing ingredient, medical emergency, or during the early hours of civil unrest—was scraping the festering mounds of defecant left behind by his 150-pound Great Dane, dumping them into a thinly-lined Rubbermaid trash can, and spraying the steaming odiferous remnants into the shared strip of gravel and fence posts at the edge of our properties, creating a literal river of shit flowing down the front yards of our otherwise idyllic American neighborhood.

What. The. Haaayylll.

Let’s all take a break for just a second to recover from this now-shared knowledge. Friends, I don’t want to share this with you; I have to. I have to get it out of my mind where it has sat alone as a sense memory for five years and spread the agony to others. I am a wounded man, and as we know, “hurt people hurt people.” I’m sorry.

Ok. Let’s move on.

Though this dung-removal process is altogether gag-inducing, eye-burning, and more infuriating than I’ve ever let Pete know, I like Pete. I like Pete a lot. He’s between my parents’ and grandparents’ ages, speaks conversational Italian to my golden retrievers, and always snowblows our driveway when he’s out doing his own. Pete is the unelected mayor of our street—always greeting folks in their driveways after work or during weekend yardwork to get the hottest gossip, share his thoughts on the branches that overhang the street, and offering any and all of his personal tools and equipment to anyone in need. “I don’t know why you bought that. You can always use mine. Just gotta ask.”

I know Pete and I stand at opposite political poles. Our votes cancel each other out. We have competing yard signs every election season. But Pete always makes sure I voted. He always lets me know if the winds have knocked down my bleeding heart signs in the front yard. And never once have Pete nor I made a reference to, joke about, or trashed the names on the other’s yard signs. Our friendship—our neighborship—doesn’t ignore those things, it just exists within them.

Our lived experiences are different. Our values are, at times, in opposition. And though many of those values are nonnegotiable to me, Pete and I have enough in common to respect each other, our worth as people, and the contributions we make to the neighborhood.

I like Pete. And Pete likes me.

I’m glad he’s my neighbor.

But damn, man…train that dog to go in the grass. It smells like a zoo out here.

-AT

Adam Tidrow is a serial entrepreneur, expert in American business and economic history, and scholar whose work focuses primarily on local economic development in the American Rust Belt.