By Dave Ellis

Most people have strong olfactory connections with the past. In non-scientific terms, smells make us remember. I know I think of mom’s cooking whenever I smell onions sautéing, or camping when I smell burning wood. I think of hotdogs when I smell bologna, because technically they are made out of the same materials. One is just flattened. Kind of like the difference between a hairball and a toupee.

My latest smell-experience is with the herb fennel or Foeniculum vulgare for you Latin speakers out there. I like using the Latin forms of words, it makes you sound intelligent. Just listen to a judge talk to a lawyer, it’s like olden times…makes me want to wear sandals.

I was experiencing the licorice-like aroma of fennel, not because I was eating sausage, which is where you normally find fennel; no, I was brushing my teeth. That’s right, with sausage. Just kidding, I only do that on my birthday, cause it’s special. Actually, my wife bought fennel-flavored toothpaste.

This was so disturbing to me that I had to start a new paragraph. Normal toothpaste comes in many flavors, peppermint, spearmint, cool mint, minty-mint. Yeah basically mint. There’s a reason for that, most of us like the smell of mint. Most of us find it a refreshing scent.

I recently toured the dentifrice aisle of the supermarket and found there are many flavors of toothpaste…cinnamon, orange, vanilla and bubblegum (for kids), but no fennel. You’d have to travel to an all-natural store to buy it. Bit of advice, don’t confuse this with an au-natural store, to save you some distress.

All of this ruminating about flavor then reminded of what a brother of mine said, that he loves chocolate so much he eats some before bed to savor the flavor. Now if you are a dentist you have either dropped your jaw in disbelief or are rubbing your hands together in a more-money-for-me manner. I was a bit surprised because I asked about brushing before bed and he mentioned that he only brushes in the morning.

I was then shocked to find that some of my other brothers do too, and most of my buddies too. Everyone I asked told me they only brushed once a day. I was worried I was becoming too girly for brushing twice a day, and twice as much as all the other guys.
Maybe that makes me obsessive compulsive.

And then I thought about how all us guys were before we were married. Technically speaking, we have come a long way. Most men don’t care about hygiene. We pride ourselves on being able to use our pants as napkins, our sleeves as kleenex and our kleenex as toilet paper.

We don’t care for the rules of the civilized world. We don’t need a table, plate and utensils to eat. Left alone, most men would be happy to eat ramen noodles straight out of the pan over a sink, in the bathroom - let me finish here - at a gas station. This is when we realize we need to get married, so that we don’t die from infection.

So I did some more research on fennel and found that medically it “is very effective in relieving bloating and gas.” There it is. My wife is looking out for me (and her, semi-selfishly.) I knew she loved me, she just wanted me to be happy and my tummy to be calm. So I will continue to brush with fennel, and to increase my intake of sausage.
And I’ll keep building those yummy new “pleasant smell memories.”