I don’t always get auras with migraine episodes, and the only kind I get when I do is a strong but fleeting scent. One from not too long ago that’s stuck with me is the aroma of Big Red gum.
Ad screenshot © 1979 Mars Wrigley via Bionic Disco.
I’m pretty sure I haven't chewed or even thought much about it in close to 40 years. I certainly didn’t remember it being such a distinct sort of cinnamon — and that surprise of specificity is a recurring theme with the smells, be they a brief reminder of the brand of cigarettes Dad’s parents smoked or the musty, vinegar-ish scent of the wood in parts of Mom’s parents’ house. I’ve smelled garlic, not as prepared with any particular dish that I recall, and the breath of my late cat Pebbles.
Stella Saner would have been 100 years old today, had she not passed early in
the morning of January 21st with her daughter, my mother, at her side.
Here’s a lightly edited version of what I wrote to read at her memorial service.
Bryan Walsh contributed a good piece on Hurricane Sandy to last week’s issue of Time.
He details Sandy’s effects but also suggests how to prepare as storms like Sandy — a hurricane turned post-tropical cyclone after merging with the Arctic jet stream to form a hybrid nor’easter that some dubbed “Frankenstorm” — become a fact of life in what (most rational minds now agree) is an era of consequential climate change.
I’ve felt a bit of survivor’s guilt over Sandy, to be honest.
Leon Saner died on Saturday.
I can’t begin to describe how much that fact has impacted my life. He was my mother’s father — and so much more than those words might suggest.
The number of stories that have come to mind and been told by family in the week
since we took up a vigil at Grandpop’s bedside could fill a book; perhaps one day they will. For now, I’ll just share the eulogy that I managed to read at the service held in his honor:
Stella & Leon Saner, in their mid 80s, in the mid ’90s.
96.
There was no more exciting display of thunder and lightning during my childhood
than the bolt from the blue that transformed young Billy Batson into a grown superhero named Captain Marvel at the utterance of a single word.
Screencap of Shazam!'s opening sequence © 1974 DC Comics.
Although not half as faithful to the comics as its slightly later cartoon incarnation, Filmation’s 1970s live-action Shazam! on Saturday mornings was thrilling in large part because it did indeed star real people. Ere long there would be a live-action superhero boom that brought versions of DC’s Wonder Woman and Marvel’s Hulk to our living rooms in prime time — with less successful stabs at other Marvel characters — plus, of course, the sensational reintroduction of Superman to the silver screen
as the decade closed out.
I’m still not writing enough about my lifelong passion for comics.
Convenience stores, newsagents, and 5-&-10s in South Jersey fed my early habit,
as I shared last year. Only so much history could be gleaned from comic-book reprints and editorial pages, however. Luckily, a bevy of books on comics awaited at the Cape May County Library, where surveys of my favorite four-color fantasies and their forebears could be found in (mostly) cold, hard black and white.
The one I checked out most often was a 1973 tome aptly titled The Comic-Book Book, edited by Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson.
On St. Patrick’s Day, so they say, everybody’s Irish. A large number of folks back in Wildwood, NJ, were at least partly Irish year-round. I went to synagogue with kids named MacDonald.
Irish hero Shamrock’s introductory panel in Contest of Champions #1 © 1982 Marvel. Plot: Mark Gruenwald, Bill Mantlo, Steven Grant. Script: Mantlo. Pencils: John Romita Jr. Inks: Pablo
Marcos & Bob Layton. Colors: Andy Yanchus & Pat DeFalco. Letters: Joe Rosen.
At one corner of Pacific & Lincoln was Shamrock Café, only a café in the sense that it was a pub that served coffee with Irish whiskey. Shamrock was owned by a family alongside whose two youngest daughters, twins, I walked to and from Crest Memorial in kindergarten and first grade. Their house was on the way to mine, and often I’d linger for milk, cookies, and maybe an episode of Ultraman.
I don’t remember my first comic book.
Cover to Spidey Super Stories #9 © 1975 Marvel Comics.
At least, I’m not sure which one of many likely candidates it actually was.
