Pine-Sol

When you are a kid and you move into a new house, there is one virtue upon which vital importance is placed above all other virtues. That virtue is: cleanliness. I feel this is especially the case when your house is built from the ground up. Imagine, for a moment, that you are nine years old, and you learn that you will be moving into a new house in a different part of town. Not only are you moving to a new place but that place has yet to be built! Right now it’s a piece of land, but soon, it will be a brand new home. A few months later, you go and visit a large hole that has been dug into the ground. This hole is going to be your new place of residence. Now the hole is actually pretty sick, it’s like a private playground for you and your brother and your sister with various hills and valleys and pits and for a nine-year-old who has no concept of a cell phone, it’s just about the greatest place in the world this side of Disney World.

Until it’s time for the foundation. Your kingdom of dirt is no longer accessible and your heart is broken. But this is cool, because it means that your house is coming along. It doesn’t matter that you’re living at Grandma’s house for a while, because that’s fun anyway. More than anything, you’re just ecstatic to move into your new crib. It’s a slow process, and some of it took place in the winter, which only caused for more delay. Therefore, you watch many a Chiefs game and a Presidential Election (and several recounts) from Grandma’s house and every now and then you go check on the house.

You watch the beams go up. The plumbing put in place. The electricity. The drywall. The flooring.

Finally, the magical day comes and it’s time to move in. You’ve just turned ten and you learn one very important lesson: That place better be sparkling clean all the time.

It’s taken a few paragraphs for me to get here, but this story is not allegorical. Go figure. This is the story about me and moving into our house on E 76^th St in a lovely neighborhood called Summit Woods, and as far as the house goes, I was really bad at cleaning it. My mother, however, was not. Every day, when the house was polished for the day, it had a very, very distinct smell. It was good. I liked it.

You might describe the smell as fresh? To me, this smell of Pine-Sol was the best scent in the world. This is important because my most dominant sense is my sense of smell. So much so, that a certain scent can take me back two weeks or twenty years. When I smell baby powder, I think of being a child in my first house, and when I smell cinnamon baking in the oven I remember tucking in to a homemade cinnamon roll my friend Elizabeth made one snowy Saturday morning in Bolivar.

Scents can stir up nostalgia unlike anything in my life. Let me explain what Pine-Sol became to me: It smelt like home. More specifically, the new house, and how mom might be cleaning it. When I came home, Pine-Sol was the scent. Our house really could’ve been some sort of commercial for Pine-Sol.

One Monday night, I came home to the new house from football practice. We had lost really badly the Saturday before, so our entire practice consisted of running. Running was my biggest fear in the world and I had just done it for two hours straight. So when I came home, the Pine-Sol hit my nostrils and I felt some sort of comfort because that horrible practice was over and I didn’t have to worry about it for another day.

Monday was about as normal of a day as you could have.

Tuesday was the opposite.

I wished I had asked my step-father, David, to stay home. David, a firefighter, was not on-duty so he was not at the fire station that day. He was probably preparing to go lay some flooring. Mom was already working at the hospital. I came downstairs and he was in his armchair and the I could immediately recognize the buildings on the TV. My Dad had been in one on a business trip the year before, and I learned all about them. At the time, only one was on fire. I asked what had happened and David told me that a plane had crashed into the building.

It was odd to me that on a clear day, a plane would be flying so low to the ground that it would crash into a sky scraper. I assumed it was off course from one of the New York airports and It was a terrible accident. I left the house before anything else happened that morning- I had a bus to catch, after all

As other kids got on the bus along our route, the horrible truth was revealed.

Now, I understand their reasons, but much to my chagrin, the teachers of Hazel Grove Elementary that morning said absolutely nothing. They feigned ignorance with their words but their faces told the essence of the story. I could recognize it, even though I was only ten.  If you think the media was frenzied, and reported hundreds of off-the-wall and untrue stories, imagine being in an elementary school. One kid said the President was dead. Another, that the terrorists were on their way to One Kansas City Place, another that the United States had detonated a Nuclear Weapon on the perpetrators (the young man claimed Germany was actually the responsible party, and we had “nuked ‘em”).

One rumor that I had been hearing turned out to be true: that both towers of the World Trade Center had collapsed that morning. It was unfathomable. Not six months before, towards the end of my fourth grade year, I was discussing these monumental towers and comparing them with another boy who was very taken by Sears Tower. I was obsessed with the World Trade Center because my Dad had gone on business. He was enthralled with Sears Tower for the same reason. The idea that they had collapsed seemed impossible. I thought back to watching my new house rise from the ground up piece by piece, and couldn’t help but thinking of these towers falling, piece by piece. Through it all, the rumors and rumors continued to swirl.

I couldn’t help but wonder all day long what was actually happening. It wasn’t until I arrived back to my driveway, hours after the attacks, that I was told. When we got to the driveway, it was time to go to my brother’s football practice. I usually stayed home when Ryan had practice, and was anxiously preparing to do so today, as well. Before leaving, and before I could go inside, David asked me if I wanted to come with them to practice that night. Mom was still at work at the hospital, so at the moment it was stay at home alone, or go with the two of them.

It was an unusual request, but he read my mind. While it was pretty much unspoken that I stayed home during Ryan’s practice and he stayed home for mine, today was different and I didn’t want to be alone.

We were only halfway to Ryan’s football practice when we learned that it had been cancelled, for no other reason than the obvious fact that no one could remotely imagine caring about sports on such a day. On our way back to the house, the radio had been giving updates on casualties, the responsible party, everything pertaining to the events in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. One of the deejays imparted a revelation that I had not even considered but when you’re ten, it was about the most significant/creepy things I had heard in my life, - that the date was 9-1-1. We went to the local QuikTrip for fuel and waited in line for what seemed like an eternity. David had the impossible task of trying to make sense of everything and explain it to two boys, only 10 and 8. We were scared, he knew it, and he tried his best to explain why the lines at the gas station were so long. Looking back, I can’t imagine his task. In an effort to calm us down a bit, he took us to our favorite restaurant- McDonald’s, of course.

There were hundreds of firefighters in New York City risking and laying down their lives trying to save thousands of people that day. In Kansas City, there was one firefighter who took his boys for a Happy Meal to help them feel better.

We came home that night and I walked through the door and two things met me in that moment: the embrace of my mother, and the scent of Pine-Sol. I was home. For the first time that day, things felt a little bit better.

I lived ten years before 9/11, and I’ve lived fifteen years since. I always think about my mom, and David who took care of us that night, I think about my dad who had only been in the World Trade Center a year earlier and what might’ve happened if the attacks had been during his visit. I thought about the kids who came home who didn’t have the embrace of their mother.

I was still very immature for a number of years, and I still am (especially in college, holy cow). But that day, the ten-year-old grew up a little bit. How could I not? I lived history, and every year as I’ve grown up, the horror of the day becomes more and more real.

As does, the power and comfort of coming home. Forever.