So Robbie went to the dentist yesterday, defying death to do so (OK, that's not our neighborhood, and also it was totally fine out by 9 or 10 in the morning), and he came home with the usual toothbrush and toothpaste and floss, but also with a little trial bottle of Listerine, which I guess the dentist now gives out these days. We've never been huge on the mouthwash as a family, but we did used to use the minty-flavored Listerine a few years ago, which I found refreshing but not refreshing enough to replace when we ran out. However, this was the old-school Listerine, the yellowy kind (which, I learned just now from Wikipedia, was originally developed to sterilize skin before surgery, which sounds about right).

Anyhow, I forgot about it until Robbie came to bed last night, and--you know how sometimes you smell something and you don't seem to remember, in an active way, where you smelled it, you're just suddenly back there? When I was growing up I used to spend the night fairly often at my great-aunts' house, where I shared a room with Dottie, and I don't think I actually knew this at the time, but after last night I can say with certainty that she used original-flavor Listerine. It was sort of comforting, but not perhaps so romantic, so I'm not sure how long the original Listerine can last in our household. It's fighting against ten or twelve years' worth of childhood memories, after all. Or I guess we could just go all in and buy flannelette sheet-blankets for our bed and tune a transistor radio to KDKA all night, but that might be a hard sell, especially if I also try to revive my childhood custom of jumping from my bed to Dottie's at odd intervals during the night. (Yes, I jumped onto her, and yes, she was in her seventies at the time. You know how otherwise strait-laced people go to Las Vegas to cut up? That was me and my great-aunts' house. In my defense, though, I think she did sort of enjoy it, at least when I missed her solar plexus.)