I don’t love New York City.
There, I said it. (Even if I’m missing it a bit these days.)
I’ve been visiting periodically since I was a kid, but I have yet to fall in love with it. Mostly it’s because the things I love to do (theater and shopping and eating) are often closest to the things I hate most (crowds and tourists and Times Square). Still, I have grown to having a great fondness for certain elements of the city, particularly those fanciful edges of Central Park, where storied histories of places like the Plaza and Tiffany’s brush with modern day whimsy if you catch the light and the moment just right. Such magical alchemy was in mixing mode a few years ago when my Mom and I were visiting on one of our Broadway weekends for Mother’s Day. We had split up in the gender-designated buildings of Bergdorf Goodman and I was perusing the handsome cologne section, where curved glass and wood provided elegant carriage and support for all of Tom Ford’s Private Blends. On this day, however, there was nothing new in Ford’s olfactory world, and the salesperson was instead edging me toward what was then called By Kilian – a line of obscenely-priced bottles that promised various sensual experiences with names like ‘Straight to Heaven‘ or ‘Flower of Immortality’ or the one she was pushing on me now, ‘Bamboo Harmony’.
Having just come in from the street, on a day when the sun was brilliant but bordering on just too hot when all that surrounds you is concrete, I was looking for something light and fresh, something to loosen the claustrophobic debris of the city. As she waved the sample card in the air, I fell instantly in love with the refreshing and delicate aroma of white tea wafting about as it dissipated into the refined and rarefied air of Bergdorf Goodman. Not in a financial position to splurge on anything so decadent, I pocketed the sample card, thanked her profusely, and made my way back onto Madison to find Mom.
The verdant glow of Central Park was in the distance, the sun was still shining, and a glorious spring afternoon in New York was at hand. It was the closest I would come to loving the city, and it was close enough. It was also a revelation – the way a whiff of a scent could open up a portal to light and space and freshness even in the middle of the most crowded city in the country.
I thought of ‘Bamboo Harmony’ when our state suddenly found itself in the midst of a stay-at-home shutdown, and the abstract notion of feeling confined suddenly fell into concrete, home-bound form. I remembered the way it had instantly changed the day, transforming the crowded and cramped notion of New York City into something breezy and effervescent. Surely if a scent could produce such results in the face of soaring, skyscraping omnipotence, then it might do the same with any slight hint of restless confinement I might be feeling at home.
It arrived as a 10thanniversary present from Andy, and on that sunny morning, before I even turned the laptop on for the start of another work-at-home day, I sprayed a small spritz on my wrist. Once again, harmony was instantly conjured. The walls disappeared, the darkness lifted, and any close-quartered tension evaporated. A forest of sky-high bamboo floated before me, alternately kissed and obscured by the peaceful veils of passing clouds, delicately undulating in the slightest of breezes. The heavenly top notes of bergamot and neroli are there, in the barest and best of ways, not strangling anything with sweetness, and then the tea scent emerges, along with some fig and oakmoss that lends the proceedings an earthy green element in perfect keeping with their intended bamboo connotations.
Is this what bamboo really smells like? Not at all.
Does it matter? Not in the least.
We live in the imagined realm of a floating world; reality is far too dark and dreary to confront without a cape of fragrance billowing off our shoulders.
