Do You Have Synesthesia Too?

What I remember tonight is Al Jarreau playing on my father's stereo. The speakers were high, mounted atop two identical cabinets painted white. One stored the multi-decked stereo and all my father's albums—all his Peter, Paul and Mary, his jazz collection, his Crosby, Stills and Nash. His Al Jarreau. The other held a bar with tumblers and bottles and a pullout white board where my father cut limes. It was a little bit shiny but there were marks made with his knife on it. I remember the sound of the piano music playing from the speakers near the ceiling and the redolent sound of the ice cubes clinking against my father's low tumbler, the color of his whiskey golden brown. I remember the gold band on his ring finger. And I remember the smell of his skin mixed with smell of a cigarette.

That smell came to me years later. I had forgotten it. I was in my home in Venice. A salt-eaten, centuries-old apartment at the northern tip of the city. Paint fell from the walls in sections. I had begun smoking then, in that year, in that unusual place, egged on by a Croatian woman and a Venetian man one night at a low-slung wood table in a wine bar in the old Jewish ghetto with red wine decanters mostly empty in front of us and a series of plates slick with the grease of fried fish now eaten. "Do what you want to do," the Venetian said to me.

I was sitting at a Formica table in my apartment when the smell infiltrated me. It was the kind of table that pretends to be wood but is too shiny. I remember staring at a poster on the wall, only I don't remember what the poster was of. But I remember stopping my writing and staring at the wall and resting my chin in my hand and smelling something familiar and distant and warm and complicated. It was the smell of my father's hand. I saw his wedding band more clearly than I see this screen in front of me now, the heft of his knuckles, the white spot of the glint of the metal.

This smell—I can't describe how personal it is still. It is the smell of my love for my father, his love for me.

I have one of his tumblers still. It is low and a bit square for being an actual round glass. Its bottom is thick, making its gravity low and centered. You feel weight when you hold this glass, even though it is tired now and somewhat whitened and milky. He gave me this glass with three others he had grouped in a set after I moved into this apartment in Brooklyn. Only the others are lighter, with a slightly smaller diameter. There is only one of his originals, and I use it when I feel shameless, when I don't worry about breaking it.