Non-Alcoholic Liquid Herbs information, tips and advice

Demolition and construction sites have an unmistakable smell: damp and slightly sweet. You associate it with cloven halves of old buildings, showing the ghosts of staircases, like tattoos on their stripped walls; or with scaffold-covered detours, wet with run-off, where some new building is going up. It is not the smell of dirt or rock. I suspect it is old cement, powdering away, or new cement freshly poured. If so, then the Romans smelled it when they put up the Pantheon.

Construction sites smash the past and build the future. In the present we have transportation, and the smell of exhaust. What pedestrian has not crossed a street just close enough to a turning bus to get the full facial blast? Bus exhaust smells like cigarettes, only dustier. If Mayor Bloomberg really cared about our health, he would ban these beasts. On some summer evenings, when the sky settles down like a lid, and the setting sun is the color of a scab, the whole city becomes a bus's backwash, and our only consolation is to know that our ancestors had it worse, for their omnibuses were pulled by horses.

Our natural impulse is to hide our mistakes. Where smells are concerned, that means air freshener. Air freshener smells like a wad of bubblegum, if it were the size of a softball. The great users of these sweet stinkbombs are cabbies. Some of their devices, dangling from the rear-view mirror or the Plexiglas partition, are shaped, with cruel cheeriness, like pine trees, so you'll think you're in the Adirondacks. Once one of these has been hanging in a car, its work is done, and it does no good to ask the cabbie to take it down. Your only recourse it to roll down the windows and hope the cabbie drives fast, though that leaves you prey to buses.

Smell is closely related to its more respectable cousin, taste. Restaurants and markets produce some of the city's best smells, offering a palette edited for human pleasure. The Brazilian restaurant has a stand for mixed non-alcoholic drinks by its front door. The menu board lists combinations of fruit, vegetables, and herbs, which are supposed to increase potency or memory. All day an immigrant shoves oranges, carrots, ginger, pineapples into a blender. Juice comes out the spout, scraps disappear down a plastic tube. The fruit smells predominate, but they have a colorful aura, as if they were wearing tropical shirts.

Little India has replaced the Armenian neighborhood that once existed around Lexington Avenue and 28th Street. Among the storefronts offering saris, brass knickknacks, plane tickets, and cassettes in strange modes and languages are shops selling spices--and the restaurants that put them to work. (One especially well-stocked grocery occupies the building in which Chester Alan Arthur was sworn in as president.) For Indian taste, too much isn't enough. The spices jostle with our nostrils and each other, a fight club for smells.

Chinese food is anything but bland, yet one smell dominates in Chinatown: fish. Salty and sour, the fish lie in silver rows, eyes and cheeks turned innocently heavenward. The fishmongers shout and shuffle them like cards. A day ago they were in the Atlantic; tonight they will be in a pot. The bars on Second Avenue that service New York University pack kids in like sardines. The music and the screaming form a wall with no door in it; you must simply walk through, past the bouncer. Screamers spill out onto the sidewalk to smoke, but you cannot smell their cigarettes. The smell that rules is beer, sweet but acrid, making a little tug at the back of your throat. The beer and the beer smell flow all night; early next morning, when the drinkers have gone, the smell remains.

We eat because nature demands it; after we eat, nature continues to take its course. Civilization allows us to perform this function in privacy. Dogs do not have that privilege. The laws of New York now compel owners to clean up after their pets, and with surprising devotion, they do. But self-indulgence makes for occasional lapses. As is so often the case with dogs, we react (in this case, with displeasure) because of a powerful sense of kinship. Dogs have extra legs and no driver's licenses. But that smiling, loping, thirsty, obedient, defecating creature--who is he like?

The final assault, what socialists call la lutte finale, happens on a day when a holiday, or perhaps a strike, coincides with temperatures in the 90s. Then the assault comes from garbage. The garbage sits in its plastic bags, humbly waiting to be recycled. The bags form trench walls, as in a daguerrotype by Mathew Brady. Unidentifiable liquid leaks out. The leaves of the ailanthus trees, and their shadows, do not move. Some poor deliveryman pedals by on a bicycle. This smell goes beyond dog waste and personality; it touches religion. "For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Time for the chill in the air, the rain.