A few months ago, I wrote an entry on the curious and powerful connection between scent and memory.

Well, that connection's been at it again. I stopped by the Logan Circle Whole Foods this afternoon to pick up some fancy cheese. I was on the way home from campus, where I have beenm assembling readings for my syllabus, particularly for a day on using concrete language when writing about food. So I had in my mind, for example, an article on the aroma wheel for describing wines, a very famous short snippet of Proust, and some Jeffrey Steingarten on why ripe fruit tastes better, and why it's harder and harder to find.

And so I was particularly attuned to scent as I stepped into the whole foods elevator, and inhaled that heady, but somehow thin blend of wood-fired pizza crust, peat-and-water infused vegetables, expensive rennets and just a hint of institutional cleaning fluids.

I am transported to 1996. I am working at Thyme Square Cafe, a new creation then, featuring organic foods, fresh juices, and a trendy decor. Laura Chenel goat cheeses were famous, but just hitting menus en masse. Here it was featured on the whole-wheat-crusted Get Shorty Pizza (does that date it?), and I was a burgeoning foodie.

I reasoned, as I was just about to start grad school, that if it was a restaurant I wanted to eat at, it must be a good restaurant to work for, and for a short, strange summer, it was.

Here I found my still-favorite white wine (Caymus Conundrum, a white table wine whose best years seem to have been in the mid-'90s until a delicious 2002 vintage hit shelves), I learned the virtues of really good balsamic vinegar, and began to form an impression that salmon was hardly the end-all-be-all of seafood.

I learned that whole grain can mean a variety of things to a variety of people, and I learned fancy ingredients can taste just as bad as cheap ingredients when not prepared with a certain modicum of affection.

And I learned how to be among a group of people and not be of that group of people, but that's another story entirely.