Smell the Truth of New Year's Eve 2010

As a pool driver I work on many different accounts. Some I like better than others, but it is all work that pays. Recently I did a run for a company that provides research animals. They breed them and ship them all over the country. I have done a few runs for them before, but this one was different. The other times it was rodents, rabbits specifically. Rabbits are shipped in cardboard boxes that are stapled shut and they have enough food and water for a 24 hour trip inside each box. So as a transporter, you never actually see the rabbits nor have to handle them. You are transporting boxes of live animals.

This time however, it was a canine load. beagle puppies in large crates. Ten crates each with three pups in them. I had to water them every 12 hours. And when I got to the destination, I had to help the client unload them. I had to handle each one of the 30 pups, handing them over to workers at a pharmaceutical company where their fate was uncertain. I did not ask what would be done with or to them. I just handed them over, got a signature on the shipping papers and left for the nearest motel.

By the time that I finished delivering the pups, except for the 4, twenty minute power naps that I took slumped over behind the wheel of the Ford E-250 van on the way there, I had not slept in 48 hours. I was beyond tired. But when I laid down and closed my eyes I could not sleep because I could instantly smell those pups, their Eukanuba food, the puppy poop in the cages, and I could hear their cries. Then I thought about how it must have felt to have been one of the Jews that worked for the Nazis in the camps processing fellow Jews in with the ever present stench of the ovens permeating the air.

How inescapable the truth was then. One can lie by deceit or by omission but that assumes that lies are always perceived by ear. Body language can also conceal or give away your intentions because it relies on trained eyes to read it. But you cannot lie by smell! Even scented candles really aren't what they purport to be. Sure they smell close, but you can tell they are imitations.

I cried for about an hour before taking my allergy medications for the night and then going to bed. That is how I spent my New Year's Eve as 2009 changed into 2010.

I once heard that the reason that men have shorter life spans than women is because we simply internalize these kind of stressors. We don't talk about them with anyone else and as a result it eats us up inside. The price we pay for this coping mechanism, is a shorter lifespan.