GUEST BLOG BY MY SON, TOBIAS BARRINGTON WOLFF

This is a guest blog by my son, now Professor of Law at UPenn and Visiting Professor at NYU Law School.

I forget whether I have ever told you my own story about Zabar's and H&H Bagels. At the beginning of my year with the Whiffenpoofs, you may recall that we spent two weeks on a retreat on Cape Cod, getting to know each other and learning the music. Mid way through, we were given a day off, and I offered to drive a friend of mine to New York so that he could see his girlfriend, who was there for the summer. It was my job during the retreat to shop and cook food for everyone, so I took the occasion to make a trip to Zabar's and H&H. (H&H bagels are indeed singular and transporting -- in part, I think, because they put a fair amount of sugar in them.)

While I was picking up supplies at Zabar's, I noticed the bin of Zabar's Special Blend Coffee amidst the other selections, and I remembered that you had gotten Zabar's Special Blend delivered to our house in Northampton for some years and brewed it in your Chem-Ex carafe -- probably from about the time we first moved there until I was about six or seven years old -- before you gave up and started buying your coffee locally. I decided, purely for reasons of nostalgia, to pick up a pound of the Blend to include among my supplies. The moment that the bin was opened, the smell of that blend of coffee instantly transported me back to Northampton and my six-year-old self with one of the most powerful remembrances of things past that I have ever experienced.

I had been drinking coffee for years at this point. I spent a good part of High School hanging out at the Coffee Connection in Harvard Square (before it was taken over and profaned by Starbucks), I was an inveterate late-night coffee drinker in college -- the taste, scent and culture of coffee had long since suffused my being. At no point before then had the smell of coffee even reminded me of my young life in our kitchen in Northampton. But the distinctive scent of Zabar's Special Blend (to which I had not been exposed since those early years) brought me back. I found it astonishing, and still do, that my six-year-old nose was sensitive enough to discern the specific scent of that blend of coffee, many years before I had ever tasted coffee or even conceived the idea that there were distinctions between different types of beans or blends, and that my young brain had recorded that scent with sufficient precision to give me my own Proustian moment in Zabar's fifteen years later. I am actually now somewhat reticent about going back to Zabar's, because I do not want to cheapen that experience by repeating it too casually.