Calvin Klein Obsession c.1989 · Brotherhood Of Scent

Calvin Klein Obsession c.1989

During my senior year at SUNY Oswego, my then girlfriend, who I had anticipated marrying, bought me a bottle of "cologne." Yes, the 6.7oz bottle in the picture is that very same bottle 35 years later. I thought it was after shave; I was not a "cologne" guy, but she was certainly someone who wanted a man with style -- she wanted a cologne guy. And so she thought she might change me into one of those guys -- a guy to whom my 22 year old self might have mocked or scorned for being an effete. I was a "man's man:" hell, two spritzes into cupped palms, rub the hands together and slap my cheeks as though I were applying my grandfathers Old Spice -- what did I know? Would that I could go back to 1989 and correct my character flaws and avoid 30+ years of pain?

Well, finally, that girl grew tired of trying to change a beer swilling, "two spritzes into the palms" kind of guy -- she broke up with me and sent me on an 8 year quest for the soul of a lost boy. That bottle, the same 6.7oz Obsession pictured below, sat dormant in the bathroom drawers of my vagabond existence for the next several years. That gift of Obsession, from this girl who was once the love of my life, seemed to actually contain my soul.

Digging it out, at some point during 1997, after my father succumbed to a two-year battle with multiple myeloma, the Holy Spirit grabbed my soul and pulled me out of my life's morass; simultaneously, I grabbed that bottle of Obsession from the back of another bathroom cabinet, and sprayed my face like a man, not the boy from Home Alone standing before a mirror. Out of that bottle came the proverbial rebirth and the confidence of my youth. The Holy Spirit restored my spirit, the bottle of Obsession restored my soul.

As the Yankees ran rough-shod across the American League in the summer of 1998, brimming with the confidence of a bottle of Calvin Klein's Obsession, I met the true love of my life and we were married in six months! Alas, the long dormant bottle of Obsession whose absence from my life, mirrored my own period of being lost. Last night I sprayed from that same bottle (I had put it back into the drawer as I progressed into my 30's) and the LOVE OF MY LIFE, my wife of almost 26 years said: "Why do you spend so much money on cologne when you have the best cologne in the drawer." It was a revelation, just like it had been years earlier.

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