On particularly cold days in Chicago, there are brief moments when it's like the city has no smell. You tilt your face up toward the winter sun, inhale and there's just nothing. If an animator wanted to render the phenomenon, they could do so with a few wafting coils of scent — the kind that appear in Looney Tunes cartoons, curling out of oven doors and perfume shops — being absolutely throttled by freezing gusts of wind.
That, of course, isn't reality, as I was reminded on a recent Friday. I was walking home from the library and had just turned down a particularly windy corridor when I was hit by the overwhelming, malty smell of beer. Quickly, that was followed by the sweet, gentle fishiness of flaky white fish. I had stumbled onto a family's Lenten fish fry. Behind a chain link fence, stocky men in Chicago Bears sweatshirts clustered around a hissing backyard deep fryer, while a woman standing at the side door shouted at a gaggle of kids playing nearby to be careful.
