text: Cody had no sense of smell; he had no sense of taste either, but it's not fair to only talk about what he wasn't. He laughed and cried, the same as you and me. Cody was a human being, and he was just as pissed off about it as anyone else. He was different too, it's fair to say. When Cody was a baby a brick struck him in the face while playing near a construction site. They were building apartments, and his parents got a wad of money from the construction company as a way of saying sorry. He was permanently blessed with a dent in his head, a line across his forehead that made it look as if he was always pressing his face against a pane of unseen glass. My great grandfather had a dent in his head, a small round divot above his left eye. He got it in ``the war'', laying on the ground working on the engine of an American tank. Another soldier was sitting on top of the engine and dropped a big wrench straight in to his mellon. I don't think the military gave him any big wad of money or said sorry, but the event provided him with a fabulous story for the rest of his life. The other soldier, my great grandfather said, was a celebrity who was proudly serving but had no real business as a mechanic. I have no idea who this celebrity was, but my great grandfather lived to be 95 years old, and told this story with a grin until he lost his mind. Whether the ding in the head of my proavus really came from a celebrity or not, this was truly a great story. He would tell it to us loudly, waving his hand about, and we would laugh and smile. This story is my fondest memory of him. Cody was too young to remember the brick that had smacked him in the head. Even if he had been older, that brick probably would have still excused itself from his memory, politely bowing in to faint obscurity. That brick took his sense of smell, and taste, and left his incredible brain a jumbled mess. Sometimes Cody would be confused, but never angry. That was his blessed gift, to never be angry, and it served him well. We all cherish the stories of our scars, they are the physical record of our triumphs over death. At any good party someone will show off their old battle wounds, even if they were just the result of an errant golf ball. My great grandfather happily told the story of how the famous actor introduced himself with a wrench. Cody loved to spin his tale, even though he couldn't actually remember it. In his rendition the brick struck him at high noon, in a blistering summer heat, and his dear mother had to run 50 city blocks to the hospital while carrying the baby and the brick. The brick didn't stay lodged in his head after impact, Cody told us, but his mother brought it along anyway, ``just in case!'' Everyone laughed at that point in the story. And then Cody would remind us how lucky he was to survive that brick, and how good his life was as a result. You didn't feel sorry for Cody and his dented forehead. He was intelligent and funny, and just a little confused sometimes. People called him stupid, but he wasn't.