Perfect mornings, like perfect everythings, are few and far between. But about three weeks ago, I had one. Or at least I had the START of one.

It began as it always does, with reveille sounded by Kitzel the Kat. But that morning, maybe deciding she could wait a bit before her b’fast, she stilled her usual 0715 “bugle,” and let the dogs and me sleep till a decadent 0830.

Once I managed to open my eyes, I couldn’t believe them: Old Sol was blazing away in a bright-blue cloudless sky. This, after weeks of naught but sunless, slate-grey, seppuku skies. It was glorious, an experience a friend once described as, “… one of the one’s God gives us.” But truth be told, to have sunshine like that, I didn’t care if it was a gift of God, or the Anti-Christ, or a bequest from the Charles Manson estate.

Thus, excited, empowered and enthused, I zipped through my pet duties and started on breakfast. That too was gift from The Divine: I had an almost-full pot of yesterday’s coffee and a half-quart of lo mein that passed the sniff test. So not only would I dine in style, but I’d expend none of my precious energy to do it.

Repast over and dishes more or less washed, I chose my schmattas du jour, grabbed my book bag and got ready to head out. Only one chore remained — choosing my hatwear. That is always easier said than done because my selection is vast. I keep my daily humdrum hats in a big bin by the door, so I can select and split, rather than agonize over them. On that day I chose a dapper hand-sewn purple newsboy cap I’d bought in Seattle years ago. I put the cap on my cabeza and adjusted it to max jauntiness. Then I turned and reached for the door, and when I did, I was stopped in my tracks by a stench so foul I almost hurled my lo mein.

It wasn’t overwhelmingly strong, but it was overwhelmingly foul. I took a cautious sniff, then another, and when I realized I wasn’t gonna spew, I started to search for the source of the effluvium.

The most likely candidate of course was dog poop. The dogs are housebroken and the cat is kitty litter trained, but, hey, we’re all human, right?

I gave a cursory look of the floors. Nada.

Then I gave them a detailed look — including under chairs, behind bookcases, even in the bathtub and wastebaskets. Mas nada.

Next was going to the horses’ mouths, so to speak. All three critters passed inspection with flying colors — none of which was brown.

Now what?

Well, if the problem wasn’t the animals, maybe it was me, so I checked all my shoes and boots. Rien.

Then I checked for propane leaks, open garbage can covers, backed-up sinks — anything and everything. Plus de rien.

And then the clock ran out and I could search no more. I had a lunch date with Kookie at which she wanted some help on her latest project — a tarot deck featuring local characters from My Home Town. Since there are 78 cards in a tarot deck, I’ve no idea if she knows how much work it’ll take to narrow down the finalists, but what are friends for, eh? So I couldn’t cancel because she was so excited to share her Wave of the Future with me, plus our agreed time was mere minutes away. Anyone who knows me knows how much I value punctuality (whether I can model it or not).

I hopped in my car, snapped on my seat belt, and just as I was about to turn the key — Damn and Double Damn! — there was that smell again.

I got out of my car, checked the bottom of my boots again. Nothin’.

Then I took off my jacket, searched, and was about to take off my pants when it hit me — a direct hit amidships!

It wasn’t the dog, it wasn’t the cat, it wasn’t the propane line. It was ME!

And when I say me, I mean me … myself … and I.

It was nothing I stepped in, brushed against, sat on. In fact, it was nothing external at all. Instead, after successfully avoiding it for decades, I’d finally been struck with the Geezer’s Worst Curse — OMO.

What, you ask, is OMO? Maybe you don’t know it by its medical name, and neither do I. But I’m sure you know it when you’re near it. It is Old Man Odor.

There are many varieties of it. There’s moth balls and tobacco. There’s fetid egg yolk and coffee. There’s unwashed skivs and wood smoke. The list is endless and the only thing they have in common is they’re all repugnant. And now I had joined the legion of the repugnascienti.

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A killer in our midst

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I had no idea how or why it happened. For sure, I’m no fashion plate. Or to quote my mother on my casual sense of style: “You look like an unmade bed.” Unmade, maybe. But frequently washed. Ditto for my clothes and corpus.

Finally, I concluded it was like lots of old age vicissitudes: You do fine for decades, running on a full tank of super premium 24-7. And the next thing you know, a genetic switch gets thrown and you’re limping or gasping or shaking or shuddering. Arteries that just last year were as clean as an OR instrument tray are now as clotted and clogged as a rush hour Mumbai subway.

But the Kook awaited, and stinky vapor trail or not, I drove to our date. After about a mile, an image flashed in my mind of Kitzel the Kat. Any cat owner and lover (the same thing, far as I’m concerned) knows how they like to sleep in oddball places. Inside shopping bags. On the top of bookshelves. On the arms of chairs and the backs of couches. Especially in places with lots of soft padding, like clothes.

And the image I had of Kitzel was her sleeping in a box of clothes, specifically in my hat bin by the door, which she does now and then.

Something about Kitzel. While she likes all dogs, cats and people and is really sweet and gentle, her sense of feline charity does NOT extend to mice. They come in the house and within the hour they’ve been dispatched to their ancestors. If she flew a P-51 Mustang, you’d never see the fuselage, only the mouse stencils.

I thought about her rodenticidal obsession. I thought about her sleeping in my hat bin.

And then I came up with a tentative hypothesis: After one of her “hits,” and in typical Kitzel fastidiousness, she’d given the deceased a burial befitting a worthy opponent … in my hat bin. So — Eureka! — what I’d thought was OMO was in fact DMO. It’d be easy enough to prove.

I drove onto the shoulder, took off my cap and gave it a light sniff. And when I did, I was “rewarded” with a hit of defunct rodent.

I drove back, sprinted into the house and carefully started removing hats from the bin, one at a time. After the eighth hat, there, lying in state, was exactly what I thought there’d be — Mus Mortuus Omnino.

I hoisted him by his tail and gently deposited him in the grass, returning a gift to wildlife while, hopefully, sending him to The Great Feline-free Cheese Fest in the Sky.

Things finally settled down Chez Deaupe and what passes for sanity has once again prevailed.

My blood pressure returned to acceptable limits. I canceled my emergency appointment with the mobile psychiatrist. And maybe best of all, I now have an entire binful of freshly-laundered hats.