Lately, I've had to wear rubber gloves a couple of times. 

And for me, rubber gloves bring back memories. 

Memories of going to see the dentist. 

Most of the people reading this'll probably be thinking 'that can't be good' right about now. 

But it actually can, and is. 

You see, the dentist's office we always went to when I was little was a lot bigger and fancier than the one we go to now. It had a large waiting room, with an alcove where there were a bunch of toys. The rooms that each dentist had were probably nearly a third of the size of the entire place that we go to now, even taking into account how small I was then. And those rooms... they had a very unique smell to them, a smell I hadn't ever encountered outside of that building. 

I liked that smell. For me, it made the annoyance of being incessantly told "open wide" and having things poked around in my mouth worthwhile. Even when the dentist brought out the pointy tool with the curved hook, which would always wind up leaving me with an aching mouth, and the mirror-on-a-stick that went with it, which always felt way too big to go in my mouth, especially with a pointy object in there too. 

And one day I was there, and I realized that the smell was the gloves, which there were always a pair of on the dentist's hands and a whole bunch more in boxes along one side of the room. Except it wasn't, because it was too strong to be the gloves. Still, after that I was always tempted to ask for a pair of gloves to take with me, especially the time the dentist had a box of purple gloves visible. 

To this day, I don't know what made the smell so strong. Maybe it was actually just the gloves-- after all, there were entire shelves of boxes of them. But I don't think so. Still, that sort of rubber gloves always smells like dentist to me. Even though we moved, and the dentist's office we go to now doesn't smell like that at all, and I know it would be more accurate to say that the old dentist's office always smelled like rubber gloves.