The Smile

Mirrors don’t help any more. The tarnished brass one in the living room sends back dusty reflections, more ghost-like than anything tangible. The bathroom is always steamy; its image would be more dreamlike were it to be worthy of the reality I seek. The long full-length mirror in the entrance way tells me that I’ve gained weight, filled out, as an adult should. But there is little trace of contentment, of happiness.

The smile I seek is absent.

I’ve known for many years that I don’t smile, often at least. I hate to think of myself as someone who never smiles, but maybe that’s why I don’t like the reflection scoffing at me whenever I stare into the picture windows of my soul.

Yesterday, in my quest, I began the search for photo albums. Closets were cleaned out; I found much useless bric-a-brac, which eventually will be the joy of the homeless rummaging in my garbage.

I hit the attic. I have long since grown out of the habit of fearing spiders, although I still do not consider them part of my animal kingdom friends like mice and earthworms. But I do religiously take my web broom – yes I have a special one especially for this chore – and sweep away all of the cobwebs above my head. I prefer taking the risk of spiders crawling on me rather than thinking me a potential victim and falling into my hair. It’s been years since my schoolroom problems with lice, but spiders don’t seem to understand that.

The multitude of a lifetime of boxes containing this and that brought no images of my lacking smile. I rummaged for several hours, delighting in the discovery of Mr. Brown, my old teddy bear, several charcoal drawings of naked trees which miraculously survived years of moving from one house to another, and all of my childhood books which have never found their way to my adult bookshelves.

But the rare family photo albums were not among the dust.

Today I will try the damp of the basement. And the old college footlocker which is now covered in many layers of moldy green.

During my adult life I have always been the person with the camera. I have a lousy visual memory, so I snap up every vision I can behold, be it daily life with colleagues, students or neighbors, holidays with the family (or most frequently without the family) or the frequent vacation time I spend on my own. So I will have a hard time pinpointing the moment my smile disappeared, if ever I can determine a single event which made it less a permanent fixture of my face. There’s no use in going back to my childhood and placing blame there. It was not happy, in fact it was disastrous, but I don’t think that it effectively erased my smile from as early as my childhood. I “grinned and bared” it for a long time, many people never knew how much I suffered, so I imagine there was always a plastered smile on my silly face.

But that must still be discovered.

Basements are not my favorite places. Although in my house I have plenty of room there for my laundry and my workshop, the laundry has been moved to a room off the kitchen and my handiwork is never done underground. The old trunk found its way there only because it was easier to take it down a single flight of steps rather than up two to the attic.

The lock on the trunk was rusted. It took me forty-five minutes to go through the jars of keys I have collected in over fifty years of my life to find the right one. Then I had to get out the crowbar to force it open.

I found pictures of myself, my own siblings and those brats belonging to the stepparents who populated my life. There was suddenly a room full of people I hadn’t seen in over thirty years conversing with the shadows of my memories. It was pleasant, but there were no images of the me that grew up with them at the time. Or if there were, I was hidden behind someone, or had my hands in front of my mouth. It was almost as if I knew there was something to be hidden. Could it have been that I always knew my smile was missing and that one day I would be looking desperately for it?

Three photos were placed in a German edition of Khalil Gibran’s poetry. 1983. Three photos taken in Berlin during the most wonderful year of my life. Somehow Cupid socked me hard with a golden arrow and I was in love, not for the first time in my life, but truly in love. One picture, with a French beret I have since lost, showed me delirious with love. My blue eyes glowed with it and the smile I addressed the camera was genuine, ear-to-ear, and seemed at the moment to last an eternity.

The two other pictures I had not set eyes on since October of that year. As that love disappeared unexplained one chilly morning, so did the smile I thought would last forever. I’ve never returned to Berlin, even after the wall was broken. I could not celebrate the freedom of that city when the city itself was the imminent reminder that I lost part of myself there so long ago.

I did what I should have done twenty-fours years ago. I burned the last remnants of a cold lonely part of my life. And although the tears flowed freely, I somehow think that I will allow myself to smile a bit more easily the next time I find someone worthy to love. And maybe, just for a change, I’ll discover that the person most worthy of that love is myself.


The Smile
[2007.6.11…b]
Written for the Writer's Cramp
981 words