A Smile

On any given day it is the best thing I see.  It is guaranteed make my day better, instantly.  It lights up my world and it does the same for the people around her.  When Marty smiles, I mean really smiles it is the best thing in my day.

Marty has always liked to laugh and to smile.  She was the funny one, the one who could actually remember a joke and tell it without pause and with real comic timing.  She was the one who laughed out loud.  She still does and when she gets tickled it is a worth seeing.  Marty’s face lights up, she laughs and holds her stomach and just for that moment,  a real normal seems to take hold and all is right with the world.

You have to see it to understand, you have to understand Marty to see it fully.  Her eyes light up, her lips kind of purse together and then separate to show a little tooth, the corners of her lips turn up and her whole face smiles.  The mouth is the star but the face is the universe, they combine and show joy.

The best of her smiles are spontaneous, when she hears something funny, when she sees something funny.   

We never really see a smile of contentment, that doesn’t happen, it has to be something that for whatever reason she finds funny.

We went to see Anchorman 2 and Marty laughed out loud and grinned at the first ten minutes of the film.  She yawned the rest of the way through the movie.  That’s her review of the film, she is an astute judge of funny.

They also had a preview for Melissa McCarthy’s new flick, “Tammy”, where McCarthy was wearing a sack on her head and dancing to Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” and Marty smiled big and laughed through the whole trailer.  That’s the stuff, over the top, base, visual, auditory humor that gets Marty going.

Don’t get me wrong, she laughs at me from time to time, she even cracks herself up occasionally.  Yesterday we went to Academy and I went to check out with our few things.  Marty and Renee went ahead to get into the van.  We were parked close (Academy in Waco has great handicapped parking….as opposed to WalMart) and she was riding in the lift up, facing the store as I came prancing out.  When I got to the van she was just beaming and I asked what she was smiling about and she said, “You look like a real shopper.”

Now I’m not sure why that thought made her laugh, but she cracked herself up.  I think it’s because she knows I’m the anti-shopper and she thought it pretty funny that I was earnestly walking up clutching my new purchases like I was carrying something valuable.  I make her smile and occasionally I make her laugh.

It’s the simple things, the simple times that seem to hold this whole thing together, the time spent laughing, the time spent smiling, and the time spent being together, quietly, contentedly.  Smiling is really a good thing.