Smile! It makes you gorgeous!

“Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh nevermind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked”….well I am not so sure I would use fabulous but I was damn cute.

I continue to attend my pack-rats anonymous meetings each and every week! Snaps for me! Organization is now the name of the game. The recent purge under my bed produced several boxes of photographs that have not seen the light of day since leather ties were in fashion (and I don’t care what anyone says, they must never make a comeback!). As I started to arranged them chronologically and get them into albums, I realized that my fondness for smiles, pastry, cowboy boots, hats and horses has been with me my entire life.

Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas are days for feasting and laughing with family. In addition to roasting a turkey, rabbit, goose or chicken, we also roast each other. It is almost a guarantee that I will be the ‘attacked’ with 2 stories. One involves the day my great-grandmother – a saintly woman with the patience to match – babysat me as an infant and when she handed me back to my mother said, “this baby has me beat”. The second involves the origin of my nickname - Troop. Apparently I was not too fond of anyone but my father or anything but food. If I wasn’t sitting on his knee and eating, I was crying. Even on his knee though, I constantly made this “grrrrrrrrrrrr” noise that sounded like a tank, hence the name troop. These stories, I believe, are the product of a few over active imaginations and need to be filed in the “fiction” section of our little family library.

This year though, I have hard evidence to defend my good name and reputation. Even moments before my brother cracked me over the head with a bat, I was smiling. (My siblings and I have had A LOT of stitches at the hands of each other). Also evident is the fact that all you had to do was give me food to make me smile. And look at me smile in my cowboy boots! Apparently walking around naked also made me smile. And it still does! Try it. When you don't have company.


My fondness for food eventually led to an overbite. Still, I liked smiling ‘chiclet’ teeth and all - kids can be so cruel. I was called Bugs Bunny and apparently saw a ghost behind the school photographer one year. Even through that I smiled! 5 years of headgear and braces, didn’t make me stop either! Or eating. Braces did turn me off gum for life. Thankfully. In Robert Land there would be no gum and no filtered cigarettes. I hate seeing them on sidewalks, beaches and in parks. If anyone has a spare country, let me know so I can set up my throne. But I digress.
Remember to smile! Like McDonalds says, they are FREE!