The smiles that light up my world (redux)
“My Ironbridge Summer” Vol.5
A rambling musing on life, music, silly games of cards, movies and and ode to my son to whom the book is dedicated, this is chapter 41 (of 56) within my 8th of December self-published book “My Ironbridge Summer” and here she is, pictured and linked below together with a link to the original article that spawned the chapter and indeed, the chapter in full. This book is the tenth I’ve self-published since March 2022 and is reasonably priced in both hardback and paperback and also free to read should you have an Amazon Kindle “Unlimited” membership.
"My Ironbridge Summer" - link to Amazon
The smiles that light up my world
For a Thursday that threatened both sunshine and rain whilst ultimately providing neither, it was another of those strange days to be alive on our prehistoric rock spinning gently through an unquantifia…
For a Thursday that threatened both sunshine and rain whilst ultimately providing neither, it was another of those strange days to be alive on our prehistoric rock spinning gently through an unquantifiable infinity.
Unquantifiable is a weird word when you look at it for perhaps 6 or 7 solid minutes and I don’t particularly suggest you doing so. We could also discuss and even gently argue over how many syllables the word has and according to the damned Americanized dictionary here it isn’t even recognised as a word. Which is neither here nor there for this opening lead but I’ve written it now, for good or ill, and whilst I’d spell Americanized with a “s” in place of the “z”, that isn’t particularly relevant either and we’re already veering dangerously into tangents that we have no business with, not today, and not after a Thursday that began and ended with smiles that would light up the darkest of rooms.
After watching my brave baseball boys in Dodger blue defeat those pesky Orioles of Baltimore it was way past 6am local time when I retreated to bed only to awaken way before the shrill of an alarm and the greeting of another day. Less than 3 hours sleep is another of life’s courses I don’t particularly endorse you following. Walls begin to bend. You have a tendency to stare for hours at a time at the moon questioning whether it’s crescent shaped, a full half moon or perhaps that slippery area in between. You end up giving swans human names or singing songs on sunny Monday mornings feeding ducks, oblivious to the world around you. You may also re-read passages of your own writing and see you’ve written “a full half moon” and smile at the quixotic nature and poetry of writing or listen to those damned fools who believe last night’s game, and indeed tonight’s tussle between the same two teams, could be a forerunner for the World Series. Those people clearly haven’t followed the fortunes of the Los Angeles Dodgers in mid to late September. I have. For a quarter of a century. They tend to lose in heart breaking fashion come the play offs. Take it from me. I’ve gone to bed at 6am far too many times across far too many years with the heaviest of sporting hearts.
But not last night and hopefully not later in a future that hasn’t happened yet, but I digress. What this has to do or have any connection with eating bacon and sausage sandwiches on the grass of mother nature and playing and losing at games of cards and the placing of triangle shaped tiles into a correctly numbered format is anyone’s guess at this stage and possibly the most perplexing aspect of this article is the fact I wanted to quickly churn the book ending of a day on planet earth with the most beautiful of smiles and I seem to have veered off into season ending baseball talk, bacon (and sausage) sandwiches and screaming “YAHTZEE!” at the top of my lungs whilst sat beside a flower bed in a busy public park. Naturally this loud exclamation of ecstasy resulted in a thousand yard death stare from my son but he had the last laugh and indeed smile of the day, comprehensively beating me 3 Games to 0 at “Uno” and by 187 points in a game of placing triangles into bridges, bridges into hexagons and generally staring at the board screaming, internally, “I still can’t fucking go”.
He was overjoyed at his victory at “Tri-ominos” and you should have seen the widening of his smile as we tallied the final scores! But oh for my son’s smile before victory in a hand of Uno. The lad has no poker face to speak of, more a sunshine smile on the cusp of a giggle, and you know as well as he does that he’s about to win yet another hand, tally up yet more points and proclaim yet more Game victories to have been won.
That’s when the real smile arrives, the greatest smile in the world.
We listened to Bruce Springsteen on the drive back. Largely in a comfortable silence, I thought of the sunshine smile beside me during “Badlands”, my dear old Mum during “Thunder Road” and I just about kept it together as we listened to “Racing in the Street”. Why is a confession for another time. Settling back into the rhythm of our days together the lad decided, totally unbidden by me, at least not today, that today was indeed the day he wanted to watch “Magnolia” for the first time. This was it I thought, that rite of passage moment of finally watching this soul destroying masterpiece with my son. Keep it together Stephen I may or may not have said to myself in the garden ahead of “curtain up”. Don’t go talking all over the film either someone else chimed in, another voice in a head overflowing with them. “
Don’t mention the frogs!” screamed another, whilst another voice reminded me not to recite all of Tom Cruise’s lines and don’t, whatever you do, go on and on about how the director has moved an entire 90 second scene in one flowing movement without any cuts or edits and a young boy’s life is about to change and flower and take on a determined life of its own in the worst of circumstances and on a fictional TV game show the director guides us to via the pouring rain of outside through a maze of tunnels and corridors in the bowels of a tall building they will scale in one fluid motion before passing through more corridors and dressing rooms before arriving at the floor of a popular TV show thrown into the chaos of the impending death of their host.
Who needs that?
And don’t start crying when Aimee Mann starts singing “Wise Up” for crying out loud!
All these voices and more were screaming for my attention as I settled down to watch Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece for the first time with my son, and I largely ignored all of them. Conservatively, I’ve watched this film 20 times, which equates to 2 and a half days and nights of my life. Mainly nights, often alone or when scaring any potential love interests running for the hills when I disintegrate into pieces when Aimee Mann (and indeed the entire cast) sing, or when the director cleverly and slowly backs his camera away from a boy with a broken heart or the teenager in a man’s body sobbing he has “lots of love to give”.
The lad smiled as I rambled through my scatter-gun dissection of the film: luck, chance, destiny, solitude in a small world, a highly probable case of incest, an even higher probability of two characters dying, duplicity, bullying, depression, anxiety, feelings of worthlessness, self destruction, two characters only wanting the very best for others around them…oh, and frogs raining from the sky before love, compassion, concern for others, reunification, re-birth, re-awakenings and then, when all has been lost and much more has been found, Claudia, the film’s beautiful angel, looks directly into the camera and smiles.
I usually dissolve into a sobbing mess at this point, but not today.
Today I smiled, and that made three of us.
“Goodbye stranger.
It’s been nice”.
I hope you’ve found your (personal) paradise.
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.