Smiling is my favorite

I always hated when people told me to smile.

You know what I mean. Strangers – usually grown men – telling a young woman to smile as they pass by on the street. They think nothing of it; to them, it's just friendly advice so that that stranger might look more attractive, or seem approachable and available … to them: A stranger on the street.

In alphabetical order: Alone, Approachable, Attractive, Available … all of the things that can be dangerous when you find yourself in a dark alley or -- in my neighborhood back-in-the-day – walking home all by your lonesome at 3 p.m. on a Thursday.

The idea of “Hello,” or “Nice Day” or just a silent smile of their own without the demand of a response, never occurred to them?

I suppose it's just as well … A stranger who tells you to smile for them (if you aren't paying them to take your picture) is a pretty good indicator of a creep we should seek to avoid.

Of course, I'm bringing this up because I am pushing a birthday of monumental proportion, or so I'm told. And birthdays are the watch-pots that have a tendency to boil over while you're standing over the stove.

Now, I won't tell you which birthday I'm not celebrating … you can just keep on thinking 27 because that's where I stopped counting (two years before my own mother ditched the accounting of her chronological age). You can probably guess it's been a while since anyone has told me what to do with my expressions.

Which, I have to say, is one of the genuine benefits of getting older.

And – hold your pearls – smiling has become my favorite.

Granted, I realized this because I am vain and as unlikely to employ the skills of a plastic surgeon as I am to get my roots done in a timely manner. A smile is the most inexpensive yet effective facelift I can muster.

But I feel I must let you know … as a public service, not as a demand: Smiling has been a fairly eye-opening endeavor (though not literally; literally it makes me a little squinty, but that's for another column).

Have you seen a senior light up when you look them in the eye and just smile? It doesn't matter if it's a “fine morning” or the “worst weather we're having,” the temperature out there is something we all share in some degree of a stake.

You don't have to dig any deeper.

You don't have to carry their groceries or help them find where the store managers have moved the cornflakes this week. You don't have to do anything.

But you might feel some tension in your body loosen. You might start to see that some things, at least, aren't as bleak as the talking heads on TV or your friends on “facebonk” make it seem.

But just like I've begun to look forward to getting at least one hundred and fourteen “Happy Birthdays” typed at me from the social network on the anniversary of the day I was born, I've come to realize that as an exercise, even disingenuous smiling somehow becomes bona fide with practice and repetition.

But you'll have to find out for yourself. It's not my place to tell you to smile.