After months of pay­ing undue atten­tion to polit­i­cal pom­pos­i­ty cal­cu­lat­ed to intim­i­date the inde­ci­sive, flat­ter the fools and fool the feck­less, a break is in order.  Ergo, I resolved to record one thing that made me smile each day between my last perch post and this one.

SATURDAY: The Face­book birth­day announce­ment for a friend of 50+ years stand­ing, prompt­ed me to dig out a pho­to tak­en in 1974 on the Tlaeeng Pass (3.225m). Known as “Roof of Africa”, it’s the high­est road on the continent.

 John Finch (left),  me (cen­ter) and James Turn­er (right) scrimped and saved for months to mod­i­fy our trail bikes to car­ry fuel and camp­ing gear on the 1,000-plus kilo­me­ter round trip from Cape Town. (I made a cou­ple of hun­dred dol­lars back sell­ing the sto­ry and pho­tos to an Aus­tralian dirt bike mag­a­zine; my first for­eign dateline/byline.) Those foot­loose and fan­cy-free days rank among the best of my expe­ri­ence-rich life. And best of all, we three are still alive, kick­ing — and despite resid­ing on three sep­a­rate con­ti­nents — still in touch.
Just writ­ing that gave me a bonus smile.
Befit­ting the inter­ven­ing years, SUNDAY was a sedate morn­ing walk in the Borgh­ese Gar­dens. Begun in 1608, the park took 25 years to com­plete. It’s referred to as “the lungs of Rome”, a hope­ful claim in a city choked with traf­fic for which it was nev­er designed.
But the gar­den is its own “smile city”

The young woman pluck­ing the harp and accom­pa­ny­ing her­self with a sub­lime voice in Ital­ian, French and Eng­lish, would cer­tain­ly have invoked one in Car­di­nal Sci­p­i­one Borgh­ese, the renowned patron of the arts who com­mis­sioned the gar­dens. For me, the harpist and no polit­i­cal signs or speech­es,  added up to a feel­ing (how­ev­er brief) that the world is just fine, thanks very much.

My MONDAY smile came after five hours of clean­ing up a gar­den shed that has been demand­ing it for more than a year. It was, admit­ted­ly, a smug one, but it felt good, which was, after all, the point of my self-set goal for the week.
And then came a bonus: an Amer­i­can friend, who is my polar oppo­site when it comes to Trump and MAGA, and I agreed that we will not argue about, or even dis­cuss U.S. pol­i­tics for one full year.
I can’t say that prompt­ed a prop­er smile, but it removes the risk of ran­cour, so I’ll count it as one.
TUESDAY saw a slip­page of resolve. I let pol­i­tics intrude, but only as far as the head­lines and the first thir­ty sec­onds of on air reports, or ini­tial three graphs of print pieces.
And then, low and behold, FOX News actu­al­ly pro­duced a smile that turned into a chuck­le – and not my usu­al deri­sive type.
A female guest in glass­es that might have been pur­loined from Elton John’s con­cert col­lec­tion, was cheer­ful­ly (as opposed to the FOX norm of stri­dent­ly) mock­ing the three report­ed­ly lead­ing choic­es for anti-Trumpers con­tem­plat­ing exile:
New Zealand  — has veered polit­i­cal­ly hard right,
Cana­da — is on a path to toss out left winger Justin Trudeau in favour of a con­ser­v­a­tive leader described as “not Don­ald Trump but he sure acts like him”, and
Aus­tralia — is home to many of the world’s dead­liest snakes, spi­ders and sea creatures.
That was a bit of typ­i­cal FOX hyper­bole, but also a fun putdown.
(Grant­ed, it’s no joke to those with rea­son to fear they may be on a Trump hit list, however.)
As befits its mid-week sta­tus of nei­ther here nor there, WEDNESDAY’s smile scale was cow­er­ing close to a line by Amer­i­can poet E.E. Cum­mings: “The most wast­ed of all days is one with­out laughter.”
I set­tled down with a rit­u­al evening sin­gle malt, resigned to hav­ing fall­en smile short, when Don MacLean’s “Amer­i­can Pie” came up on our 60s playlist.
I lived through the rock and roll his­to­ry the song chron­i­cles, and still know all the words in the eight min­utes and forty-two sec­onds of the full version.
And if that isn’t worth the smile I sang them through, I don’t know what is.
I’m an AI scep­tic, but THURSDAY a sto­ry that a British phone com­pa­ny has deployed an AI tool to take on inter­net scam­mers prompt­ed a wry grin.
Called “Daisy”, it mim­ics the voice of an elder­ly woman to talk to fraud­sters and “waste as much of their time as pos­si­ble” .
(This link will hope­ful­ly bring up a YouTube exam­ple of it.)
FRIDAY was an unex­pect­ed smile bonus, cour­tesy of an unin­ten­tion­al but whol­ly appro­pri­ate jux­ta­po­si­tion. An adver­tise­ment (Ital­ian) that popped up dur­ing a late night TV host’s riff on the absur­di­ty of Trump’s cab­i­net choic­es, shows a grin­ning man offer­ing a woman who has just declined his offer of food because she has stom­ach prob­lems, his box of anti-acid­i­ty and nau­sea medication.
In con­clu­sion, I’ll para­phrase a cou­ple of lines from a Rolling Stones song I cheer­ful­ly sing along with:
“You can’t always get what you want/But if you look around sometimes/, You just might find/A smile that you need.”
Oh yeah.

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