Stranger Smiles

I am hoping to add to this section. It will start here with three accounts, but I want it to grow.
I like to smile at people when I am in public, and I like it when people smile back at me. This section is dedicated to people who show their pearly whites to strangers.
One person I worked with described that he had two smiles: one was a flirty smile and one was a nice—but professional—smile. He then told me that he would make sure that when buses went by—that were usually filled with elderly people—he would flash his big flirty smile at all the old women on board. I liked that and developed two smiles for myself.
My first smile is my normal smile. It usually shows my top row of teeth—about nine of them. My second smile is my old people smile (I don’t know how it got this name, but that is what it is). This smile forms a fuzzy rectangle shape with my lips and shows two rows of teeth, about 23 teeth in all. It is not conventional, but is still a smile.
Account One.
One day I was driving my car on a city street and was stopped at a red light. The traffic coming towards me had a green light and a green arrow, and so they began to move slowly. I saw an old man in a bright yellow VW Beatle. I dazzled him with my old person smile, not thinking about it because it has become somewhat common for me to do. While giving him this smile, we made eye contact. He then reciprocated my smile: he turned his head to look straight at me, stretched his lips back to their corners, and showed me as many teeth as possible as he drove past me one lane away in his bright VW Beatle. I laughed out loud. I know my smile is funny but I had never had it mirrored back to me, and in such a quick moment! His old face looking straight back at me as he zips along in his yellow beetle is a clear picture in my mind and makes me love that old man.
Account Two.
I was in the Holy City. We were walking around the Old Town in Jerusalem on the historic cobblestone to get to another holy site. Coming towards us was a Hasidic Jew. He was wearing his black pants, white shirt, black suit coat, and black hat. He had dark features, his dark brown curls tried to keep up to his fast past. As our trails neared we made eye contact and he offered me a smile that was as large as the western wall. This wasn’t a halfhearted smile of closed lips with corners that barely pointed to the heaves, This smile was one that took effort; the top lip had to separate from the bottom as the sides of his mouth pulled even further away from each other to form a gap that would display his top row of white teeth. It was sincere, contagious, and had to be duplicated. Instantly I told the corners of my mouth to pull out and up, directing them to point as far as they could above while insisting that my lips separated to allow a gap where my teeth could be seen.
He tread on, we continued to wander, and that thought of a shared smile in Israel is a warm memory of my travels.
Account Three.
I was holiday shopping. The store had many people roaming the aisles in search of gifts. I tire easily of shopping with so much competition and chaos. I was looking at some food items and saw a toddler sitting in the seat of a shopping cart and I’d guess that the child was younger than two years of age. The child looked at me and I at him. When making eye contact, I smiled my normal smile and at the same time I lowered my head, just slightly and my eyes widened. The child looked back at me for a few seconds and slowly, a smile grew on his face. It was a slow process. It was not an instantaneous recognition and counter smile. It was deliberate and was produced in slow measures. Soon after he had shown me his full smile of all his baby teeth, his father pushed him away, but I stood in the isle, and smiled at the cereal boxes.

Mimo

I changed the name of this blog. Mimo is a Czech word, a preposition. It means besides, by, past, or despite. I heard this often to describe neighboring towns: Long Beach is ‘mimo’ Seal Beach.
In a different context, I heard someone excuse themselves with an apology and say, “I was ‘mimo’”. This was, to me, amusing. I could completely relate to this idea. I know how I can be in a conversation and one aspect of it catches my attention, and I will skip behind the synapses in my mind to a new thought and eliminate the background noise, or, unfortunately, a conversation.
Sometimes I feel this way in general about myself; that I am close, but not quite in the same town. That’s okay; it’s petty good over here, too.
Thus, the new name of the blog has been created.

Irish Spring:

A little creek?
A season?
A jump from a leprechaun? (maybe not politically correct)