swoon 14

I like banter. I like connections. I like making grumpy old men show their soft side and gruff ladies smile and over share. I take it as a challenge. My family watches the show, giving me a “good job mom” when they see me break an exceptionally less than pleasant person. Fun!

I was not always like this… in fact I spent my teen years assuming that adults in the neighborhood did not know who I was. Forgetting that I have looked the same since the age of three… and that boobs do not change a person beyond recognition… it seemed easier to avoid interaction than to have to explain who I was. A bizarre period of time.

My posts tend to lead to a fair amount of private messages…
• “What’s wrong, why were you at the doctor”: nothing is wrong, yearly breast ultrasound and mammogram, and colonoscopy, it’s all good, thank you.

• Masks don’t help keep you safe from covid-19: correct, but they help you not spread it to your loved ones if you get sick.

• “You were not shy or invisible when you were younger”: Who I put forth to the world in my younger years was not who I was inside. Young people are tender and weird and usually have much less confidence than they project.

Anyway, this entry is really a long drawn out way to thank my dear friend Lisette. We lived together in Manhattan right after college (as pictured below). It was Lisette who broke my protective shell and taught me how to have fun and engage with people. She would explode into a store… saying hi to the security guard, telling someone the shirt they were looking at would go great with their eyes, dancing and singing to the music playing, make twelve friends on the checkout line ending up with plans to rollerblade dance in Central Park with them the next day, and last but not least saying “hi, how is your day going” to the cashier and then actually listen to their answers…finishing off with a “well I hope it continues” or “I hope it gets better”, and every single cashier ended up with smile on their face. Magic.

Lisette’s ability to go out of her way to be joyous is infectious, and when I am able to get a stranger to smile, I think of her. We could change the world if we all did this… we could create a pandemic of smiles. Swoon.