Please stop smiling

(...and let me finish my crossword?)

Dear Smiler,

Quit smiling when I’m trying to finish my crossword! Your smile makes me want to rush over and kiss you, but my face is smudged with brown sweet stuff from this morning’s chocolate croissant. I don’t know what the French (or maybe it’s Portuguese here in west end Toronto) put in their croissant-filling but you don’t want it on your face – but that’s what’ll happen when I kiss you.

The crossword is my reason to get up in the morning: I think of ‘15 across’ and my inner thighs grow taut and twitchy. Have you ever completed the Globe and Mail’s Whango-Superbo Saturday Special? It requires the genius of 11 professors. So imagine how your smile must be interfering, if I'm impelled to throw down my pencil and slather your lips with my chocolate-stained labials whensoever you smile. A croissant fetches approximately $1.35 at a decent café. You’ll have to share in that expense: this is a house of crosswords, not of chocolate gratis. You must learn etiquette, for this is a place of accomplishment and well-considered verbiage. Therefore cease smiling and undertake a crossword of your own! I recommend the TV Guide's ‘Cross-Tease’ for starters, because while your grin is notorious your wordcrossing experience is probably near zero.

That smile - the reason it bewitches me so – is first, what goes on at the level of the tooth. Many have said (and I include in this generalization the great Coco Chanel and his assistant Velhimna) that teeth are ‘the bouncer to the soul’. Your mouth may keep me out, but I line up for hours in my well-coiffed suit to glimpse your shineys. Your pearly whites are more like Pearly Gates; does St. Peter loan you an ivory toothbrush? I am agog.

Next: the lips themselves, ruby red with a hint of Citrus Splash lipliner, which was purchased from a drugstore, one of the nation’s finest. ‘Like a drug’ is right: your succulent pneumatic mouth-hearts are narcotic vis-a-vis their intoxication of my soul! Those lips could withstand months of industrial testing to verify their bouncy resilience, their glistening moistness.

Also, the dimples: as part of the smile as Shemp was part of the Stooges – quite often absent, from uglier people that is, but when they do appear it is a grand comic farce that liquefies my soul into butter at the mere thought of your lactic succulence. In short, your dimples connect me to a higher plane of existence and nonsensical hyperbole.

Finally, it is the combination of all the above. Your smile has many variations but a single theme, that of smiliness, and those smiles, while magnificent and rival to Michelangelo’s David in baring the sheer beauty of the human form - they also mess with my ritual crossword! A man with a crossword is a creature of purpose, un wordsmith nobile to quote the French (only partly in their language); a crossword is a test of diligence, gateway of curiousity, the fruit of hours of newspaper content-related decisions…. So, please stop your torture and let me finish what I have begun!