The Smile Chronicles

This post has random bleh-ness, so please go right ahead and ignore it if you have anything better to do. And if you still go ahead, paying no heed to my well-meaning warning, then, you truly deserve to be tortured with the post that is to follow.
The truth is, that I have been quite discontent these days. And escape mechanism is to be flitting between nostalgia clips (that oscillate between chirping birds in a hundred-year-old tharavadu, to guzzling away many random beverages that don't agree with each other in a dilapidated college building....)

And in all these clips, there are these spots of brilliant humour, which create an oasis of happiness in the midst of all the 'ifs' and 'if onlys' in life. So I just decided to list here, in random, unconnected (just realized they mean one and the same!) memories that still bring a smile.... Like I said - walk away before it is too late, folks!

1. My sister, aged two, would call 'breakfast' and 'wastebasket' the same thing - 'Bake-aack'..... We would understand reference to context only when she pointed and said the word.
2. My Mom, a dedicated homemaker, but with all the competencies of Sherlock Holmes, would rummage through all our 'personal' stuff when we were in school, and try as she might, she could NEVER hide the glint in her eyes. 
3. A terrified Dad sending me a birthday gift - exactly a month in advance!
4. I would go around the TV peering through the holes in the back of it to catch the little people that lived inside it - age 3
5. My first crush in school .... we would attend drama classes together. (Finer details - he ended up playing my escaped convict SON in a prize winning skit. Yup! I was the bad*** even back then)
6. My first job interview, where I poured hot coffee all over the interviewer. (Finer details - I got the job)
7. A couple of over zealous young hoteliers, waiting for the millennium sunrise on the beach - on the Western coast. (Finer details - it can be attributed to blood alcohol, but our basic geography lessons failed us - we forgot the sun does not rise from the western seas!)
8. During the few days of hour-long romantic conversations before wedding, would-be hubby declares he has planned the entire cross country post wedding-reception travel (I hail from one corner of the country, and he, from the other extreme corner)..... but he forgot to book his new bride's tickets!
9. There was this contraption called the VCR (yeah! I'm THAT old) which was brought home amidst a lot of dancing and jumping up and down .... we could now watch movies at HOME - who could have thought of that, huh?
10. After a particularly eventful evening with friends, (that raised alcohol content in the bloodstream) I decided the best place to sit in an auto was the drivers' seat - much to the horror of the driver, who just vanished (with the auto) 
11. After a disgusting Delhi-dude-in-big-car-and-baked beans-for-brains knocked my little car, I bravely got out of my car amidst all the honking and the ensuing traffic jam, walked up to the smirking buffalo in the ship-of-a-car, and pulled out his car keys from the ignition. When the dude shrugged and said 'OK lets just wait for the cops' (which meant an hour long wait), I threw the keys right into the middle of the honking traffic...... AND RAN for my life. Watched shocked dude trying to navigate traffic to get keys. *Satisfied laugh here*
12. Sister and me manoeuvring through aisles to avoid lecherous MCPs in the buses in Kerala, jabbing an open safety pin into a guy and laughing like crazy about it later.
13. Mom, sister and me playing 'Tickle Tickle' on the bed on lazy afternoons.
14. Grandfather waking up all of us cousins (with a playful glint in his eyes) with the loudest rendition that the old radio could dole out, of the theme music of All India Radio - at the crack of dawn.
15. The musical chairs that would form and inevitable part of every wedding Sadya (feast).

Suddenly realized - it takes so little to actually give us true happiness, right?