An Eye for Simple Pleasures in a Complex World

The world of Jack Smith ranged from the front porch of his much-maligned hideaway in Baja California to the birdbath at his Mt. Washington home.

But regardless of the geographic vantage point, he found humor, poetry and gentility in a world he viewed with a fey imagination.

A final tour of a few of the vistas of Jack Smith:

On attending the 50th reunion of his Belmont High School class and explaining why it was better than the 25th:

“[The 25th] catches everyone at midlife crisis. It throws vulnerable people together in a kind of brutal encounter at a moment when they are already abraded by regrets, bewildered by uncertainties, and tormented by resurgent fantasies.

“Women are anxious about menopause and fading beauty, about empty homes and errant husbands; men look in the mirror and no longer see Charles Boyer or Charles Atlas. Jealousies are sharpened; spouses measure their mates against the ones that got away; infidelity is contemplated if not accomplished, and almost everyone goes home only slightly disenchanted.”

But after 50 years “we have banked most of our fires; our passions are subdued; our regrets blurred, our demons exorcised. We are rather surprised to be here at all, and not entirely discontented.”

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Of his quadruple bypass surgery in 1984 and the mysteries that accompanied that life-threatening procedure:

There was a “fantasy [that] took root somehow during my deep anesthesia, when they had stopped my heart and I was running on a machine.” He imagined he was “the victim of an insidious international ring of kidnappers,” and then, the operation over, “I began to write on my computer. Endlessly. Pouring out pages of exposition so articulate, so balanced, so illuminating that I knew I could never repeat them.”

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After his many bouts with heart problems, he frequently wrote of those who had nursed him back to health:

A nurse--”I knew that face: fair, pleasant, reflective, modestly voluptuous. Suddenly it came to me. She was the girl in the French Impressionist painting--the bartender at the Folies Bergere.” His cardiologist--”who speaks with a gentle Southern inflection that seems to make even bad news sound rather pleasant.”

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When in near-normal health, he continued his travels around Los Angeles, a journey that at first spanned 25 years as a working journalist and even longer as columnist and author.

Dressed in a tuxedo, he attended the opening of the French Impressionist exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But the stylish, catered affair was crowded so that Smith and his wife slipped away to a nearby fast-food restaurant:

“Actually, my Big Boy’s tuna sandwich wasn’t all that bad.”

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And then, shaking off apprehension about the steep stairs in the Los Angeles Coliseum, he attended the opening of the 1984 Olympic Games, sitting not far from where he sat 52 years earlier, when the 1932 Olympics had opened in the same stadium:

“I’m glad I went. I’m glad I live in Los Angeles. I’m glad I’m an American.

“I’m glad, come to think of it, to be alive.”

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He remained true to his dedication to simplicity in all things, even the epitaph he asked for himself. It was to say only:

“Have a nice day.”