SPEND ALL YOUR KISSES, MR. SMITH

A leisurely paste-up, by the syndicated Los Angeles Times columnist, of reflections on and of himself through a glass very lightly. It begins in 1969 when the sound of a son's motorcycle heralds Smith's advance (decline?) into middle age. Which has its compensations, not the least of them the new role of father-in-law that he plays with unexpected pleasure--especially vis-a-vis Jacqueline Joyeux who comes across in neon while Smith's wife and sons, and even his grandchildren, fade into the sterility of enviable-big-happy-family. Going nowhere in particular, he coasts along below the speed-limit, stopping to show and share his total if very random recall: of the morning the cable-TV broke (with a little help from his Airedale) just before the Super Bowl, or the cold afternoon in Rome when he finally found the glove shop but it was closed because it was afternoon, or the evening he spent drinking wine with Jacqueline's father whose ""lack of English was prodigious."" . . . Sometimes unfashionably unLiberated, usually congenial and leavening, Jack Smith is reassuringly ordinary, even between the lines.