Hispanic Fanatic

When my grandmother moved to this country, she was a multipack-a-day smoker. My mother and aunt were naturally concerned that their mom was on her way to an early, hack-coughing, phlegm-coated death. So they asked her to stop smoking.

My abuela rejected their request with the scorn of someone who has lived to old age and uses that fact to dismiss other people’s opinions. Thus blocked, my mother and aunt hit upon an effective, albeit ethically dubious, workaround.

They told her that smoking was illegal in America.

My grandmother, who spoke no English, was in disbelief. What kind of place was this America?

Keep in mind that this was in the days before Spanish-language cable channels or radio programs. And considering she had just moved here and that we were among the few Hispanics in the city at that time, she had no outsiders whom she could seek out to confirm this shocking fact.

She had to quit, her daughters told her, or the cops would bust her. My grandmother refused to believe this at first, and she pointed out that she saw people smoking on the street.

“Yes,” my aunt said with great patience. “They are breaking the law.”

My mother added that the smoker was taking a grave risk, analogous to stealing a car in broad daylight. My grandmother didn’t want to stick around for that, lest she get caught up in the imminent police raid. So she went home, finished the last pack that she had brought with her from El Salvador, and went cold turkey.

Years later, when she was long off cigarettes, my grandmother learned that the whole thing had been a lie. Of course, she was pissed off, and she sputtered threats and issued oaths and sent everyone in the family to hell.

But she still hasn’t started smoking again.

Granted, this technique only works on recent immigrants who haven’t learned English yet. And even then, most immigrants have an instant community that they can join or websites that they can check out or any number of opportunities to discover if their well-meaning children are lying to them for their own good.

It’s a completely different world today, in large part because immigrants like my grandmother have come over in greater numbers and with more of a drive to know what the hell is gong on in their adopted country. So maybe the anti-smoking trick isn’t effective anymore.

In any case, my home state is considering a ban on indoor smoking, which many other places have already adopted. I’ll have to ask my grandmother if she thinks it’s a good idea.

I know little about my other aunt, except that she died in a hail of gunfire. I never met her, and I’ve only seen two or three pictures of the woman in my life. She was killed with her husband in 1981, when the civil war ravaging El Salvador was in full, game-on effect.

Aunt #2 was not targeted for death, as opposed to her brother (Uncle #1), and had tried her best to stay out the homicidal mess that had engulfed that country. But logic tells us that a war that killed tens of thousands of people could not have been confined to soldiers and guerrillas. My aunt was among those civilians who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The details of her murder are sparse, vague, even contradictory. News that comes out of El Salvador is often like this.

But the story I heard was that Aunt #2 and her husband were driving down the road near their village. The couple’s destination or errand remains unknown. They came upon a government roadblock that had simply not been there the day before. Whether they failed to slow down quickly enough, tried to run it for some unfathomable reason, or just made inappropriate eye contact has never been determined.

The soldiers opened fire, and the truck skidded off the road. The couple, shot multiple times, died in each other’s arms. When my family claimed the bodies, the soldiers admitted that they had made a mistake, and they offered a curt “lo siento” for gunning them down.

The murder left their only child, Cousin #7, a two-year-old orphan. He soon came to America, where my mother adopted him. In an ironic twist, he now lives in El Salvador (more on this in a future post).

And that’s basically all I know about Aunt #2. To be sure, I’ve heard bits and pieces about her over the years. I’ve heard that she was a bit of a wild child and a gifted fabulist. I also heard that she loved fire ants (of all things) and could sew well. But I could be wrong about all of these things.

My grandmother rarely speaks about either of her murdered children. They are not even ghosts to her. They are reference points to a long-ago life – one that has a tenuous connection to the old woman living in the cold American Midwest today. In my presence, my abuela has acknowledged her dead son and daughter only when pressed, and she refuses to clarify or elaborate or instigate any discussion of them.

Similarly, my mother can offer only scattered information. When Aunt #2 died, my mother had not seen her in years – such are the gaps incurred within immigrant families. So she can offer only scant insight into her little sister’s life.

As such, my conjectures about her personality or the strength of her character would be misplaced. And after my experience writing about Uncle #1, I’ve learned that even well-honed family stories can buckle and alter over the years. The facts get smudged when the principles are gone, and honest attempts to portray people accurately (which is what I’ve attempted) sometimes lead to mistakes or disputes.

In truth, for most of us, it is only a matter of time before we exist only as a mysterious name and some fleeting snapshots, long-distant ancestors reduced to a jumble of letters in a box on the family tree.

So I stand no chance at capturing the vitality of Aunt #2, about whom, as I’ve said, I know little. Instead, I will offer this most basic of eulogies: rest in peace.

My family has expanded to the point where they are simply too many people to buy Christmas presents for. So we’ve decided that, from now on, gifts will be purchased only for the children. Partly we’re doing this to reject the grotesque materialism of the holiday season. But mostly, the economy is crashing around us, and nobody wants to go broke buying gifts for adults who don’t need any more knickknacks.

I’m curious if this next generation of children will be subjected to the same rules and rituals that the cousins and I grew up with. At first, the system was inflexible: first came Midnight Mass, then the presents. The youngest kids required naps, often in church, but we were all awake at 2:00 am to open gifts. It helps that my family is composed overwhelmingly of night people. Successive years of whining pushed up the gift-opening ceremony, to the point where we exchanged presents around 10:00 pm and enjoyed them before heading off to church.

In any case, before any gifts were opened, Aunt #1 always asked us to explain who Mary and Joseph were, why they were on the road, what the innkeeper said, and whose savior arrived in the manger. It was a study group for Christianity 101, and Aunt #1 filled in the blanks and embellished the more miraculous elements. She did this every year –- the same quiz with the same answers. But it was vital to her that we understand the story of Christmas. The youngest cousins gave the bulk of the answers. The older ones hung back, like wily veterans who had given their peak performances long ago.

The presents were then handed out, with the accompanying rule that everybody had to have at least one gift before anybody opened anything.  Each year, we gripped our presents in crazed anticipation until the last person received a gift. Only then, when it was verified that everybody had a present in his or her hands, did the shredding begin.

The sound of wrapping paper being ripped to death filled the room, and exclamations cascaded around the house over shouts of thanks. It was a crazed wrenching open of boxes and flinging of ribbons. It was a blur of hands and shower of sudden confetti over tumbling objects. And every now and then, mixing with a bellow of “Cool!” or the rapid tittering of the authentically thrilled, came the sound of young girls quite literally squealing with delight.

Then it was off to Midnight Mass. We stomped off snow as we entered the church. The holy water felt odd on our reddened faces, and we didn’t unbutton our bulky coats until we found a pew to take over, because we always had to sit together.

Our church was lit up with hundreds of candles, and the band gave revved-up acoustic meringue versions of “Cascabellas” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” The mass started with a processional of parishioners dressed as the three wise men, Mary and Joseph, and assorted shepherds and angels. Usually, a neighborhood teen mom’s baby represented Jesus. For some reason, a knocked-up Latina’s infant was often the default symbol for the Christian messiah in the annual service.

After the mass, we drudged into the bitter cold, gave final hugs and holiday blessings, and went home to sleep until noon.

Today, we more or less skip the mass. Sometimes, the celebration gets going late because we have to account for work schedules and in-laws and other details that we could skip when most of us were under twelve and could fit into one car. And some of us won’t even be there. We live in different states or even different countries now.

Still, I hope that at some point, Aunt #1 will call a halt to our games or conversations or gorging or whatever we’re doing. Then she will sit in front of the tree, call the children over to her, and ask them to tell her the story of Christmas.

Like many Hispanic families, we celebrate on Christmas Eve. As kids, the cousins and I loved this arrangement because we didn’t have to toss and turn in bed while wrapped presents taunted us with the delayed gratification of Christmas morning. But now, we’re grateful for the nighttime celebration because we can recover from our drinking, and sleep in the next day.

As a child, I thought everyone’s holiday consisted of a house crammed with family and friends of the family or friends of friends of the family. In those times, chaos was a friend and bedlam had to take a number. Children bounced off the furniture and yelled jokes over the booming stereo, which alternated between tejano jams and warped LPs that blared the pop music of the day. The adults mixed margaritas while new attendees entered to festive shouts among a whirl of snow. I assumed that everybody’s Christmas was a raucous house party.

We played games, of course. But our activities weren’t quaint, Dickensian formalities where everybody sat with hands folded and chuckled at the outcome. Instead, we started boisterous rounds of “Life” or “Candyland” or whatever was available, making up our own rules because no one had the patience to read the directions. And regardless of what we were playing or watching or doing, ten different conversations started among us.

As adults, most of our Christmas games begin with an inebriated demand or shouted inspiration, and contests end when another, better game starts or a cousin declares, “I win and you all suck!” At any time, a heated match of “Clue” may draw to an ignominious conclusion when a mojito splatters the board, or a hand of poker dissolves into frenzy when everyone begins openly cheating.

The feast has altered over the years. As kids, the announcement that dinner was ready provoked us to rush the kitchen like the bulls of Pamplona zeroing in on a chubby tourist. Because there was no line or system whatsoever, everyone crowded into the hot room while reaching over, around, and past each other. Drinks were mixed up, plates were tipped, and hips were checked. But we got what we wanted and danced around one another until retreating to the dinner table or the couch or a folding chair or just a wall.

Today, we all chip in to help. Cousins bring food to share in an adventurous potluck. We pile our plates high with tamales or Puerto Rican rice or ham or lasagna or Aunt #1’s special turkey with mole sauce. Who knows what will be served?

We uncork the wine bottles and pop open beers. Most important, Cousin #1 has long had the responsibility of mixing the tequila sunrises. She performs this task with a focused intensity, hunched over like she’s defusing a ticking bomb. The constant flow of beverages is far too vital to be assigned to amateurs.

It isn’t really Christmas, of course, until our abuela throws a fit. Each year, she denounces the food as inedible, even if we made a separate dish solely for her (often something that she consumes every other day of the year). The first few holidays, someone brimming with Christmas spirit would try to cheer her up. By now, however, we barely notice when she storms off. It’s tradition.

Everything leads up to the opening of the gifts. But I’ll post more on that later.

The emerald hue of his eyes is freakishly rare, especially for a Latino. Our grandmother teased him when he was a child, saying that he had stolen the eyes of the cat.

He is no good at hiding his emotions, so surprise or happiness or annoyance all dance on his brow whenever they want attention. Or maybe it is the curse of the cat’s eyes that makes him so expressive.

His other distinguishing physical characteristic is a scar on his chin from a mishap that occurred during one of our childhood baseball games. Other scars aren’t as conspicuous, and they flair much less than they used to.

Cousin #2 is entitled to his scars. He came to America when he was a spindly little kid, shortly after his father died. He is the oldest child of Uncle #1, the brave man whom I profiled a few months ago.

On the plane to the United States and his new life, Cousin #2 asked a question of my mother, his aunt, whom he had just met. He was a child of El Salvador, on the first flight of his life, who knew of just one reason for planes to exist. He knew of only one function that they served and one consequence that the whirr of their engines signified.

So he asked my mother why we were going to drop bombs on people.

His antipathy for such childhood memories is so virulent that he refuses to ever set foot back in El Salvador, even for a visit.

“I’m never going back there,” Cousin #2 has said often, as if the statement is explanation, rationalization, and vow all rolled into one.

The last time he told me this, he punctuated the remark by pulling off a hat that he was wearing (which I had praised) and slamming it on my head in a fit of generosity so intense that he nearly decapitated me. Then he repeated his words in his distinctive somber voice.

When he had arrived in America as a child, he became the man of the house for his immediate family. As one can imagine, this is an ungodly amount of pressure for a kid, especially one who has not been given any time to mourn his father. He was expected to help raise his younger siblings (Cousins #4 and #6), learn English quickly so he could translate for his mother, and figure out this culture’s strange new priorities.

As expected, Cousin #2 struggled. His troubled teen years led to poor choices as a young adult. He was no thug, but his friends were often the riff-raff of the barrio. He became a father young, drank too much, and owed too many family members money.

As his problems mounted, he withdrew from the family, and many of us had only sporadic contact with him for a few years. Then, in a scene right out of some hooky Christmas special, he ran into Cousin #3 at a crowded mall, and she hugged him as shoppers swirled around them. She extracted a promise that he would stop by the traditional holiday feast.

He did, and the rapturous welcome that he and his toddler daughter received convinced him to return. Most important for him, he found an amazing woman to love him and guide him back to the land of the living. They married, and they had their first child last year.

His children – two sons and a daughter – were among the first members of our family’s next generation. In many ways, they are the first in our line to be wholly planted in this county.

Cousin #2 works hard and stays out of trouble. The man who several of us were once concerned would get into a fatal bar brawl has been known to go for Sunday bike rides with his wife. This stability, and the life that the two of them have built together, mocks his troubled early days.

He is proof, more than anyone I’ve ever met, that a person can always turn it around. He is evidence that we are not slaves to the past and are more than the sum of our scars.

He has my undying respect.

When I was a toddler, I couldn’t pronounce her name, so I came up with a garbled nickname that I no longer use. I’ve thought about bringing it back. I think she would like that.

Aunt #1 is the only sibling of my mother whom I have ever met. She came to America after my mother had established a beachhead of sorts in this nation.

Her sensibilities are such that, once when I was a kid, I referred to someone as a “sucker,” and she lectured me on vulgarity and propriety and respect for others until I apologized. She would not be pleased to know, alas, that “sucker” is among the least profane words I use on a daily basis as an adult.

Shortly after Aunt #1 moved to America, she met a man from Puerto Rico, got married, and had three daughters (Cousins #1, #3, and #5). A quarter-century later, she divorced him. Years later, when he was stricken with cancer, she took care of him. For those of us who know her, it was an unsurprising display of patience and compassion.

Aunt #1 is the most religious member of my family. Each year, she uses a chunk of her vacation time to go on a spiritual retreat. It’s with monks and hours of meditation and no talking and everything. It requires far more dedication, faith, and discipline than I could ever conjure.

To be sure, Aunt #1 is certainly not the Bible-thumping “You’re all going to hell if you don’t agree with me” kind of fundamentalist nutjob who has given the religion a bad name. In fact, when one of the cousins came out as a lesbian, Aunt #1 offered her love, despite the huge Catholic no-no that this announcement signified.

She actually tries to live all that “Love they neighbor” and “Turn the other cheek” stuff that that many Christians reject – you know, the hard stuff. She would preach the importance of tolerance, if she preached at all, that is.

Aunt #1 is that rarest of subspecies: an actual Christian.

Let me give a quick thanks to Cousin #3 for her comment on my post “Cousin #1.” She clarifies an error I made and also makes some great points about the importance of societal priorities… and how they’re often fucked up.

But since we’re on the subject of family, now is a good time to introduce you to the grandmother.

Three-quarters of my grandparents died before I was born or so early in my life that I have virtually no recollection of them. So my only real experience with grandparents is my maternal abuela.

I met my grandmother when I was eleven, when she moved to this country against her will. All through my adolescence and early adulthood, she rarely passed on an opportunity to remind everyone that she had never wanted to come to the United States and that it was her troublesome daughters who had brought her to this frigid nation.

She is now pushing ninety, and she has lived in America for almost one-third of her life. Her birthday is October 31 (Halloween), and when she discovered that American kids dress up like ghosts and demons and devils on that day, she took it personally.

Despite her advanced age, she is absurdly healthy, leading my family to the conclusion that we have good genes and tend to live a long time if nobody shoots us. It’s true that she limps more noticeably because of a hip injury from decades past. But even with this mild handicap, helping her down the stairs is pointless, as she is likely to slap away the hand of someone trying to guide her. It’s a bit of a metaphor.

Her stubbornness is legendary and shows up at predictable moments. For example, it isn’t really a family Christmas until she throws a fit. Each year, she denounces the food as inedible, even if a separate dish has been made solely for her and is something that she consumes every other day of the year (usually dark-meat chicken). Then she goes to sit by herself on the couch while everyone else eats and drinks and laughs. The first few holidays that she pulled this, one of the cousins or someone brimming with Christmas spirit would try to cheer her up. By now, however, we barely notice when she limps off in peevishness. It is tradition, and it usually means that we can open the presents soon.

Food has also been the source of a few run-ins that I’ve had with her. When she came to America, she brought her old-world ways with her, which included a belief that men can’t – and more importantly, shouldn’t – ever cook. My mother tried to explain to her that things were different in America and, as a single mom, she needed me to step up and occasionally prepare my own meals. This scandalized my grandmother, who dismissed the whole argument of men in the kitchen with a curt “Sin verguenza.”

And yes, if you take her out to dinner, she will complain that the food is cooked specifically to kill her.

Her drive to be judgmental is, in culinary matters at least, somewhat justified. She makes magnificent pupusas, which are a Salvadoran delicacy so amazing that I feel physically sorry for anyone who has not had them.

Making pupusas are a link to her previous life in El Salvador. However, asking her about this former life doesn’t reveal fascinating insights about another culture or a deeper look at our family tree.

Instead, it usually just provokes her to spit out some fact about the area and follow it up with a list of townspeople whom she hated or are probably dead. Then she waves her bony hands and declares the conversation finished.

Indeed, when she visited her homeland for the first time in decades, she summarized the trip with a shrug and the condemnation that everyone in El Salvador had become morbidly obese.

She has outlived two of her children and all of the men in her life. As one family member has stated, “You’re supposed to live long enough to annoy your children. But she’s lived long enough to annoy her grandchildren.” Actually, she is now a great-grandmother, so perhaps she will let a third generation know exactly what she thinks of it.

Despite her perpetual grumpiness, my grandmother did have one moment of moral clarity and bold defiance. That moment, however, deserves a post of its own, so I will address it in the future.

Instead, let me relate the fact that about twenty years after being dragged into America kicking and screaming, my grandmother learned that the war in El Salvador was over and that she could safely go home to live out her remaining years. My mother and aunt told her the news with the expectation that my abuela would be thrilled to return.

But my grandmother looked them right in the eye and said she didn’t have the slightest idea what they were talking about. America was her home, and she had no intention of returning to a sweltering land with dirt roads. She denied ever denigrating the United States, and she said it was crazy to think that she would ever want to leave.

“Por que?” she said, and returned to cooking her pupusas.

I’m continuing with profiles of my family (Hispanics, one and all) by moving on to my mother’s brother, henceforth known as Uncle #1.

It’s important to note that I never met Uncle #1. He died almost thirty years ago, while he was still a young man.

He was a teacher in my family’s homeland of El Salvador. Uncle #1 was married with three kids (Cousins #2, #4, #6 – whom I will write about in future posts), and he existed comfortably in a war-torn land – an anomaly of course.

He established such a stellar reputation as a passionate, intelligent educator that he was named Teacher of the Year for the entire country. The black-and-white photo of him shaking the Salvadoran president’s hand maintains a place of honor in my mother’s home to this day.

Despite his prestige and status, he was vocal about his discontent with the Salvadoran government. Most people in his situation would have kept their mouths shut and refrained from dark asides about social injustice or rants about economic exploitation.

But Uncle #1 had the crazy notion that people should know what was going on. His insistence on educating poor people attracted the attention of El Salvador’s death squads.

These militia groups had figured out that the biggest danger to their campaign was the leftist virus of literacy. They realized that if campesinos learned how to read, they would get their hands on degenerate books that claimed they had rights or that the landowners exploited them or some other outlandish idea.

So they encouraged Uncle #1 to stop educating the poor. This encouragement took the form of a savage beating.

However, he didn’t back down in the face of threats, and as opposed to almost everyone who ever lived, he risked his life for what he believed was right –- the kind of person who gets holidays named after him or whose name is etched in rocks and said in reverent whispers. At this point, he encroached on hero status. He was the tenacious man who could not be bullied or bossed.

Still, the line between martyred idol and anonymous victim is thin in places like El Salvador. And his fierce ideals and refusal to bow down meant little to the men who abducted him in the middle of the night and shot him multiple times. The death squad then mutilated his body as a graphic warning to others.

Some members of my family wonder if he died in vain. My viewpoint is that it is impossible for people to die in vain if they have lived their principles, and if those principles improved the lives of others. Both of these are true of Uncle #1.

After Uncle #1’s murder, my cousins moved to America. His oldest son, Cousin #2, says that he still feels his father’s presence at times.

Cousin #2 was a small child when his father died, and he has said that his final memory of the man is riding on his shoulders as they cut through a field. I was not there, obviously, but I can picture Uncle #1, striding forward with his laughing child on his back and the sun shining.

He is unafraid, and he believes in the future.

After graduating college, my girlfriend (who is now my wife) and I moved to New York City, where we lived on my cousin’s floor in a small apartment in Queens. It was very struggling Gen Xer, and glamourous or exciting only if you’ve never done it.

We stayed on that floor for three months, until we landed jobs and saved up enough money for a miniscule studio hovel in Manhattan. But for those dozen or so weeks that we lived in Queens, my wife had an experience unique to her life: She was the minority.

The situation put her liberal philosophy to the test. Would she be down with brown? Or would she reflexively clutch her purse whenever a Latino teenage boy walked by? Bear in mind that she grew up on a farm, where the nearest town was a rural enclave of eight hundred white Midwesterners. Now she was living in a city of eight million (that’s a population increase of 100,000% for you mathematicians out there), which was full of freaks and weirdos representing every race, creed, and whacked-out belief system in America.

I’m pleased to say that she came though the experience even more compassionate and understanding than she was before, and that was a high standard to begin with.

For the first time in her life, she knew what it was like to walk down the street and encounter nobody who looks like you. She mingled with people who spoke different languages, and she had to think about how others perceived her. These are perceptions that ethnic minorities have every day in America, but which are alien to most white people.

Perhaps everyone should have this experience at some time in his or her life. It certainly couldn’t hurt to understand where others are coming from, especially as this country gets more diverse (like it or not). It may even cut down on the tendency of some members of the majority to swagger about, and to refrain from wielding their strength in numbers like a cultural hammer or divine right.

To be fair, however, my wife’s sink-or-swim dunking into multiculturalism was not completely smooth. She never did understand why all the Latina women between the ages of fourteen and fifty-nine had to wear skin-tight pants that defined the concept of camel-toe.

Actually, I don’t understand it either. Maybe it’s a Queens thing.

In an earlier post, I introduced my cousins. I plan to profile each one of them on this blog, not only to give you a fuller picture of Hispanic Americans (beyond my neurotic persona), but also to verify to myself that the cousins are indeed reading my posts like they claim they are.

I will profile them in birth order, and for that reason and to preserve their anonymity, I’ll just refer to them by number. Cousin #1 is the second oldest, after me, and therefore is the first up.

In brief, she is the most popular introvert the world has ever known. Cousin #1 seems to be friends with everyone in our hometown, despite the fact that she would rather chew glass than call attention to herself. How then does she build this social circle?

For starters, she has an absurd amount of faith in the concept of humanity. She makes jaded vatos, stressed single moms, and nonplussed grocery clerks feel like they are the most fascinating people to cross her path in eons. This interest cannot be faked, and indeed, it isn’t.

She came to visit me once when I was living in LA. She took a Greyhound bus in, which anyone can tell you is routinely filled with the most deranged, shrill, deluded, and unstable individuals from the lower forty-eight states who can scrape together enough cash to attempt a new start in Southern California. I told her it wasn’t a good idea to take the bus, but she insisted. When I picked her up in downtown LA (itself a hotbed of shady individuals and wild-eyed schemers) Cousin #1 hopped off the bus with a broad smile, hugged one of her fellow passengers goodbye, and told me that she had “met many friends” on the journey. I thought she was insane for even talking to the assortment of thugs, drunks, and crazies who had hitched a ride with her.

Cousin #1 plays violin, and is by far the most musically talented member of our family. In fact, as a teenager, she performed a concert with our hometown’s symphony orchestra after being identified as one of the city’s promising young musicians. In her adolescence, she could be found intently practicing Mozart, although she was just as likely to be blaring KMFDM and Ministry from her bedroom.

Cousin #1 was a social worker for years, and she often went door-to-door in poor neighborhoods, checking in on recent immigrants and third-generation welfare moms to see if their children’s basic needs were being met. She put people in touch with the right agencies or translated documents or just listened to them whisper about how America was a much harsher place than they had been led to believe. In one especially tough neighborhood, she was robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight.

She doesn’t eat in Spanish restaurants because of the conquistadors’ cruelty to the El Salvador natives. And it takes little prompting for her to show off the huge Mayan warrior eagle tattooed across her shoulders. It is an inky proclamation of Latina identity and pride that forces those who see the tattoo to consider it a living entity rather than a mere design.

Because of her chronic compassion, the harshest insult she hurls is “boo-gee,” which she applies to items that strike her as inane in their bourgeois popularity. She is often caught between her fierce desire to solve all the world’s problems at once and her drive to accommodate others.

Cousin #1 is, in many ways then, your typical Hispanic, violin-playing, tattooed social worker who effortlessly makes people happy.