That’s the name of one of my best friends, Happy.
We have been together practically all our lives, we could say that we are family. We love each other a lot because, I suspect, we are very similar and very different at the same time.
I love her name, Happy, bright and original. Wasn’t very easy to put this name to little babies at that time, not at all, I can tell… southern European niceties, you know? It sounded soooo foreign to them. Poor guys, they are still learning.
One of the first memories I have is about me being the junior partner among older people, bigger people. We would have art lessons in the evening, with that amazing blind man who saw more than anyone then we would start running and pressing all the ring buttons in our way, calling and running away, calling and running away… wild fun! “Who is it, who is it??!!”. Then, in front of the perfumes shop we would start playing those kind of games that are too basic and too boring for an adult to explain but you’d play it as it wouldn’t be any tomorrow.
I was smaller, and slower, and any other …-er you can imagine. So I was caught very fast and they I would try to catch the others but they had all the –er’s, in the opposite direction: they were faster, bigger, smarter… so after a while Happy would play in my place and would ask me to run faster and to be smarter. I tried.
You are a teenager when you see yourself arguing with your mum and later asking to yourself what the hell was the real reason to do so… tricky times. Ah, and you start locking the toilet door (a new experience in our, other way, hippy house). I remember Happy knocking the toilet door and asking if I had something made of gold… it made me smile and, since then, I didn’t lock the door again. Not consciously at least. We were a very natural triangle, Happy, Smally and myself… friends who were half brothers or brothers who were very good friends, either way. Friendship, tricky to define. Family, on the contrary, is easy: is blood, which is thicker than water. And stays.
Happy, one of the most talented person I know in a very natural way, wasn’t showing it off at all. Even being relatively young it was very clear to me that Happy needed to exploit this amazingly strong and easy personality in a way. A high career was tried, wrong step and suffering. After a dangerous transition a much sensible step was tried and then I saw Happy radiating her name, studying, living, working and exploring new fields in life. Geographically close, vitally visiting Pluto.
Happy is an interesting mix of sharpness and kindness; rudeness and softness; diplomacy and bluntness. This is not a word-game, trying to be balanced or a cool description. I really mean that, I don’t know any other person who can be both things at the same time in a more genuine way, in a more natural way. Well, except maybe Tony Blair the only person in this planet who can be relaxed and tense at the same time. But if there is an adjective that describes the soul of Happy, that’s generosity, in all senses. Monetarily, I don’t know how she does it, I think she found what alchemists have been looking for generations but she is not selling the formula. In other fields, she just does the right thing. Anyone who knows her can tell that. Really remarkable.
