Good Morning.
Tomorrow is the holiday when people named Johnson and Schmidt wear green ties and people named Flanagan and O'Brien
wear shirts, shorts, suspenders, socks, and hats with shamrocks on them. The folks who legitimately claim a Gaelic heritage put food coloring in their beer and drink a great deal of it. They sing in establishments that make enough money on one day to get them by all year. They put ceramic leprechauns on the front lawn but the rainbow is left to divine providence and the pot of gold is apparently handled by Publishers Clearing House.
The St. Patrick's Day celebration in my city was started many years ago by a Jewish woman known for her ability to celebrate
anything. She lined up a brigade of bagpipers from Winnipeg who come to town in their kilts, troop down the aisle during Mass at a cathedral that sits high on a hill, march in the annual parade as probably the most sedate group among the participants, and visit several other venues throughout the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening.
When I was in college, a very nice young man - half Polish and half Cuban - and I were in New York over the March 17th weekend. Armed with several bottles of green food coloring, we poured them into a fountain that was not already appropriately transformed. That's the most interesting tale I have about my celebration of St. Pat's, but I still chuckle when I think of an hour or three I spent at a local pub in 2008 when people, mainly under the age of forty, wore green T-shirts with one word on it: O'Bama. I like that sort of twist, but I would probably have spelled it O'Bamagh. If you don't get that, you're not Irish.
These days I don't do much pub-crawling. I once had what I considered to be a splendid idea for a vacant lot next to a funeral home owned by a well-known Irish family in town; I thought someone should put a pub on the lot and named it The Irish Wake so mourners could console themselves after a visitation. Sadly one of the fast food joints bought the lot and that was the end of my thoughts about pubs. I will also bypass the parade this year in the interest of my aches and pains but will cook up a nice corned beef. I'll wear a green plaid shirt and put a green bow on the dog. Neither of us is Irish but we do this in gratitude for the snakes being removed from counties named Cork and Donegal and for the blessings about the wind being always at our backs and the sun shining warm upon our faces and the rain falling gently upon our fields.
Unfortunately it's not all Guinness and glee. In certain areas of Ireland the curbs are painted either green or orange to indicate where people are safe or in peril. If you're Catholic you stick to the neighborhoods with green curbs and avoid those with orange, and if you're Protestant you do the opposite. This is serious business and you don't mess with it even though it
shouldn't exist in the first place.
In this country we don't paint the curbs, amazingly now that I think about it, because we've managed to adapt the orange vs.
green delineation into white vs. black, brown, red, and yellow. Apparently some people don't live with the sun and the rain upon their fields, although I'm quite certain the guy in charge of the rainbow would sharply disagree.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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