Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Irish On My Mind


It’s damp and drizzly today and as gray as old underwear, the perfect weather for St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow. I’m in an Irish frame of mind today – a sort of melancholy racousness that wants to party and at the same time cry in a pint of Guinness (well, pinot grigio). That’s how it is with the Irish though. We’re a strange people – forever laughing on the edge of desolation.

Anyway, tomorrow is the big day and for once we are going to do something celebratory that I didn’t make myself. My husband, God love him, will never be accused of being a party boy (we SO would never have gotten together had I known him in high school), so to drag him to a crowded, noisy bar to hear Irish music would be the equivalent of tossing him in Mountjoy Gaol with poor Kevin Barry who was hanged as a rebel. A few times when the kids were little we trekked up to Cleveland for the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. Though Eric found it palatable,  I am not as enamored of it as I was when I was a kid and marched in it dressed in my embroidered Irish dancing costume. The sleight of time’s hand cruelly diminished my memory of its pageantry and I’m still pouting about it.

When the girls lived at home I made St. Patrick’s Day myself from corned beef, cabbage, colcannon, and soda bread (with raisins) garnished with what we always called a “hooley in the kitchen”. This consisted of cranking up jigs, reels and hornpipes on the stereo and dancing in front of the sink. Well, I danced and sometimes Catie danced with me, but Moira and Eric were content to watch (with pleasure of course) in their mutually quiet way. My set piece was the hornpipe (hard shoes a la Riverdance), one step of which invariably brought the house down even though the secret to its success was just to stomp as hard as possible on the two opportunities to do it.

Don’t laugh. I took Irish dancing lessons for years and used to compete in the feis (pronounced “fesh”) in Chicago, Akron and Toronto where I won enough medals to at least keep my head up. My grandfather was an extraordinary Irish dancer who could make his feet sound like a typewriter. When I was four he started teaching me in the basement of his house on Saturday afternoons to scratchy old 78 rpm records cranked up on the Victrola. The reward for learning “the baby reel” danced to the tune of The Girl I Left Behind Me was a tiny glass of beer ringed with pink elephants and the admonition to keep its existence to “meself”. I know, I know … but it didn’t kill me. I’m still here, aren’t I?

Since the kids flew the coop I have occasionally danced by myself just to make sure I still have the old Irish mojo (I do), but that’s been about the sum of St. Patrick’s Day these last years. When I was a child though St. Patrick’s Day officially dawned with a sunrise Mass at the old Carmelite monastery in Akron. The mystical chanting of the monks singing plainsong (Gregorian chant) in the dim chapel redolent of incense haunts me still, as does the memory of my grandfather dressed like the lord of the manor with a carnation in his lapel in remembrance of his mother and wafting fumes of Cashmere Bouquet talcum in his wake. After Mass we’d head to breakfast at the Ancient Order of Hibernians and then to Cleveland for the parade. Most of the time I had to “dance out” in the evening (which was what we called performing at various venues), but a few times we partied hard and late at either the Hibernians or the West Side Irish American Club in Cleveland. All of it now seems far, far away, as I am no longer Catholic, nor enmeshed in the Irish culture. Of course the fact that it WAS long ago and far away may have something to do with it too.

But this year, I have found a way for Eric and me to celebrate St. Patrick's Day that he will actually like and I won't have to concoct out of potatoes, flour, corned beef and recorded music. Tomorrow, dressed in kelly green (me at least), we are heading down to Sully’s Irish Pub early in the morning for their big Irish breakfast. There will be live music, little girls dancing as I once did, and hearty Irish fare washed down with a cuppa or two. Maybe -- if I get very, very lucky -- I'll even glimpse that Celtic magic, that in the end, was the good part of the bad old days of my childhood.

4 comments:

Saturday Evening Post said...

Aye, lassie, it's a Guinness I'll be havin' meself, to you.
S.E.P.

tess said...

Thank you, kind sir. I raise my glass of pinot grigio to your Guiness and say "Slainte!"

Anonymous said...

No fair! I'll be sloggin' away at me job cobblin' shoes for the little people! Have a great breakfast at Sullys!

tess said...

And so we did! And now off to other adventures. The Guiness flowed like the River Liffey. As me Irish grandfather would say, "Top 'o the mornin' to ye and the rest of the day yerself!"