~:: Just Saint Pat ::~

One of the things I have actually known for sure in my life is that we were Irish.  I don’t remember when I first knew it, but I tasted it every day after that all through my young-in-family years.  Green Irish.  Not Orange.  That was absolute, even though we were nothing close to Catholic.

My middle name came from my father’s father’s father’s brother—I think.  (And wouldn’t you think I’d know that for sure, cerrtainly???)  And it’s an Irish name.  Our last name, though truncated and civilized when the old ones came over to this side of the wide ocean, meant “that guy who lives under the little hill,”  or “on the little hill,”  or “the guy with the brown hair.”  Any number of things it meant.  What a generous and free-handed language that must have been.

And when I’d spread my father’s huge many-generation pedigree out on the Arkansas-woven rag carpet of our living room, I saw Ireland listed over and over again in my father’s line.

These are Irish children, in spite of their father’s lack of the blood.

My father taught us to say, “Top of the mornin’ to ya!”  and “Erin go bragh!”  And once I gave him a green T-shirt for St. Pat’s day that said, “You can always tell an Irishman – but you can’t tell him much.”

The day before the St. Paddy’s day parade in New York one year, my friends and I were wandering the city and found ourselves possessed of carnations, died a proper Irish green.

My father brought us presents on that day, and we always wore green and were pinched if we didn’t.  I had a gold pendant made from one of my father’s heirloom cufflinks – gold that had belonged in the family for generations – hidden in an Irish croft by the family smugglers, who were discovered and burned out.  Evidently, they went back and found the melted lumps of treasure and beat them into cufflinks.

I lost it, of course.  (Kick self around the entire campus three times.)

But I have never been to Ireland.  And when I became a genealogist, I realized that we were other things, too – English (which may explain my constant inner conflict), Huguenot, some native American (which I have not yet found), Welsh – a DNA test will undoubtedly tell me more.  But I finally found Ireland cropping up (no pun meant here) on Mom’s side as well.

But then, they say, on Saint Paddy’s, all people of good will are Irish.

And so, when we (now grown and married) had our one and only family reunion in Colorado one year, the heart of our celebration was the children’s Irish Necklace.

Murph’s.  Not so glorious as the older kids’, perhaps, but then, he was only a wee thing when it happened. It’s the only one I could find to photograph.  But I believe they all still have them.  I was never so pleased as I was when I heard that one of my nephews had later taken his to school for show and tell.

Each of the cousins got this shamrock hung on an empty lanyard, and as the week went on, earned bright pony beads (for learning each person’s name and what family they belonged to, each birthday and a couple of scriptures – one bead for each feat of memory), and other, more glorious beads – a wooden syrup bottle, puffy balls with eyes, a tulip for showing a grownup that you’d found a flower, a spring-wound caterpillar for finding five insects, tiny gold and silver fish for going fishing with uncle Guy, and other things for remembering the family stories my father sprinkled through our evenings, tolling them out like dew-kissed four-leaf clovers.

It was all about remembering – each other, the stories that held us together, the fun we were having with cousins – and evidently, that being Irish was holding down the entire weight of our family identity.  My parents have been to Ireland.  If none of the rest of us ever go, it will still be in us.  A secret sort of rebellious and wind-wild and magical cast of the soul.

Which comes out with the green food coloring every year on this date.