I have exactly two items of clothing you could call green in my wardrobe.
One is a tie that might be the only green piece of clothing in creation that could never be confused with St. Patrick’s Day apparel; and the other a sweater that’s green in name only. It’s nondescript even by nondescript standards.
And I never seem to be able to wear either when the occasion calls for it.
Last Thursday night, I attended the Friendly Knights of St. Patrick dinner, mainly because the annual winter virus had hit our office hard and I was called off the bench to pinch hit. Of the reporters in our office, we have a Krause, a diGrazia, a Jourgensen, a Turcotte, a Grillo and a Cawley. Of that group, only Gayla Cawley sounds like an Irish name, but she was busy. Two others were sick, and one (Bridget Turcotte) had spent her day riding around Saugus with “Bruin,” the police dog.
I got the nod.
Now, this isn’t exactly casting against type, though it may sound so. I have a rather complicated ethnic lineage that I’m not sure even Ancestry.com could sort out, but part of me is Irish. On my mother’s side. My grandmother was a Sheahan, and when she spoke you could almost hear the faint trace of a brogue. So there. I have the chops to darken the door of an Irish celebration. What I didn’t have was the green — clothing, not cash. I had a lot of blue, but is blue even associated with a nationality in and of its own?
You want to talk about feeling like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. There was lawyer Jim Carrigan with the deepest emerald-green sweater I ever saw. City Councilor Fred Hogan had Leprechauns and shamrocks all over his suspenders. Funeral director Dave Solimine had a suit on … I can’t even describe the suit, but suffice it to say it was St. Patrick’s Day-themed. Last I checked, Solimine is not a name associated with being Irish, and he even dressed the part.
I try to dress well, and most always appropriately. I figure there are many ways to embarrass the company unintentionally without going out of my way to do it.
But I found myself almost apologizing for my lack of green-ness, and thinking to myself Kermit was right. It’s not easy being green.
I survived, though. And for me, going to the Hibernian Hall is always like Old Home Week. I grew up among the West Lynn Irish cognoscenti as part of the Sacred Heart parish, and a lot of those people didn’t go very far geographically. If I could rhyme the names, it could almost be like the chorus from “Dear Old Donegal.”
“Meet Conlon and Donelon, McDonald, O’Donnell, and Carrigan, Harrington …”
I grew up listening to songs like “Donegal,” “When Irish Eyes are Smiling,” and — my favorite — “Danny Boy” when my mother played them on the hi fi. I knew every word to every one of them when I was a kid (though not so much now).
When I got into college, that interest in Irish music expanded to include the pub songs (you know, folk tunes such as “Tim Finnegan’s Wake,” “The Wild Colonial Boy” and the beautiful, “Whistling Gypsy Rover”). Basically anything by the Clancy Brothers.
I used to go to the old Porthole, or the old Harp and Bard in Danvers (now Supino’s), to see the Corcoran Brothers, but while I liked those songs, my interest waned before I could ever even begin to learn all there is to know about them.
There’s a hilarious song by Robbie O’Connell (nephew to the Clancy Brothers) about how he came to the U.S. to sing Irish songs, only to be told he wasn’t Irish because he didn’t sing the type of Irish-American songs we all knew over here. I urge you to find it on YouTube because there’s a lot of truth to it. My mother generally eschewed the political side of Irish music, and did not like what you and I would call the drinking songs.
For all the Irish that is in me (H-A-double-R-I and all that …), I do not like cabbage, which means I’m not a big fan of the traditional Irish-American boiled dinner. My Portuguese-Italian wife loves it, so guess what we ate Sunday?
You cannot deny who you are. And even though it’s but a fraction of my total DNA package, I am Irish. I may be lax about wearing the colors, but I appreciate and value what the culture means to me. Lately I’ve taken to punching up both obscure and ubiquitous versions of Irish tunes on YouTube (find Sinead O’Connor’s version of “The Foggy Dew.” You may get a better appreciation of her).
I hope everyone had a nice day. If you trucked into Boston for the parade, I hope it was a pleasant experience. If you had a big family bash, I hope everyone behaved. And if you’re like me, and had a quiet boiled dinner Sunday afternoon, I hope it was everything you expected it would be.
