Happy St. Patrick's Day!

To all of you 40 million plus souls in this country who can claim Irish ancestry, and to all of you who wish you were Irish for just one day, Happy St. Patrick's Day to you all! It's the one day out of the year when being Irish is considered cool, where the wearing of the green is a tradition and where drinking green beer and singing bad Irish-American songs is a foregone conclusion. Bars will be hopping tonight, but for the fact that it's spring break at the local universities. I usually awake to the sounds of people partying on their front porches in my neighborhood, but they've all gone home for break, so this morning was unusually quiet. Just as well. I weary of the beer bottles and cans littering front yards after every weekend revel, and I would imagine that all those who have gone south to Florida and other parts where there are warm beaches to be had are reveling today in the all day drinking that typically characterizes St. Paddy's. Fine, as long as they're not doing it in my backyard, that's OK by me. I can live with a quiet evening tonight on my street and no litter to deal with tomorrow. Let them trash the Florida beaches and the hotels they are doubtless filling up all along the coasts of warm places. They can sleep off their hangovers tomorrow morning in their hotel rooms and then hit the beaches in the afternoons when they've sufficiently recovered.

What I find so odd at times about St. Patrick's Day is the fact that when the Irish came to these shores in the 19th century, they were greeted with signs announcing No Irish Need Apply and they were treated as the lowest of the low. They were largely Catholic and people were suspicious of their papist loyalties. Some spoke Gaelic, so they also spoke a funny language. In fact, it wasn't until recently that I found out that by saying that someone was speaking with an "Irish brogue", that it was in essence an insulting term. You see, the word "brogue" in Gaelic means "shoe", and the English said that it sounded as if the Irish were speaking with a shoe in their mouths owing to their sometimes thick accents, thus, a "brogue". I'm glad I found this out now, but I suspect that I've told more than one person that I liked hearing their "Irish brogue" without knowing what it meant. So now I know, and I won't use that term again! But people still use it not knowing what it means, and I don't know if it is still met with the same derision as I am sure it once was. But still, I shall refrain from using it nonetheless, out of respect for the meaning of the word. Being of Irish ancestry myself (on our mother's side), I try to imagine how hard it was for my forebears to come to these shores and be met with a less than warm welcome. The Irish were badly mistreated, put down, often poor, crammed into teeming urban slums, thought to be dirty and less than industrious because of their reputation to drink and more. Now, everyone wants to be Irish for at least one day a year, and Irish music, language, dance and song are going strong in this country, so the irony of St. Patrick's Day is never lost on me. In the space of a few generations, the whole world loves the Irish and wants to wear green for a day and utter inane phrases like "Faith and Begorrah!" (the more proper exclamation being, "Jaysus, Mary and Joseph!", but you probably wouldn't want to say that within earshot of a fundamentalist!).

So to one and all, a Happy St. Patrick's Day! May you all be Irish for one day and be blessed by good luck the whole year through!