On being Irish

I have fond memories of growing up in an Irish American family. In grade school I took Irish dancing, not ballet. I went to Catholic school, not public. And the Duncan's and the McGuires would get together to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.

My Aunt Kay's house on Seneca Parkway was huge and filled with kids. My cousin Maggie and I would find little nooks and crannies and play for hours - in the big bay window in the dark office, or in the closet of her room. These were magic places.

One year my mother made a sheet cake to bring for St. Patrick's day and set it out on the back step to cool. Well, didn't my grandfather open the back door and step right in it!

I'll never forget how we laughed as we cut around the footprint and reshaped the cake into a shamrock on another platter. And then of course all day "the cake" was part of the banter and the laughter...that lovely, warm laughter that the Irish wrap around the sadness, despair and joys of life...and that wry, deadpan humor that we all still have, because it's been passed down to us for generations.

So last night I celebrated St. Patrick's Day with Bob, Dan, Dan and Alicia and their friends. We met at The Skellig.

In the back room there was a band that reminded us of the Dady Brothers. Dan Schreiner and I danced and danced through one song - me remembering all my Irish step dancing as I went, and Dan doing a great job making it up!

In the front room musicians gathered at a table in the center of the room with penny whistles, fiddles and drum and beat out that lilting Irish tunes.

The Harpoon Pipe Band made the rounds and wowed us with their bagpipes and such drumming as we'd only seen at drum corps shows. We all stamped out the rhythm with our feet until it went so fast we couldn't keep up.

And we of course we toasted it all with Guinness and Murphy's stout.

It was a simple and a fine way to celebrate, not so much St. Patrick, but the joys of being alive and the blessings and the curses of being Irish...and the music and the laughter and poetry that sustain us.

Yeats said it best...

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with gold and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

- William Butler Yeats, 1899