St. Patrick’s Day in Cleveland, especially if you live on the west side, is always a major annual event. There’s a big parade downtown with the usual ubitquitous ugly floats, fat men in kilts, bagpipers, tone-deaf marching bands and loud spectators drunk by noon without access to a decent public bathroom in sight.
On St. Patrick’s day “Irish” is a synecdoche for everyone in town. Local bars that reek of steaming corned beef and cabbage are crammed with revelers guzzling foamy (sometimes green) beer and swaying to canned Irish music from noon to midnight. It’s a couple of rungs above a peasant festival for amateur drinkers and pseudo-Irish. The real drunks (many Irish) know better than to venture out. Some use the “holiday” as an excuse to take the day off and start drinking and spilling mid-morning from flimsy plastic cups, and by mid-day start planting sloppy kisses and singing, “green alligators and long necked geese” as if it’s a sacred hymn.
In my family, our maternal Irish ancestry was considered a dirty little secret, a source of shame and ridicule, and more often denied than celebrated. Although my mother would occasionally sit down at the piano and play a few maudlin Irish standards in sentimental moments, our father essentially disowned her heritage, despite the fact that her family were wealthy mixed patrician stock with no immigrants from the emerald isle in several generations. We were raised to claim only our German roots, with a little French thrown in for flavor, except on St. Patrick’s Day when some of us would disclose the unmistakably Irish surname of our grandfather in order to feel a kinship with the merrymakers. It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that in a household where virtually no racial slurs were ever uttered, my father’s only passing bigotry was toward the Irish.
I have long since purged myself of any shame in my Irish lineage and instead embrace what I believe are some of the interesting aspects of the ancient Celtic culture, especially the music. To me, the quart or two of Irish blood contributes a mellow sweetness to the otherwise rigid Teutonic and Alsatian snobbery, which was instilled in us with arrogance and aristocratic authority. Delicate and haunting Irish melodies resonate for me as profoundly as a Beethoven symphony, and a Celtic harp will stop me cold. One of my favorite books as a student was James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I must have read four times, along with every word written by William Butler Yeats. Thus, somewhere in a hidden chamber of my heart courses the bitter brine of chaos, passion and rebellion. Erin go braugh, indeed.
